o do with an elephant
story. In the forests we saw numberless old elephant pits, and on the
grassy slopes there were mazes of elephants' trails, some so big that
hundreds of elephants must have moved along them. But we saw no
elephants. We scanned the hills for miles and tramped for days in ideal
elephant country, but our quest was all in vain. Then our food supplies
ran low, our last bullock was killed, and we hurried back to the base
camp on the river, a hungry, tired band of a hundred and twenty men.

The matter of provisioning a large number of porters far from the
railroad is a serious one. In addition to carrying the _safari_ outfit,
the porters must carry their _posho_, or cornmeal ration, and it is
impossible for them to carry more than a limited number of days'
rations. So the farther one gets from the base of supplies the more
difficult it is to move, and a relay system must be employed. Porters
must be sent back for food, often six or eight days; or else a bullock
wagon must be used for that purpose. In our _safari_ we used two wagons,
drawn by thirty oxen, to supplement the porters in keeping up food
supplies, and even by so doing there were times when rations ran low. In
such times we would shoot game for them, either kongoni or zebra, both
of which are considered great delicacies by the black man.

However, this is not telling about my memorable elephant experiences in
the Guas Ngishu Plateau.

We got back to the Nzoia River on December third. On the fifteenth,
after many more unsuccessful attempts to get in touch with a herd, Mr.
Akeley and I resolved to try the mountain again. We thought that perhaps
the elephants might have moved northward along the eastern slope, and so
we thought we'd push clear up to the Turkwel River and find out beyond
question. We outfitted for an eight days' march, carried only one tent
and a small number of good porters. Only the absolute necessaries were
taken, for we expected to move fast and hard. The first day we marched
eight hours, crossed the Nzoia River, and by a curious chance at once
struck a fresh trail which was diagnosed as being only a few hours old.
The bark torn from trees was fresh and still moist; the leaves of the
branches that had been broken off as the elephants fed along the way
were still unwithered, and the flowers that had been crushed down by the
great feet of the herd had lost little of their freshness and fragrance.

The trail led us first in one d