FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND ACRES 177 
marked the course of a frenzied or frightened ele¬ 
phant, and to our intense relief the sounds dimin¬ 
ished as the animal receded. I don’t think I was 
ever so frightened in my life. But I had company. 
I didn’t monopolize all the fright that was used in 
those few seconds of terror. 
We then decided that there was no sane excuse 
for hunting elephants under such conditions. We 
at least demanded that we ought to see what we 
were hunting rather than blindly stumble through 
dense bush with elephants all around us. So we 
beat a masterly retreat, not without two more seri¬ 
ous threats from the hidden elephants. A boy was 
sent up a tree to try to locate the elephants, but even 
up there it was impossible to distinguish anything 
in the mass of vegetation around. We fired guns 
to frighten away the animals, but at each report 
there was only a restless rustle in the brush that said 
that they were still there and waiting, perhaps as 
badly scared as we were. 
My second elephant experience came the next 
day. 
We started forth again, with a single tent, our 
guides and gunbearers, a cook and a couple of tent 
boys and twenty porters. This time we politely 
ignored all elephant trails in the dense bush and 
pushed on through the forest. Here it was in¬ 
finitely better, for one could see some distance in 
all directions. We climbed steadily for a couple 
of thousand feet, always in forest so wild and grand 
and beautiful as to exceed all dreams of what an 
