384 
THE ELEPHANT. 
fast as my aching bones would allow me; but 
observing that she turned round, and looked back 
towards me, before entering the bush, I lay down 
in the long grass, by which means I escaped her 
observation.” 
The life of the professed elephant-hunter is one 
of great peril and privation, and there are few who 
engage in it that do not, sooner or later, cc go to 
the wall.” I was surprised to hear D—*— say,” so 
writes Mr. Hose, 6e that it was his wish to leave his 
present life, and to settle down quietly on his farm. 
6 Indeed,’ I said, s X should have thought that this 
wild pursuit, and your former dangerous trade 
(that of a smuggler), would render a quiet life some¬ 
what sleepy.’ 4 1 have a wife now, and shall have 
children,’ he replied, 4 and have been driven to 
this by debt and necessity. I have nearly got over 
my difficulties, for in twenty months I and my 
Hottentots have killed eight hundred elephants; 
four hundred of them have fallen to this good gun, 
and when I am free I quit it. Scores of times have 
the elephants charged around me, even within a 
yard of the bush under which I had crept; and I 
feel that it was a chance I was not crushed. Once 
I had fired at a large troop in a deep ravine, one 
side of which was formed by a steep cliff, which 
echoed back the sound of the firing, and a hundred 
elephants, with upraised ears, and loud screams, 
and tossing trunks, rushed down the narrow pass, 
and charged the echo, being the opposite side to that 
where we stood when we fired, and the one to which 
we had now moved; myself and Hottentots iyiug 
