if they had continued
in a direct route, should have entered the jungle within 300 yards of
our first station.

We had slipped, and plunged, and struggled over this distance, when we
suddenly were checked in our advance. We had entered a small plot of
deep mud and rank grass, surrounded upon all sides by dense rattan
jungle. This stuff is one woven mass of hooked thorns: long tendrils,
armed in the same manner, although not thicker than a whip-cord, wind
themselves round the parent canes and form a jungle which even elephants
dislike to enter. To man, these jungles are perfectly impervious.

Half-way to our knees in mud, we stood in this small open space of about
thirty feet by twenty. Around us was an opaque screen of impenetrable
jungle; the lake lay about fifty yards upon our left, behind the thick
rattan. The gun-bearers were gone ahead somewhere, and were far in
advance. We were at a stand-still. Leaning upon my long rifle, I stood
within four feet of the wall of jungle which divided us from the lake.
I said to B., 'The trackers are all wrong, and have gone too far. I
am convinced that the elephants must have entered somewhere near this
place.'

Little did I think that at that very moment they were within a few feet
of us. B. was standing behind me on the opposite side of the small open,
or about seven yards from the jungle.

I suddenly heard a deep guttural sound in the thick rattan within four
feet of me; in the same instant the whole tangled fabric bent forward,
and bursting asunder, showed the furious head of an elephant with
uplifted trunk in full charge upon me!

I had barely time to cock my rifle, and the barrel almost touched him
as I fired. I knew it was in vain, as his trunk was raised. B. fired his
right-hand barrel at the same moment without effect from the same cause.
I jumped on one side and attempted to spring through the deep mud: it
was of no use, the long grass entangled my feet, and in another instant
I lay sprawling in the enraged elephant's path within a foot of him. In
that moment of suspense I expected to hear the crack of my own bones as
his massive foot would be upon me. It was an atom of time. I heard the
crack of a gun; it was B.'s last barrel. I felt a spongy weight strike
my heel, and, turning quickly heels over head, I rolled a few paces and
regained my feet. That last shot had floored him just as he was upon me;
the end of his trunk had fallen upon my heel. Still he was not dead