Adventure Magazine Cover — page 147: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

With an Elephant Hunter in Africa no other white man, they knew me. A year before I had come upon a band of them and had been able to win their favor by killing a lion which had carried off a Wanderobo girl, I had hunted with them and had learned their peculiar dialect, a rather musi- cal jargon not unlike that of the Lumbwa, which I knew well. With as little delay as possible after de- ciding upon the trip for ivory I left the rail- way and in ten days was in camp with twenty carriers on a grassy slope reaching away from the Magor River. In a dense wood a little way up the stream were some huts, made by bending the tops of saplings to the ground and covering them with grass and sticks,and so concealed in the under- brush as to be impossible to see until one was close upon them. These constituted a tem- porary Wanderobo village. Because of the necessity of drawing to within twenty-five or thirty yards of game before they could kill it with their arrows, the Wanderobos were almost always hun- gry, so I fared forth each morning after the dew was off the grass to provide meat not only for my own men, but also for my sav- age friends, whom I expected to help me in my elephant hunt. Always on these tramps I searched for tracks of the big animals that were my special quest, and one forenoon I found them. The grass was much trampled and showed long streaks where the elephants had passed through. When I entered the Wanderobo village that afternoon I sent my boy for the chief and informed him that many elephants were grazing along the Ronganda hills. ‘This news caused excitement. The Wanderobos had not seen the tracks themselves because the Lumbwa, their deadly enemies, were known to hunt among these hills, and on this account my friends had kept away, but they were eager, of course, for information about the elephants. The moran, or warriors, clad in monkey-skins and armed with spears and arrows, gathered around me. To convince them absolutely of the presence of the herd I sent my boy back to camp for a saucer and a small tin of kerosene. When he had returned and had handed me these articles i drew back from the group of savages to perform a little witchcraft. “Watch me,” I exclaimed. “Into this saucer lam about to pour some water. I will touch the water with fire. If the ele- phants are still within our reach, the water 10 711 will blaze up. If it does not blaze, the ele- phants have gone and we will have to be satisfied with poorer meat. We will see.” To the kerosene I then applied a match. When the Wanderobos, craning their necks, saw the flame, they raised their voices in a shout of joy. I motioned to the chief and witch-doctor, and we three withdrew to make our plans. It was arranged that four men start at dawn to locate the herd. These runners came in the morning to my camp, and, shivering in my tent door, I gave them instructions and watched them disappear in the half-light around the hill. A little later all the other warriors gathered about my tent and we went on a hunt for zebra and antelope to provide the women and children with meat while the men were hunting elephants. Upon our return in the evening we found the runners already back, with the information that many elephants were feeding only eight miles away. The Wanderobo warriors scattered to make preparations for the hunt, withdraw- ing into the thick bush, out of sight of the women and children, who, it is believed by this tribe, render the poison harmless if they come too near when it Is being smeared upon the arrows. But the women were not idle. They were clutching handfuls of grass, throwing it into the air and chanting weirdly, ‘‘Oesenie, Sirreon Engail”’ (O great spirit, bring us fortune!) 7m 6“THE news that elephants were to be pire, hunted had been carried by runners to every Wanderobo village within twenty miles, and all night warriors kept comingin. In the morning, about one hun- dred and fifty of them had assembled, a strange collection of savages who jumped and yelled, half-crazy from eating, as part of the preparations for the killing, leaves of the culie or morie, a bush which produces an intoxicating juice. We delayed our start until forenoon, not ‘intending to at- tack the elephants that ‘day but to go into camp and be ready for the hunt at dawn. Keeping a sharp lookout for wandering Lumbwa, we established ourselves, after a march of three hours, on a hillside and sent four men ahead to see where the herd was moving. I went out to procure meat for the big party, and in the course of the day dropped three antelopes and two water- buck, a sufficient supply of food for all. Meanwhile the runners had returned and re- Gomichdookseeo