Boyce. Great Stretches of Dense
Forest]

[Drawing: _Being Killed by an Elephant Is a Very Mussy Death_]

Many African hunters consider elephant hunting more dangerous than lion,
rhino, or buffalo hunting, any one of which can hardly be called an
indoor sport. These are the four animals that are classed as "royal
game" in game law parlance, and each one when aroused is sufficiently
diverting to dispel any lassitude produced by the climate. It is wakeful
sport--hunting these four kinds of game--and in my experience elephant
hunting is the "most wakefullest" of them all.

In my several months of African hunting I had four different encounters
with elephants. The first two were on Mount Kenia and the last two were
on the Guas Ngishu Plateau, near where it merges into the lower slopes
of Mount Elgon. The first and the fourth experiences were terrifying
ones, never to be forgotten. An Englishman, if he were to describe them,
would say "they were rather nasty, you know," which indicates how really
serious they were. The second and the third experiences were
interesting, but not particularly dangerous.

Mount Kenia is a great motherly mountain that spreads over an immense
area and raises its snow-capped peaks over eighteen thousand feet above
the equator. The lower slopes are as beautiful as a park and are covered
with the fields and the herds of the prosperous Kikuyus and other
tribes. Scores of native villages of varying sizes are picturesquely
planted among the banana groves and wooded valleys on this lower slope,
each with its local chief, or sultan, and each tribe with its head
sultan.

In a day's "trek" one meets many sultans with their more or less naked
retinues, and every one of them spits on his hand, presses it to his
forehead, and shakes hands with you. It is the form of greeting among
the Kikuyus, and, in my opinion, might be improved. These people lead a
happy pastoral life amid surroundings of exceptional beauty. Above the
cultivated _shambas_, or fields of sweet potatoes and tobacco and sugar
and groves of bananas, comes a strip of low bush country. It is a mile
or two wide, scarcely ten feet high, and so dense that nothing but an
elephant could force its way through the walls of vegetation. Most of
the bushes are blackberry and are thorny.

[Drawing: _Following the Trail_]

The elephants in their centuries of travel about the slopes have made
trails through this dense bush, and it is only by following t