Читать книгу In Brightest Africa онлайн

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Very few people have studied African elephants in the field. Ninety-five per cent. of those who have followed them have been purely hunters and their desire has been, not to study, but to shoot—to see the elephant the shortest possible time. Time to judge the ivories and get a bead on the brain was all that they wanted. Of other elephant knowledge all that they needed was the simple facts of how to follow and find them. The comparatively few men who have tried to study the elephant have not gained as much knowledge as one would imagine, because without trying it one cannot realize how extremely difficult it is to study the live African elephant.

For example, as I said before, I spent a day with seven hundred elephants in the Budongo Forest, but although I heard them all the time and was very acutely conscious that they were near me, I do not believe that I actually had my eyes on an elephant more than half an hour, all told, during the day. It happened this way.

One night about dark, after a week or two of hunting, we heard the squeal of an elephant while we were sitting at dinner. A little later there were more squeals and occasional trumpeting—more and more, clearer and clearer—and by the time we had finished dinner the noise was only a mile or so away. It was a continuous row which suggested a tremendous herd. We went to bed early with elephants getting closer to camp all of the time. There is little danger of elephants attacking a camp, and, as there is no way to study them at night, about the only thing left to do was to go to bed and get in good shape for the next day. Along about midnight Mrs. Akeley came over to my tent and said that she had loaded my guns and that they were all ready. She could not sleep; so she went out to sit by the fire. The elephants were then within a hundred yards of our tents and there was a continuous roar made up of trumpetings, squealing, and the crashing of bushes and trees.