ELEPHANT HUNTING 
261 
look for elephants, followed by our gun-bearers and half a 
dozen wild Meru hunters, each carrying a spear or a bow 
and arrows. When we reached the hunting grounds, open 
country with groves of trees and patches of jungle, the 
Meru went off in every direction to find elephant. We 
waited their return under a tree, by a big stretch of culti¬ 
vated ground. The region was well peopled, and all the 
way down the path had led between fields, which the Meru 
women were tilling with their adze-like hoes, and banana 
plantations, where among the bananas other trees had 
been planted, and the yam vines trained up their trunks. 
These cool, shady banana plantations, fenced in with tall 
hedges and bordered by rapid brooks, were really very 
attractive. Among them were scattered villages of conical 
thatched huts, and level places plastered with cow dung 
on which the grain was threshed; it was then stored in huts 
raised on posts. There were herds of cattle, and flocks of 
sheep and goats; and among the burdens the women 
bore we often saw huge bottles of milk. In the shambas 
there were platforms, and sometimes regular thatched huts, 
placed in the trees; these were for the watchers, who 
were to keep the elephants out of the shambas at night. 
Some of the natives wore girdles of banana leaves, looking, 
as Kermit said, much like the pictures of savages in Sun¬ 
day-school books. 
Early in the afternoon some of the scouts returned 
with news that three bull elephants were in a piece of for¬ 
est a couple of miles distant, and thither we went. It 
was an open grove of heavy thorn timber beside a strip of 
swamp; among the trees the grass grew tall, and there 
were many thickets of abutilon, a flowering shrub a dozen 
