Sands of Silence by Peter Hathaway Capstick

Author:Peter Hathaway Capstick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Johnny and Jonas casting around for tracks at a waterhole.

Johnny and Jonas took the lead, easily following the spoor, having committed it to memory. It is quite amazing to an outsider, but both Johnny and Jonas would from time to time leave the track and cut if off, so to speak, knowing instinctively where the bull had gone when he had stopped to snuffle in a patch of roots or tubers. They knew the spoor as surely as the FBI knows its fingerprints. Maybe an old scar, perhaps just a mark in one of the feet that was distinctive. Who knows? But it was within an hour that the men stopped and pointed to a great gray hulk as distinctive as a battleship on a golden sea of ripe grass.

Roger was filming us as we went forward over the three hundred yards that separated us from the elephant, and so was Phil. Christ, but he was big! Until I had spent more time afield in Bushmanland, I would have thought that lone bull was the biggest elephant I had ever seen! He was magnificent as we walked closer; we knew he really couldn’t make us out beyond fifty yards or so unless he was farsighted. The ivory looked like toothpicks, so big was he by comparison, and I had to listen to Volker as he told me the real weight. His ivory would go in the sixty-five-pound class.

I was astonished, but the more I looked at the bull, the more I had to agree with Volker, as much of the ivory was hidden in the head, unlike other races of elephants, in which most of the weight comes from what is sticking out of the cheek.

I had a perfect chance for a side-brain shot if I had wanted it, but to run across a sixty-five-pounder on the first morning meant that we were bound to see one bigger than that in the nineteen days to come. At least I thought so. After all, a ninety-six-pounder was already in the barn, and the German client had actually had his lunch while deciding whether it was big enough to shoot! The elephant had been snoozing in the hot hours, a couple of hundred yards away.

Very hot and tired, and experiencing adrenaline letdown, we decided to have lunch here; there was a little bit of shade where the elephant had been browsing. After an hour, Johnny arrived with the Toyota and the goodies therein, not the least of which was water. We had drunk dry the entire three flax bags we were carrying.

That afternoon we looked in vain for more elephant spoor, but with no luck. We hung one more leopard bait, but decided to head south to the same area that Hanley and Doug had been hunting.

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