ection, while Hassan, with a coolness and courage that I both
admired and envied, stood still until the big elephant was within ten
feet of him and then leaped to one side as the three beasts swept by
him, carried onward by the impetus of their mad rush. As the big one
passed it made a vicious swing at him with its trunk.

[Photograph: Bow On]

[Photograph: By courtesy of W.D. Boyce. The Bull Elephant]

[Photograph: Cooking Elephant Meat]

Fortunately the elephants continued in their course and we followed them
with my big rifle again reloaded and ready. Once more they turned in
toward the river and were completely swallowed up in the tall reeds. We
again waded in after them and had gone only a few yards when we once
more saw the angry head of the big one looming up as it came toward us.
I fired point-blank at the base of the trunk and the beast stopped
suddenly. Then it slowly turned and as it was about to disappear in the
tall elephant grass again I fired at its backbone. The huge bulk
collapsed and disappeared, buried in the reeds. Hassan yelled that it
was dead, but we couldn't see for the grass. The situation now was
perilous in the extreme. The river made a sharp bend at this point like
an incomplete letter O, with a narrow neck of land through which the
elephants had passed when I had shot. At the narrow neck it was about a
hundred feet across while the depth of the "O" was about three hundred
feet and the width about two hundred and fifty feet. This small
peninsula was matted with a jungle growth of high grass and reeds six or
eight feet tall, while the edges of the river were thickly wooded with
small trees tangled together and interlacing their branches over the
narrow but deep waters of the Nzoia.

[Drawing: _Awaiting the Charge_]

Down in the jungle depths of this peninsula there was a violent
commotion among the low branches of these trees, an indication that the
animal was not dead, but was thrashing madly about as if desperately
wounded. Hassan said it was the young elephant and that the older one
was dead, but this could not be determined without pushing on through
the reeds until we would be almost upon them. This course seemed too
dangerous to try.

The river at this point was absolutely impassable for animals. The banks
were ten feet high and perpendicular. The water was perhaps five or six
feet deep and the width of the swift stream not over twenty or thirty
feet. The trees had interlaced the