African Game Trails by Theodore Roosevelt

Author:Theodore Roosevelt [Roosevelt, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461624240
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Published: 2001-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Mr. Roosevelt’s description of one of the elephant pictures—written on the back of it

Early in the afternoon some of the scouts returned with news that three bull elephants were in a piece of forest a couple of miles distant, and thither we went. It was an open grove of heavy thorn timber beside a strip of swamp; among the trees the grass grew tall, and there were many thickets of arbutilon, a flowering shrub a dozen feet high. On this the elephant were feeding. Tarlton’s favorite sport was lion hunting, but he was also a first-class elephant hunter, and he brought me up to these bulls in fine style. Although only three hundred yards away, it took us two hours to get close to them. Tarlton and the “shenzis”—wild natives, called in Swahili (a kind of African chinook) “wa-shenzi”—who were with us, climbed tree after tree, first to place the elephants, and then to see if they carried ivory heavy enough to warrant my shooting them. At last Tarlton brought me to within fifty yards of them. Two were feeding in bush which hid them from view, and the third stood between, facing us. We could only see the top of his head and back, and not his tusks, and could not tell whether he was worth shooting. Much puzzled we stood where we were, peering anxiously at the huge half-hidden game. Suddenly there was a slight eddy in the wind, up went the elephant’s trunk, twisting to and fro in the air; evidently he could not catch a clear scent; but in another moment we saw the three great dark forms moving gently off through the bush. As rapidly as possible, following the trails already tramped by the elephants, we walked forward, and after a hundred yards Tarlton pointed to a big bull with good tusks standing motionless behind some small trees seventy yards distant. As I aimed at his head he started to move off; the first bullet from the heavy Holland brought him to his knees, and as he rose I knocked him flat with the second. He struggled to rise; but, both firing, we kept him down; and I finished him with a bullet in the brain from the little Springfield. Although rather younger than either of the bulls I had already shot, it was even larger. In its stomach were beans from the shambas, abutilon tips, and bark, and especially the twigs, leaves, and white blossoms of a smaller shrub. The tusks weighed a little over a hundred pounds the pair.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.