Part 16

It poured hard most of the night, and it was quite cold. Luckily, the forest was a splendid wind break, and but little rain reached my snug camp-bed. The boys made little shelters with under-bush, kept the fires going and ate python all night.

As soon as we were warmed up a bit next morning we started. Now, when the bush is wet and the cold of the early morning is still on, it is very hard to get a native to go ahead. Being naked, they come in for a shower bath every time they touch a branch. They simply loathe it. With difficulty one will eventually be pushed in front, but in a very short time he will pretend to have a thorn in his foot or some other pressing reason for stopping, and another has to be pushed forward. This continues until things heat up with the heightening of the sun. Not that you can see the sun when in this kind of forest; but, somehow, its heat rays penetrate the dense roof of foliage, although quite invisible.

We soon reached a lot of fresh elephant tracks. I examined them carefully, but could find no bull tracks at all. I could not even find one moderately big cow track. I was puzzled. All the tracks appeared to have been made by calves and half-grown animals. The boys were very pleased with them, however, and when I said I was not going to follow such small stuff they assured me that the smaller the track the bigger the teeth. This belief I have found to be common all over Africa, not only among native hunters, but also among whites. In my experience it has failed to stand the test of careful observation. But it is so widely held and so firmly believed in that it may be interesting to state the conclusion I have arrived at after very many opportunities of testing it. It is, of course, merely one man’s experience, but I give it for what it is worth.

Very large and bulky elephants appear to carry small tusks. Why they appear small is this: A tusk reaches a great length and a great lip diameter in a comparatively small number of years, but is very hollow and weighs light. At this stage the bearer is still young and slim, as with man. Therefore, his tusks look enormous in proportion to his general bulk. Therefore, however, his tusks gain but little either in length or girth, but the hollows fill up more and more with the decades; while his body continues to fill out, he stops chasing the cows, takes less and less exercise, becomes bulkier and sourer in the temper, suffers from gout, for all I know, gets a liver—for I have found them diseased in very old elephant—and now his tusks look small in proportion to his general size. To bear me out I would point to the enormously heavy tusk in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It is only some 9 ft. long and only just over 24 ins. diameter, yet it weighs 234 lb. I have had heaps of tusks 9 ft. long and 23½ ins. in diameter which weighed a mere 100 lb. to 150 lb.

Pointing to a track which in any other country would have indicated a young cow, the headman said that its maker would be found to carry enormous tusks. I knew this was bunkum; all he wanted was meat. But it began to dawn on me that perhaps the elephant of Liberia were, like its hippo, a dwarf race. This decided me to go and have a look, so off we started.

The herd was a fairly large one and the ground soft, consequently the tracking was easy and the speed good. All were hungering for meat. What an appalling spectacle we would have been, as we raced along, for wise, calm, judicious eyes not out for blood—the natives all eager, searching the ground for tracks here and there like hounds on the trail. Some, more enterprising, chancing ahead to find the trail. A slap on the thigh signals this to the more tardy, while the pale-skinned man rests at the checks, the better to carry out his deadly work when that should begin. Watch him peering furtively through the bush in all directions, for human eye cannot pierce the dense foliage. Far better good ears than good eyes in this kind of country. Watch him during the checks listening. He imagines that those terrific vibrations his dull ears faintly gather may be caused by his quarry. How stupid he is to continue thinking so when surrounded by living evidence that it is not so, for not one of the native men has paused even for a second; they know monkeys when they hear them.

All the same, these were not ordinary “monks,” they were chimpanzee, a whole colony of them. They were very busy gathering fruit, and I pointed my rifle at one huge old man “chimp.” Like a flash my natives disappeared, and with such a clatter that the chimps heard and also disappeared. I had had no intention of firing, but I almost began to believe that I must have done it, so rapidly had the stage cleared. However, up came the headman, relieved that the chimps had gone. I asked him what was the matter. He told me then that chimps when in bands will attack if fired at. I don’t believe it, but I am glad to say I have never tested it. They looked such jolly old hairy people.

After this we pushed along faster than ever, for the day was getting on. The quarry led us in every conceivable direction. Had I got lost or had my natives deserted me, I could not have found my way back to the village at all. The sun’s position did not help, it being invisible. A compass would not have helped unless a kind of rough course had been jotted down with the distances travelled between changes of direction.

Towards evening I began to think that it was a rum go. I could see no reason why the elephant should travel so: food appeared to be plentiful. There were no signs of man anywhere. But the fact remains that their signs showed that we had gained but little on them during our nine hours’ march. We had to camp for the night.

Rain during the night obliterated the tracks to some extent and made trekking slower. We had not gone far when the unexpected happened. The natives all stopped, listening. “Only monks,” I thought. Wrong again, for it was elephant this time. They must have wandered round back on to their tracks, and we happened along just in the nick of time to hear them crossing. Had we been a few minutes earlier we should probably have had another day’s hard going for nothing.

Some of them were quite close, making all the usual sounds of feeding elephant. The sighs, the intestinal rumbles, the cracks, the r-r-r-r-ips as they stripped branches, the little short suppressed trumpet notes, the wind noises and the thuds of flapping ears—all were there.

Now, leaving the boys, I approached alone. It was astonishing how thick the stuff seemed. I was certainly very close indeed to elephant, but nothing could I see. I started through some bush, came out sure of seeing something—and did so when I lowered my eyes. I had completely forgotten my idea about these being dwarf elephants, and had been unconsciously peering about for a sight at the elevation of an ordinary elephant’s top parts; whereas here I was looking straight into the face of an elephant on a level with mine and only a matter of feet between us. At first I thought it was a calf, and was about to withdraw when I noticed a number of animals beyond the near one. All were the same height. None stood over 7 ft. at the shoulder. Their ivory was minute. I withdrew to think it over calmly. I met the headman, much too close in, and cursed him soundly. I said there was no ivory and that I was going to look for a bull among the main body, and that he had better keep well back. I was intensely annoyed at his pressing up like that and also with the appearance of the elephant. I was not so interested in the natural history point of view then as I would be now, and the fact that these elephant were as out of proportion to the ordinary elephant as the pigmy hippo is to the ordinary hippo merely irritated me.

Circling round the lot I had first seen, I got up to the bigger herd, searching vainly for a bull. I had now more leisure to examine the beasts and to compare them one with another. I soon spotted what should have been a fair herd bull, judging by the width of his forehead and the taper of his tusks, but he stood scarcely 6 ins. higher than the cows about him. His tusks were minute, but yet he had lost his baby forehead and ears, and looked, what in fact he was, a full-blown blood. I shot him. But here again I was at fault. I took a calm, deliberate shot at his brain, or rather where I thought his brain ought to be, and where it would have been in any decent elephant. But it was not there. Whether or not he was a brainless elephant I cannot positively say, for I killed him with the heart shot. But I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, because I subsequently found out where others of his race kept their brains, and their situation in the head was not that of an ordinary elephant’s. The ears were also different, although this is a poor distinction upon which to found a pretension to difference of race, for ears differ all over Africa. Then, the tail hairs were almost as fine as those of giraffe. As regards bulk, I should say it would take six of them to balance a big Lakka elephant.

I was thoroughly disgusted, but the boys were jubilant. They thought he was enormous. I said that I could not think of hunting such stuff. The tusks looked about 10 lb.—when weighed afterwards they scaled 15 lb. each, being shorter in the hollow than I had guessed them. “Well,” I said, “if all your elephant are like this, I shall have to pull out.” Then came some more surprises. They said all the “red” elephant were the size of the one I had just killed, but that the “blue” elephant were much bigger. “And where were the ‘blue’ elephant to be found?” I asked sarcastically; for I thought all this just the usual bosh. “There were not many,” they said, “and they never mixed with the ‘red’ ones, but they were huge.”

“And how big were they?” I asked. “As high as that,” pointing with their spears to a height of about 11 ft. or 12 ft. After all, I thought, it might be so, more especially as I had seen a pair of tusks of about 25 lb. each on the “beach”—as a shipping port is always called in West Africa—which were reputed to have come from this country. We then camped by the dead elephant, and the business of cutting and drying meat on fires began.

In a way, the smallness of the elephant helped me, for the meat was soon all cut into strips and hanging over fires, and the boys were eager for more. Therefore I had no difficulty in getting some of them to go with me the next day to look for the so-called “blue” elephant. I thought that if these were as big as the natives said they were, they were probably wanderers from the interior, where I knew normal-sized elephant lived, having hunted them in the hinterland of the Ivory Coast.

We hunted all that day without success, but I saw the old tracks of an ordinary elephant. These the boys said were made by a “blue” elephant. We returned, after a long day, to the meat camp. The headman announced his intention of accompanying me on the morrow, as his women would arrive that evening and would take charge of the meat. Now, here is a curious thing about Africans. If one acquires, say, a lot of meat, he tries to get it into the charge of his wives as soon as possible. While he remains in possession everybody cadges from him: friends, relations, everybody of similar age, the merest acquaintances, all seem to think that he should share the meat with them. But once the meat is handed over to his wife it is secure. Whenever anyone asks for some he refers them to his wife. That ends it, for nobody will cadge from a woman, knowing, I suppose, that it would be hopeless, for if the wife were to part with any she would be severely beaten by the husband. Yet that same husband, while still in charge of the meat, cannot refuse to share it.

With this in view, the headman had sent a runner to the village to bring his women to the elephant shortly after death, and in the night of the second day they arrived. Our rather dismal little camp became quite lively. Fires were lit all over the place, and everyone was extremely animated. When natives have recovered from the effects of their first gorge of meat they become very lively indeed. If they have a large quantity of meat, requiring several days to smoke and dry it, they dance all night. The conventional morality of their village life is cast off, and they thoroughly enjoy themselves.

Early on the following day we were off for the big elephant. About twenty natives attached themselves to us. We wandered about, crossing numerous streams, until someone found tracks. If they were small I flatly refused to follow them. Late in the afternoon a real big track of a single bull was found. It was quite fresh and absurdly easy to follow. We soon heard him, and nothing untoward took place. The brain was where it ought to be, and he fell. As I anticipated, he was a normal elephant, about 10 ft. 10 ins. at the shoulder, with quite ordinary tusks weighing 31 lb. or 32 lb. The boys thought him a monster, and asked me what I thought of “blue” elephant. He certainly was much more nearly blue than the little red-mud coloured ones of the day before.

As it was too late for anyone to return to the village that night we all camped by the elephant. Being dissatisfied with the numbers of warrantable bulls about, I decided to return to the village with the boys. So off we set across country. We travelled and travelled, as I imagined, straight towards the village. This was far from being the case, as I discovered when we all stopped to examine a man-trail. It was ours. We had been slogging it in a huge circle, and here we were back again. I had often admired and envied the Africans for their wonderful faculty for finding their way where apparently there was nothing to indicate it. I have never yet been able to exactly “place” this extraordinary faculty. They cannot explain it themselves. They simply know the direction without taking bearings or doing anything consciously. Always puzzling over this sense which we whites have to such a poor degree, I have watched closely leading natives scores of times. The only thing they do, as far as I could observe, is to look at trees. Occasionally they recognise one, but they are not looking for landmarks. They are quite indifferent about the matter. Something, which we have probably lost, leads them straight on, even in pitch darkness.

The occasion of which I am writing is the exception which proves the rule, for it is the only instance of natives getting seriously lost which has come under my observation, and that is more than twenty years of hunting. For seriously lost we were. We wandered about in that forest for three days. Leader after leader was tried, only to end up on our old tracks. Food ran out. The boys had eaten all the elephant meat they brought with them. My food was finished, but the cartridges were not, thank goodness. I remember ordering a cartridge belt from Rigby to hold fifty rounds. He asked me what on earth I wanted with so many on it. I said I liked them, and here was the time when it paid to have them. For now we lived entirely on monkeys, and horrible things they are. Tasting as they smell, with burning and singeing added, they are the most revolting food it has ever been my bad luck to have eaten.

At the end of the third day I thought to myself that something would have to be done. This kind of thing would end in someone getting “done in” with exhaustion. As it seemed to me that I should be the first to drop out, it appeared to be up to me to do something. But what? I had not the foggiest notion where we were. But one thing I knew: water runs downhill. Brooklets run down into streams, streams down into rivers, rivers to seas. Next morning I took a hand. I made the boys follow scrupulously the winding bed of the first stream we came to. It joined a larger one; we followed that. Not a word of remonstrance would I listen to, nor would I tolerate any short cuts. At length we reached a large river, and I was relieved to see that they all recognised it. Did they “savvy” it? I asked. Yes, rather. So I sat down for a rest. The boys were having a fearful argument about something. It appeared that some held that our village lay up-stream, others that it was down-stream. They came to me to settle it. I asked the up-streamers to come out; they numbered seven. I counted the down-streamers; they numbered nine. I said: “The village lies down-stream”; and by the merest hazard it did.

The village from which I had done so much hunting and where I was so profusely “fêted” had acquired great riches with the meat I had given the people. In spite of this, or, perhaps, because of this, they showed great opposition to my going. At first I paid no attention to their protests, continuing calmly my preparations for departure, weighing and marking my ivory, etc. When my loads were ready I announced my intention of leaving on the morrow. This was wrong. What I should have done was to have kept my intention entirely to myself, then suddenly to have fallen in the boys, shouldered the loads and marched off. All would then have been well.

As it was, when the morrow came the boys did not. They could not be found. I could not move my loads without them.

I found the headman, accused him of playing this mean trick, and demanded the boys. He then tried all the persuasions he could think of to get me to stay. He offered me any women I fancied. That is always the first inducement in the African mind. Slaves, food, anything I wanted if I would only stay.

I got angry and cursed him and threatened to shoot up the town. He said quietly that the king was coming and I could talk to him.

The boy in the foreground, interpreting, was nearly eaten by the natives, who pleaded, in excuse, that it was their custom to eat all of that tribe that they came across.]

Meanwhile I had to wait. I was simply furious. The suspicion that they were after my ivory kept poisoning my mind. I argued with myself that they knew the value of ivory; that they knew what a lot of gin and “trade” they would get if they took my tusks to the coast. And a white man, a hunter of elephants, “done in,” what would it matter? People would say: “Serve him right,” probably. Then they wanted my rifle. They had seen it kill elephant with one shot. It had wonderful medicine. Curious how near we are to the primitive. I thought of shooting someone; I actually wished to shoot someone. But that would not have helped matters. Then sense and experience came to help me and—I laughed. As soon as I laughed they laughed. I felt master of the situation.