256 ELEPHANT-HUNTING [ch. x 
and after standing stock still for a minute or two, 
Kermit and Tarlton stole quietly off for a hundred 
yards, and waited until the anger of the cows cooled 
and they had moved away, before going up to the dead 
bull. Then they followed the herd again, and Kermit 
got some photos which, as far as I know, are better 
than any that have ever before been taken of wild 
elephant. He took them close up, at imminent risk of 
a charge. 
The following day the two hunters rode back to Meru, 
making a long circle. The elephants they saw were not 
worth shooting, but they killed the finest rhinoceros we 
had yet seen. They saw it in an open space of tall 
grass, surrounded by lantana brush, a flowering shrub 
with close-growing stems, perhaps twenty feet high and 
no thicker than a man’s thumb ; it forms a favourite 
cover for elephants and rhinoceros, and is wellnigh 
impenetrable to hunters. Fortunately this particular 
rhino was outside it, and Kermit and Tarlton got up to 
about twenty-five yards from him. Kermit then put 
one bullet behind his shoulder, and as he whipped round 
to charge, another bullet on the point of his shoulder. 
Although mortally wounded, he showed no signs what¬ 
ever of being hurt, and came at the hunters with great 
speed and savage desire to do harm. Then an extra¬ 
ordinary thing happened. Tarlton fired, inflicting 
merely a flesh-wound in one shoulder, and the big, 
fearsome brute, which had utterly disregarded the two 
fatal shots, on receiving this flesh wound wheeled and 
ran. Both firing, they killed him before he had gone 
many yards. He was a bull, with a thirty-inch horn. 
By this time Cuninghame and Heller had finished the 
skin and skeleton of the bull they were preserving. 
Near the carcass Heller trapped an old male leopard-—a, 
