ll giraffe that had cast its lot in
with the herd was busy, too, tearing and snapping down twigs and leaves,
feeding like the others, who were all feeding like one, even to the
eighteen-month-old calves busy at the teats of their enormous dams.

The sunlight, level and low, struck the wonderful picture. Half the herd
were in the wood, and you could see the tree branches bending and shaking
to the reaching trunks. Half the herd were grazing on the wood's edge, the
giraffe amidst them, its clouded body burning in the sunset against the
green of the trees.

The wind was blowing steadily along the edge of the wood and against a
band of hunters of the Congo State, blacks armed with rifles, who were
worming their way along from tree bole to tree bole, till within shooting
distance of the bull elephant nearest to them.

The creatures feeding knew nothing of their danger till three shots, that
sounded like one, rang out, and the bull, struck in the neck, the
shoulder, and between the ear and eye, fell, literally all of a heap, as
though some giant's scimitar had swept its legs away from under it.

At this moment the sun's lower edge had just touched the horizon. The
whole visible herd on the edge of the wood, at the sound of the shots and
the crash of the falling bull, wheeled, trumpeted wildly, and with trunks
swung up, ears spread wide, swept away toward the sunset, following the
track by which they had come; whilst, bursting from the woods,
leaf-strewn, with green branches tangled in their tusks, furious and mad
with fright, came the remainder, following in the same track, sweeping
after the others, and filling the air with the thunder of their stampede.

Shot after shot rang out, but not an elephant was touched, and in two
great clouds, which coalesced, the broken herd with the sound of a storm
passed away along the road they had come by, the night closing on them as
the sun vanished from the sky.

Berselius had not reckoned on this. No man can reckon on what the
wilderness will do. The oldest hunter is the man who knows most surely the
dramatic surprises of the hunt, but the oldest hunter would never have
taken this into his calculations.

Here, back along the road they had travelled all day, was coming, not a
peacefully moving herd, but a storm of elephants. Elephants who had been
disturbed in feeding, shot at, and shot after, filled with the dull fury
that dwells in an elephant's brain for days, and with the instin