The Recollections of William Finaughty Elephant Hunter 1864-1875 by Finaughty William

Author:Finaughty, William [Finaughty, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

XII. CIGAR AND THE ELEPHANT— A UNICORN HORN— SIX ELEPHANTS WITH FIVE BULLETS— A NARROW ESCAPE— THE BABY ELEPHANT AND ITS MOTHER—AN AMUSING SCENE—A DISAPPOINTED BOER—BUSHMAN CATTLE THIEF AND HIS DESERTS.

We continued our journey down to the junction of the Shasha and Simbokie to the spot where Napier and I had previously seen the enormous herd of elephant. We found elephants fairly plentiful and had some profitable shooting. This is where Cigar makes his first appearance as an elephant hunter. I overheard him talking at the camp fire to the other boer s about the matter and from this it was quite clear that though he was a famous hand with a gun he did not altogether like the idea of getting too close to an elephant. I was, therefore, not surprised to find that when it came to an actual encounter he was not a success. He fired a number of shots but did not get anything, then he lost the elephants and once or twice got lost himself and had to sleep out in the bush. During the whole time he was with me he never shot an elephant, and eventually I put him on to shoot rhinoceros, sending him in a direction directly opposite to the one we took, on account of the noise he made with continuous firing.

He mentioned one day that he had fired at and wounded a rhino with an exceptionally long horn, but the animal had got away. Curious to know whether he was "drawing the long bow" I went out in that direction and, directed by a number of vultures sitting in the trees, I soon located the carcase. It certainly had a very pretty horn, 3 ft. 10 ins. in length and with a very small butt. In fact it was so unlike the usual rhino horn that I afterwards showed it to a man as a fine specimen of a unicorn horn.

I was away from the wagons a whole week, having shot eight elephants meanwhile. There was a nice shower of rain the night I returned to camp and in the morning the boys told me they had heard elephants down the river. I made it a rule never to hunt on Sundays, but it was such a beautiful morning after the rain that I could not resist a ride out, if only to see which way they had gone. Their fresh spoor was visible less than a mile from the wagons, and before I anticipated anything of the kind the herd was right in front of me.

Upon examining my pouch I found I had only four bullets there, with one in the gun. However, I set to work with my five bullets. With the first I secured a cow, the bulls being too far away. Following up the herd I got a bull with a lucky shot, shooting him at a distance of 12 feet, without even putting the gun to my shoulder. This was not my usual practice,

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