ELEPHANTS 
727 
We learned that the village, which was a couple of miles 
away, had been destroyed by these elephants, under the 
lead of the rogue bull. The elephants had begun by rav¬ 
aging the gardens and plots of cultivated ground; the natives 
tried to drive them away; the beasts grew bolder and finally 
one night when the natives yelled at them, they charged 
them, drove them into their huts, and then destroyed sev¬ 
eral of the huts; and one, the rogue bull, killed one and 
maimed another of the inhabitants. In out-of-the-way 
places wicked herds will sometimes thus attack hunters’ 
camps, being attracted rather than repelled by the fire. Mr. 
Paul Niedieck in his “ Rifle in Five Continents” describes 
an attack thus made on him in which he nearly lost his life. 
Not only are some individual elephants particularly vicious, 
but there are whole herds which are vicious. 
Elephant hunting, in addition to being ordinarily very 
hard work, is often dangerous. As we have elsewhere said, 
experienced hunters often differ widely in their estimates as 
to how the different kinds of dangerous game rank as foes. 
There are many men who regard elephants as the most dan¬ 
gerous of all; and again there are many others who regard 
the lion and the buffalo as beyond comparison more formi¬ 
dable. Our own view is that there is a very wide range of 
individual variation among the individuals of each species, 
and, moreover, that the conditions of country and surround¬ 
ings vary so that one must be very cautious about general¬ 
izing. Judging partly from our own limited experience, and 
partly from a very careful sifting of the statements of many 
good observers with far wider experience, we believe that, 
taking the average of a large number of cases under varied 
conditions, the lion is the most dangerous; that a buffalo 
