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I smell the man-smell, even though it comes with other elephants like ourselves. We must get away from the danger!" Tusker rushed at the gate, but before he could reach it two of the new elephants, who were tame, hurried toward him. The men on their heads threw the big ropes about Tusker, and he was pulled by the two elephants over toward a tree in the stockade, where he was made fast.
"All the strong elephants will try to break out. Perhaps it will be all right yet. Listen, Tusker is going to speak." Tusker, the big bull, raised his trunk and said: "O, Elephants! I am sorry, but I seem to have led you into a trap. I did not know it was here. I tried to lead you away from the man-smell and away from the danger, but I have led you into worse. Now I will try to get you out.
Sometimes a good hunter will back-track a trail several miles in order to assure the success of his hunt. "My son, if a moose is badly frightened by man-smell it may at first go off on the gallop and then settle down to a steady trot for four or five miles before it stops to listen but not to feed.
"The others are getting ready to leave. They are closing in. Perhaps we have to run away again." And that is just what the elephants had to do. "It is the hunters once more!" cried Tusker. "I smell the man-smell! The danger-smell comes down to me on the wind. We must hurry on.
The Indian in his extreme care to avoid communicating man-smell to the rabbit will even remain to leeward of it while he handles it, lest man-scent should blow against the rabbit and adhere to the fur. If that happened, the fox would be so suspicious that he would not go near the rabbit.
As the days went on I grew to think less of Kahwa; the memory of those nights spent in the town, with the lights, and the strange noises, and the warm man-smell all about me, began to fade until they all seemed more like incidents of a dream than scenes which I had actually lived through only a few weeks before.
With great satisfaction he reached in for another mouthful. Last Bull, as it happened, was standing close by, but a little to one side. He had been ignoring, so far, his morning ration. He was not hungry. And, moreover, he rather disapproved of the hay because it had the hostile man-smell strong upon it.
When I expressed surprise that an animal should have intelligence enough not only to find a buried trap, but to dig it up and then spring it without being caught, Oo-koo-hoo explained that it was not so much a matter of animal intelligence as of man's stupidity; for whenever that happened it did not prove to the animal's credit, but to man's discredit; the careless hunter having simply left enough man-smell on the trap to form a guide that told the animal exactly where the trap lay.
In the gallery itself were heads of bear, wolf, fox and lynx, with stuffed birds from land and sea. Skins and guns hung on the walls of the anteroom, the inner rooms were also full of skins and impregnated with the smell of wild animals and tobacco-smoke. Harald himself called it "Man-smell;" no one who had once put his nose inside could ever forget it.
Sometimes it happens that an hour a minute changes the destiny of man; and the ten seconds which followed swiftly after that first shot from the foot of the coulee changed Thor. He had got his fill of the man-smell. He had seen man. And now he felt him.
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