CHAPTER 2

Between the wood clump and the one to the west there was maybe five miles of country rolling and dipping, broken here and there with euphorbia and mimosa trees. When we’d taken the tusks of the elephant and some of the rhino meat, we determined to shove right across and camp near the other woodside; first of all the elephant was getting more punch in its perfume; second, we wanted to put a considerable distance between ourselves and those confounded Pygmies, and third, Cupid was evidently in earnest when he gave us the news of elephant herds to the west.

“We hadn’t given much thought to the dwarf’s sign language, and as we started we expected to see him go off back to his friends who were, no doubt, watching us from the trees. Not a bit. He had stuck to us for keeps, as the Yankees say, and when I look back and think how that little chap stuck to us and followed us, it seems to me that there was a bit of Christopher Columbus and Leefe Robinson mixed up with the rest of his character. For it was plain as paint he’d never seen white men or guns before.

“He kept along with us right in our tracks like a dog, evidently thinking we had fallen in with his proposition about the elephant hunting, and he wasn’t far wrong. We had, in a way, without knowing it. For next morning when we were holding a hunt council, Tellemark, seeing that Gombi was still hanging about, waded right in with the proposition that we’d take the chap for guide—use him as a dog, so to speak, to find the game. I thought our native boys would buck against it, but our head man seemed to have lost his grudge against the chap; got used to him, I suppose, and didn’t put up any difficulties. That settled it. Leaving the main camp under our head man’s brother, we started, twelve in all, not counting Gombi, with provisions enough for a week, though we didn’t expect to be more than three days.

“We went along the wood belt due west for half a day, then the forest took a big bend and as we turned it, just about three in the afternoon, we came on great wads of chewed bowstring hemp lying about, and the trees alongside of us looked as if a hurricane had stripped them of their leaves and broken their branches. Elephants are vegetarians and there’s not a vegetable they won’t eat from an acacia tree to a cabbage; they’ll beat small trees down and eat them clear of leaves and bark, and they’ll simply skin big trees, besides reaching up with their trunks and stripping the branches. Fortunately the wind had wandered round and was blowing from the west; for a moment after sighting the chewed hemp Gombi gave us a sign to halt. We saw nothing, but this little chap had eyes like a vulture and he saw away far ahead of us a movement in the treetops at one particular spot as if a wind was tossing them and then we knew there was a herd of elephants in the forest just there, feeding and shaking the trees.

“It took us an hour to get within shot. They weren’t feeding in the forest itself, but in a great bay among the trees; a fairish big herd, bulls, cows, and calves, some of the calves not more than a week old, little pinkish beggars, not bigger than a Newfoundland dog. We dropped two bulls, and when we’d taken their tusks and had supper that night, Gombi had fairly put his clutch on us and we were ready to follow him anywhere.