a hill near where we had last seen them. They had
disappeared, but their trail was as easy to follow as an open road.
Before reaching the brow of the next hill one of the gunbearers was sent
up a tree to reconnoiter the country beyond.

"_Hapa_," he whispered, as he carefully climbed down and indicated with
his hand that they were near. Again we swung in a wide circle and came
over the brow of the next hill. There, four or five hundred yards away,
was the herd of elephants, standing idly under the low trees that
studded the opposite slope. There were between forty and fifty of them,
and from the number of _totos_, or calves, we assumed that many of the
big ones were cows. We studied the herd for some minutes, estimating the
ivory and trying in vain to pick out the bulls. There is very little
difference between the appearance of a cow and a bull elephant when the
latter has only moderate-sized tusks. Usually the tusks of the male are
heavier and thicker, but except for this distinction there is very
little noticeable difference between the two. Of course, an elephant
with gigantic tusks is at once known to be a bull, but if he has small
tusks it is a matter of considerable guesswork.

[Drawing: _Two Kongoni on Guard_]

We could not tell which ones of this herd were bulls, but assumed that
there must surely be several small-sized or young bulls among them. We
decided to go nearer, knowing that the elephant's eyesight is very poor,
and with such a favoring wind his sense of smell was useless. It seemed
amazing that they did not see us as we walked up the slope toward them.
When a couple of hundred yards away we climbed a tree to study them some
more. They were in three separate groups, each of which was clustered
sleepy and motionless under the trees. They had ceased feeding and had
evidently laid up for their midday rest, although the hour was hardly
ten in the morning.

From our "observation tower" in the tree we studied the three groups as
well as we could. So far as we could judge there were at least three
bulls of medium size, but as we looked those three lazily moved off
toward the group on the extreme left. At that time we were within about
a hundred yards of the nearest group with the wind still favorable, and
except for one thing we might easily have crept up through the grass to
within thirty or forty yards. Directly between us and the elephants were
two kongoni, one lying down and the other alert and erect.