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One was extremely large, with an excellent pair of horns, and it was arranged that I should try to secure this one as a trophy, while Mr. Akeley secured a photograph of the event. At thirty-five yards I shot the larger one of the two, and it dropped in its tracks. The other started to charge, but was finally driven away by shouting and by shots fired in the air.
We picked out the vital spots, as seen from all angles, and nothing then remained to be done but to get down to British East Africa with our rifles and see whether we could hit those vital spots. Mr. Akeley had an elaborate moving picture machine and we planned to get some excellent pictures of charging animals.
I rested my gun against the side of a small tree and after their onward rush had brought them within fifty yards I fired as Ake suggested, "just between the eye and ear." The animal swerved but did not fall. Akeley and Stephenson fired at the big cow and under the shock of their heavy shells she dropped to her knees, then sprang up and came on again.
Roosevelt and carry out the elephant-hunting compact made many months before at the White House. Eleven days of marching and hunting from the railroad brought us to Sergoi, the very uttermost outpost of semi-civilization. Here we found another letter in which Mr. Akeley was asked to come to the Roosevelt camp, and which suggested that a native runner could pilot him to its whereabouts.
In this event, Akeley was to take his camera, and with "Fred," "Jimmy" Clark, and I as escorts with our double-barreled cordite rifles, was to advance until he could get a photograph that would show an elephant the full size of the plate. If the elephants charged we were to yell and try to turn them without shooting; if they came on we were to shoot to hurt, but not to kill.
Akeley to enter this hitherto closed district to secure specimens for the Field Museum, and even then there was only a narrow strip that was free from tribal warfare. It was at that time that his party secured seven splendid tuskers, one of which, a one-hundred-fifteen-pound tusker shot by Mrs. Akeley, was the largest ever killed on Mount Kenia. And it was to this district that Mr.
Carl Akeley, with a moving picture machine, could not tease a charge out of a rhino in a dozen tries, while Dugmore, in a different part of the country, was so chivied about that he finally left the district to avoid killing any more of the brutes in self-defence!
Akeley had a machine and our plan of action was simple. We would first locate the rhino, usually somnolent under a thorn tree or browsing soberly out in the open. We would then get to the leeward of him and slowly advance the machine; Mr. Akeley in the middle and Stephenson and I on each side with our double-barreled cordite rifles.
Akeley thought he heard a faint squeal of an elephant far off, and while the porters made camp we went on for a mile or so to investigate. But no further sounds indicated the proximity of the herd. Early the next morning we took up the trail again, and in less than an hour my Masai sais pointed off to a distant slope a couple of miles away, where a black line appeared.
She stood as she had stood for some moments, gazing directly at us and nervously waving her ears and trunk. Akeley climbed to the top of an ant-hill and made some photographs showing the big cow and her companions in the foreground, while off on the neighboring hillside three distinct groups of elephants were in view.
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