CHAPTER XXV 
Abortive elephant hunt—Giraffe hunt—Thorns—About the aasvogel (vulture)— 
Stremboom shoots a leopard—How the Namakwas treated Stremboom—How 
Witboy saved Stremboom at a lion hunt—Piet Jacobs wounded by a native 
on the Chobe—Moremi’s terror of chloroform—Moremi wants me to remain 
with him—Van Zyl the elder’s great elephant hunt, and the end of his 
career. 
The second day of trekking brought Stremboom and myself to 
our hunting-ground, where we found that the elephants had 
again been down to drink as late as the previous day; so, ac¬ 
companied by Stremboom’s veteran right-hand man and major- 
domo, Jan Witboy, a coloured man, we mounted and took up 
the track through the open bush, telling the boys to follow on 
with plenty of water for both ourselves and the horses. There 
was no mistaking the direction the elephants had taken, for the 
country looked as if a tornado had passed through the bushes. 
Here a sapling as thick as my leg had been playfully uprooted 
in their course; there huge branches lay on the ground, torn 
down by the passing elephants, whose number we estimated at 
about fifty, while the grass and brushwood underfoot were levelled 
down as if by the feet of a large troop of cattle, only there were 
the large oval deep impressions left by the elephants’ feet in the 
ground, and great piles of excrement that too surely indicated 
the nature of the beasts we were following. Had it not been 
for the wish to save our horses for the final hunt when we over¬ 
took the elephants, and the certainty of distancing the boys who 
carried the all-important water, the track was so distinct that 
we could easily have galloped along it; but prudence advised us 
to go slowly. We even dismounted and led the horses at times, 
hoping that we would come upon the elephants resting at some 
