XXIII 
SUPERSTITION AND A SEQUEL 
217 
head at once coming straight towards me, and 
a similar incident, incredible as it may seem, 
has occurred to me more than once in my hunting 
career. Shooting again, I cut the advancing fore¬ 
part in halves, this time about eighteen inches 
from the head, and still the reptile strove to 
wriggle towards us, until one of my men, running 
up, finished matters by smashing its head to a 
pulp with a stick. It has always seemed an 
amazing fact to me that the shattering action of a 
bullet does not, in severing a snake in two, 
utterly paralyse the section containing the head. 
However, to resume my story, only a few minutes 
after this rencontre with the jokomahamba, we came 
across the fresh manure of the two elephants that 
we had persuaded ourselves were miles away, and 
starting off at once in pursuit, managed without 
undue difficulty to bag both of them, Simba stoutly 
averring that we had been lucky on our hunt simply 
because we had met with the snake. 
Sometimes, a dying elephant will take hold of a 
tree with his trunk to prevent himself falling, and 
when this occurs the inference drawn by the natives 
who are hunting is that the wife of the man who 
fired the first shot is undoubtedly proving faithless 
to him. If an elephant or buffalo charges a native 
after he has fired and wounded it, the same deduc¬ 
tion is drawn, but should he be charged by the 
