226 ADVENTURES OF AN ELEPHANT HUNTER ch. 
the first shot from my 1075 mm. had passed 
through the upper portion of his forehead, and I can 
only ascribe my poor shooting on this occasion to 
my weak condition and the unsteady state of my 
nerves, due to the repeated heavy doses of quinine 
that I had taken as a febrifuge. I can, moreover, 
assure the reader that it is no easy matter, after a 
solid month’s fever, to manipulate in bush country a 
rifle weighing thirteen pounds. 
The elephant which I had bagged proved to be a 
comparatively small animal, measuring just about 
eleven feet at the shoulder. His feet, as the natives 
had remarked, were peculiarly small for such an old 
beast, but, what was more important, his tusks were 
beautifully long and straight and weighed 113 and 
107 lbs., respectively. On his carcase we counted 
the scars of twenty-seven old bullet wounds, and 
three fresh bullet wounds received from the native 
hunters whose companion he had killed on the 
previous day. One of the last-mentioned bullets had 
become imbedded in the vertebrae of his tail, and 
must have caused him considerable pain and 
rendered him unusually vicious. 
This veteran of a hundred fights had, so the 
native hunters informed me, killed three other 
hunters in this district within the previous few years; 
one of them, Fundi Bakali, by driving a tusk through 
his chest and afterwards kneeling on his body ; a 
