Their Nights They Spend In Little Bough
Shelters By The Enclosure, Watching More Vigilantly Than By Day, As
The Elephants Are More Active At Night, It Being Their Usual Feeding
Time.
During the whole time the witch doctor is hard at work making
incantations and charms, with a view to finding out the proper time
to attack the elephants.
In my opinion, his decision fundamentally
depends on his knowledge of the state of poisoning the animals are
in, but his version is that he gets his information from the forest
spirits. When, however, he has settled the day, the best hunters
steal into the enclosure and take up safe positions in trees, and
the outer crowd set light to the ready-built fires, and make the
greatest uproar possible, and fire upon the staggering, terrified
elephants as they attempt to break out. The hunters in the trees
fire down on them as they rush past, the fatal point at the back of
the skull being well exposed to them.
When the animals are nearly exhausted, those men who do not possess
guns dash into the enclosure, and the men who do, reload and join
them, and the work is then completed. One elephant hunt I chanced
upon at the final stage had taken two months' preparation, and
although the plan sounds safe enough, there is really a good deal of
danger left in it with all the drugging and ju-ju. There were eight
elephants killed that day, but three burst through everything,
sending energetic spectators flying, and squashing two men and a
baby as flat as botanical specimens.
The subsequent proceedings were impressive. The whole of the people
gorged themselves on the meat for days, and great chunks of it were
smoked over the fires in all directions. A certain portion of the
flesh of the hind leg was taken by the witch doctor for ju-ju, and
was supposed to be put away by him, with certain suitable
incantations in the recesses of the forest; his idea being
apparently either to give rise to more elephants, or to induce the
forest spirits to bring more elephants into the district.
Dr. Nassau tells me that the manner in which the ivory gained by one
of these hunts is divided is as follows: - "The witch doctor, the
chiefs, and the family on whose ground the enclosure is built, and
especially the household whose women first discovered the animals,
decide in council as to the division of the tusks and the share of
the flesh to be given to the crowd of outsiders. The next day the
tusks are removed and each family represented in the assemblage cuts
up and distributes the flesh." In the hunt I saw finished, the
elephants had not been discovered, as in the case Dr. Nassau above
speaks of, in a plantation by women, but by a party of rubber
hunters in the forest some four or five miles from any village, and
the ivory that would have been allotted to the plantation holder in
the former case, went in this case to the young rubber hunters.
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