ost noiseless. The elephants advanced and we huddled
together with rifles ready in the patch of bushes. It seemed a certainty
that they would charge, and that if our bullets could not turn them we
would be completely annihilated. But as yet there was no sign that they
saw us, or, if they did, they could not distinguish our motionless forms
from the foliage of the scrub.

At last, the foremost elephant, barely thirty feet from us, came to the
trail in the grass by which we had retreated when we first saw them. The
trunk, sweeping ahead of it as if feeling for the scent of danger,
paused an instant as it reached the trail and then the animal drew back
sharply as though stung. Then it whirled about and the herd went
crashing away through the sparse undergrowth. It was a time of the
utmost nervous tension, and I don't believe the human system could
undergo a prolonged strain of that severity.

[Drawing: _It Started Back as Though Stung_]

During all this time we had not succeeded in positively locating a bull
elephant. Of all the forty-four elephants that were visible at any one
time, there was not one that we could feel safe in identifying as the
elephant needed for the group. Three more times we stalked the herd to
very close range, but they were now so restless that nothing could be
ascertained. So finally we decided to get ahead of them and watch them
as they passed us, but just as we had reached a point where they were
approaching, the two kongoni gave a shrill alarm and the entire herd
made off in tremendous haste. Later, on our way back to camp, we came up
with one group of six or seven, but they seemed too angry and aggressive
to take needless chances with, so we watched them a while and then left
them behind.

During all that day we were with the herd nearly five hours, five hours
of intense nervous strain, during which time there was never a moment
when we were not in some danger of discovery. But in spite of the
aggressive bearing of some of them at one time or another, I had the
feeling that the elephants would run away from us the instant they
definitely determined where we were. And it was while laboring under
this impression that I met my second Mount Elgon herd of elephants and
learned by bitter experience that the impression was wholly false. But
that is still another story, the story of being charged five times in
one day by angry elephants, and how I killed a bull elephant for the
Akeley group.