668 
African Game Trails 
garded 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 sav¬ 
age beast; its skin was in fine shape, but it 
was not fat, and weighed just one hundred 
pounds. Now we all joined, and shifted 
camp to a point eight or nine miles distant 
from Meru boma, and fifteen hundred feet 
lower among the foot-hills. It was much 
hotter at this lower level; palms were 
among the trees that bordered the streams. 
On the day we shifted camp Tarlton and I 
rode in advance to look for elephants, fol¬ 
lowed 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 ele¬ 
phant. We waited their return under a 
tree, by a big stretch of cultivated ground. 
The region was well peopled, and all the 
way down the path had led between fields, 
where the Meru women were tilling with 
their adze-like hoes, and banana planta¬ 
tions, where among the banana trees other 
trees had been planted, and the yarn 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 sham¬ 
bas at night. Some of the natives wore 
girdles of banana leaves, looking, as Kermit 
said, much like the pictures oft savages in 
Sunday-school books. 
Early in the afternoon some of the scouts 
returned with news that three bull ele¬ 
phants were in a piece of forest a couple of 
miles distant, and thither we went. It was 
an open grove of heavy thorn timber be¬ 
side a strip of swamp; among the trees 
the grass grew tall, and there were many 
thickets of arbutelon, a flowering shrub a 
dozen feet high. On this the elephant were 
feeding. Tarlton’s favorite sport was lion 
hunting, but he was also a first-class ele¬ 
phant 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, in Swahili 
(a kind of African 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 war¬ 
rant 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, not his tusks, and could not 
tell whether he was worth shooting. Much 
puzzled 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, twist¬ 
ing to and fro in the air; evidently he could 
not catch a clear scent; but in another mo¬ 
ment we saw the three great dark forms 
moving gently off through the bush. As 
rapidly as possible, following the trails al¬ 
ready tramped by the elephants, we walked 
forward, and after a hundred yards Tarlton 
pointed to a big bull with good tusks stand¬ 
ing 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 fin¬ 
ished him with a bullet in the brain from 
the little Springfield. Although rather 
younger than either of the bulls I had al¬ 
ready shot, it was even larger. In its 
stomach were beans from the shambas, ar¬ 
butelon tips, and bark, and especially the 
twigs, leaves, and white blossoms of a 
smaller shrub. The tusks weighed a little 
over a hundred pounds the pair. 
We still needed a cow for the Museum; 
and a couple of days later, at noon, a party 
of natives brought in word that they had 
seen two cows in a spot five miles away. 
Piloted by a naked spearman, whose hair 
