He charged straight into me at the sound
of the shot.
My horse, Filfil, was utterly unfit for a hunter, as he
went perfectly mad at the report of a gun fired from his back, and at
the moment of the discharge he reared perpendicularly; the weight, and
the recoil of the rifle, added to the sudden rearing of the horse,
unseated me, and I fell, rifle in hand, backwards over his hind-quarters
at the moment the elephant rushed in full charge upon the horse. Away
went "Filfil," leaving me upon the ground in a most inglorious position;
and, fortunately, the grass being high, the elephant lost sight of me
and followed the horse instead of giving me his attention.
My horse was lost; my man had never even accompanied me, having lagged
behind at the very commencement of the hunt. I had lost my rifle in the
high grass, as I had been forced to make a short run from the spot
before I knew that the elephant had followed the horse; thus I was
nearly an hour before I found it, and also my azimuth compass that had
fallen from my belt pouch. After much shouting and whistling, my mounted
man arrived, and making him dismount, I rode my little horse Mouse, and
returned to the path. My horse Filfil was lost. As a rule, hunting
during the march should be avoided, and I had now paid dearly for the
indiscretion.
I reached the Atabbi river about eighteen miles from Obbo. This is a
fine perennial stream flowing from the Madi mountains towards the west,
forming an affluent of the Asua river. There was a good ford, with a
hard gravel and rocky bottom, over which the horse partly waded and
occasionally swam. There were fresh tracks of immense herds of elephants
with which the country abounded, and I heard them trumpeting in the
distance.
Ascending rising ground in perfectly open prairie on the opposite side
of Atabbi, I saw a dense herd of about two hundred elephants - they were
about a mile distant, and were moving slowly through the high grass.
Just as I was riding along the path watching the immense herd, a Tetel
(hartebeest) sprang from the grass in which he had been concealed, and
fortunately he galloped across a small open space, where the high grass
had been destroyed by the elephants. A quick shot from the little
Fletcher 24 rifle doubled him up; but, recovering himself almost
immediately, he was just disappearing when a shot from the left-hand
barrel broke his back, to the intense delight of my people. We
accordingly bivouacked for the night, and the fires were soon blazing
upon a dry plateau of granite rock about seventy feet square that I had
chosen for a resting-place. In the saucer-shaped hollows of the rock was
good clear water from the rain of the preceding day; thus we had all the
luxuries that could be desired - fire, food, and water.
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