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AFRICAN GAME TRAILS 
feet high. On this the elephant were feeding. Tarlton’s 
favorite sport was lion hunting, but he was also a first- 
class elephant hunter, and he brought me up to these bulls 
in fine style. Although only three hundred yards away, 
it took us two hours to get close to them. Tarlton and the 
‘"shenzis”—wild natives, called in Swahili (a kind of Afri¬ 
can chinook) ^^wa-shenzi”—who were with us, climbed 
tree after tree, first to place the elephants, and then to see 
if they carried ivory heavy enough to warrant my shooting 
them. At last Tarlton brought me to within fifty yards 
of them. Two were feeding in bush which hid them from 
view, and the third stood between, facing us. We could 
only see the top of his head and back, and not his tusks, and 
could not tell whether he was worth shooting. Much puz¬ 
zled we stood where we were, peering anxiously at the huge 
half-hidden game. Suddenly there was a slight eddy in 
the wind, up went the elephant’s trunk, twisting to and fro 
in the air; evidently he could not catch a clear scent; but 
in another moment we saw the three great dark forms 
moving gently off through the bush. As rapidly as possi¬ 
ble, following the trails already tramped by the elephants, 
we walked forward, and after a hundred yards Tarlton 
pointed to a big bull with good tusks standing motionless 
behind some small trees seventy yards distant. As I aimed 
at his head he started to move off; the first bullet from the 
heavy Holland brought him to his knees, and as he rose I 
knocked him flat with the second. He struggled to rise; 
but, both firing, we kept him down; and I finished him 
with a bullet in the brain from the little Springfield. Al¬ 
though rather younger than either of the bulls I had already 
shot, it was even larger. In its stomach were beans from 
