ELEPHANT

CHAPTER 6

The greatest game animal of them all is Loxodonta africana, the African elephant. African professional hunters judged each other largely by the ivory they brought in, and big ivory is the most prestigious trophy there is. A great pair of tusks will immediately become the focus and pride of any trophy room, where they will outrank the Grand Slam of sheep, the tremendous seven-point elk, the beautiful kudu, the assorted bears, leopard, lion, the tiger burning bright, the bongo, the argali, and even the Boone & Crockett white-tailed deer rack.

The primary reason for this esteem is the sheer, awful size of the beast, the largest that can be taken with the rifle. Even now I am still shocked by how unbelievably colossal a bull elephant is when one has approached it on foot and is looking up at it in appalled wonder from a distance of fifteen paces or so. It seems eternal and quite impregnable, and one cannot imagine the puny little .458 rifle he is grasping so tightly doing other than merely annoying the monster.

Elephant truly are large. I have never weighed one, needless to say, but the authorities seem to be in quite clear agreement that a bull can weigh five to seven tons and the cows about three tons. An average mature bull stands nine to ten feet high at the shoulder, while a maximum height of thirteen feet has been alleged. In contrast, black rhino and hippo seldom exceed one and a half or two tons, and most African buffalo bulls probably go under fifteen hundred pounds live weight. The biggest Alaskan brown bears go up to sixteen hundred pounds, it is said, though the majority of those taken by sportsmen are closer to half that weight. The average Alaskan bull moose probably runs about twelve hundred pounds, while adult bull elk usually weigh around seven hundred to eight hundred pounds and rarely exceed a thousand.

Retreating elephant in Block 29.

The would-be elk hunter who lies awake at night agonizing whether his trusty ’06 will do for the bull of his dreams might reflect that in proportion it will slam the mightiest elk about six times as hard as a standard elephant gun like the .470 Nitro Express can hit a middling-size jumbo. Even the fearsome .460 Weatherby Magnum strikes a bull elephant with only about 0.7 foot-pounds of energy per pound of the beast’s live weight, which is the equivalent of using the .22 long rifle high-velocity rimfire on a two-hundred-pound whitetail. This is no doubt what W. D. M. “Karamojo” Bell had in mind when he said he did not see how anyone could hope to kill an elephant by “shock” unless he hit it with a field gun (military cannon). But besides their size there are many other fascinating things about elephant, not least their teeth. The tusks are modified incisors (front teeth), not canines as one might imagine, and continue to grow throughout the animal’s life, though more slowly as it ages. A tusk weighing one hundred pounds would gain the nimrod who bagged it the immortal prestige of being included in Rowland Ward’s famous Records of Big Game, but today ivory that goes sixty pounds a side is considered very decent, I believe. Elephant use their tusks to dig in the ground for roots or water, to pry bark off trees, occasionally to jab other elephant, and to hang their trunks on when resting. They have also been known to stick them through careless elephant hunters. A good proportion of elephant tusks have had at least their tips broken at one time or another, though it may not be very noticeable because use tends to sharpen them again, and one tusk of a pair commonly shows more wear than the other, as if the owner had been right- or left-tusked.

Elephant demonstrating. (Photo courtesy of Joe Cheffings)

Besides the tusks, elephant grow six sets of molar teeth, which appear in succession. As one lot is worn out it is replaced by the next set, until all six have been used up. Very roughly, depending on the sort of vegetation the animal must feed on, each set is good for ten years, which gives the elephant a maximum lifespan of around sixty to seventy years.

A bull elephant’s enormous ears—shaped rather like a map of Africa— may measure as much as five feet across. They not only assist the animal’s acute hearing (acute, that is, when it is on the alert and not making too much noise itself) but are also rather efficient radiators. When a jumbo is standing slowly flapping its ears in the shade of a tree during the noonday heat, the blood leaving its ears may be as much as 16 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than the incoming blood.

The most wonderful of its inventions, however, is the elephant’s seven-foot-long trunk, a writhing mass of tiny muscles that can break off a six-inch-thick branch as easily as snapping a twig, pull up a tussock of grass and daintily knock the dirt off it before stuffing it into the beast’s mouth, fling a pesky hunter twenty feet up into a thorn tree, or delicately pluck a single fruit or leaf. The elephant uses it to rub its eye, greet a friend, caress a lover, and perhaps chastise a calf. It drinks by sucking up two gallons of water into the organ and then squirting it down its throat. Dust or mud is also sucked up with it and then blown over its body. Consequently, like rhino and warthog, the elephant in any particular district tend to be the same color as the local termite mounds.

In addition, the trunk remains a nose through which the animal breathes and smells. Elephant have an excellent sense of smell, and one must pay the closest attention to the wind when approaching them, else suddenly all their trunks will go up like periscopes and that will be the end of that stalk. Thus a little porous bag of fine ashes that, when shaken, will reveal the slightest movement of the air is an essential piece of elephant hunting equipment.

Elephant society is matriarchal, with the basic unit being a family group consisting of a dozen or so related cows and their offspring, led by a tough old biddy that does not stand for much nonsense. Males are driven out of these groups as teenagers, or perhaps just leave on their own accord when they have had enough of domineering females. From then on they live and travel with other bulls or, more rarely, alone, joining cows only sporadically when one may be in heat.

But elephant are complex animals. Scientist Ian Douglas-Hamilton, who has spent many years studying them, mentioned that a young adult bull he knew came back to its family group for no other apparent reason than to spend a few days with its sister, which was not in estrus. He also pointed out the fact that no ram, bear, moose, kudu, or whitetail buck is even aware that it has a sister.

In his book Elephant, Commander David Enderby Blunt, R.N., who was an elephant control officer in Tanganyika before World War II, describes how he tried to brain-shoot a crop-raiding bull—with a .303 Enfield—but only stunned it. The bull went down, and immediately, “. . . three others closed in on him, one on either side and one behind, and they just boosted him to his feet and . . . supporting him on either side set off, wheeling gradually around to the left and back into the forest.” So many other reliable witnesses, including Selous, have reported similar instances that there can be no doubt that elephant will indeed sometimes try to raise a wounded comrade to its feet and help it get away, even at considerable risk to their own lives.

The cows are good mothers, and the whole family group is usually very tolerant of and protective toward all the infants. It is not unknown for an abandoned or orphaned calf to be adopted and nursed by another cow, something that is practically unheard of among other animals.

Sometimes elephant will congregate in very large numbers, several hundred cows, calves, young bulls, and grand old tuskers all in one huge herd, and there seems to be some excitement in the air on these occasions. After a few days they break up and each group goes its own way, but what was the conclave about? No one knows. We got involved with such a gathering once when the buffalo tracks we were following led us into a valley occupied by perhaps two hundred jumbos. We would try to work our way carefully around one group, only to have another bunch get our scent. Pretty soon mobs of screaming, panic-stricken elephant were stampeding every which way, and altogether it became somewhat hectic.

In contrast to its hearing and sense of smell, an elephant’s eyesight is mediocre. When they are not suspicious, it is quite easy to get right up to elephant using only the skimpiest cover, or none at all if one moves slowly. On the other hand, a bull once saw us moving in brush from a distance of seventy long paces, and immediately initiated a dead-serious charge. Alec Pringle, Kinuno, and I had been working this bunch of a half-dozen bulls for a couple of hours, trying to get a shot at the biggest, a seventy-pounder. The fitful breeze had been shifty in the extreme; they had caught a faint swirl of our scent several times and were alert, suspicious, and no doubt exasperated when the second-biggest bull finally spotted us. The wind at that moment was in our favor, so it came by sight. That being the case, it seemed unlikely that we could evade it by running aside, and anyway its ivory appeared satisfactory, so I called to Alec, “Shoot!”

Our tracker, Kinuno Mbogo. Mbogomeans buffalo, a fitting name for a man who spent so much time hunting these great beasts.

At that moment the elephant’s head disappeared behind the leafy branches of a nearby tree, and we had to wait until it cleared it. Then, when I raised the .458, I could not see the sights. The leaf of the Mauser safety was still in the upright, half-on position. In those days my thumb automatically flicked the safety off as the rifle came up without my having to think about it, but this one time the reflex failed me.

I blessed old Paul Mauser then, for with any other safety lever I might have pulled and pulled and pulled, wondering why the blasted gun would not fire, until the beast trundled over me. I put matters right, but Alec beat me to the shot using my old .375 with its Weaver K2.5 scope, and the elephant was already dropping as I fired. Alec and I hammered it in unison, then poured in a couple more for safety’s sake. The bull’s forehead lay fourteen paces from where we had stood. Later we recovered one of Alec’s bullets, a Hornady 300-grain .375 steel-jacketed solid from a handload a previous client had given me, from close behind the base of one of the jumbo’s ears. It was so completely undeformed that it could have been used again, but after penetrating the brain it had veered almost a foot off course.

The whole safari crew wagered as to the weight of the tusks. I made it a rule always to give clients a conservative estimate, so I guessed them at forty-five pounds apiece, hoping they would go fifty. But when Berit and Alec’s wife, Gail, who were in camp with us (together with the Pringles’ five-month-old son, Todd), took the tusks to the closest railway station, the freight scales recorded them at 60½ and 61½ pounds respectively. Nzioka the cook won the jackpot.

Actually, determined attacks by unwounded elephant are not common, and most charges are only demonstrations meant to frighten the intruder away. When an elephant shuffles its feet, shakes its head, and makes a lot of noise while backing and filling before coming on, it is usually bluffing. When it means business the elephant launches its charge with little warning, and comes silently and with deadly determination. At least I believe it comes silently, but I could be wrong. The first time I experienced a charge—merely a demonstration—the other people present afterward remarked how loudly the cow had been trumpeting, yet I had no recollection of it making any sound at all. It was a matriarch that was demonstrating to cover the retreat of its family, which is what most “charges” from cows are about. Not all are bluffs, however. Johnny Uys, a very experienced professional hunter, was killed by a cow elephant in the Kafue National Park in Zambia. From what I hear, he was armed, and covering the retreat of his party of tourists from a belligerent cow. In an attempt to stop the harridan without killing it, he put a shot through its ear, which often does the trick, but it came on and got him before he could fire again.

Despite Alec Pringle’s and my little adventure, the really big tuskers seldom charge. They have learned that discretion is expedient if they wish to retain their ivory for themselves, and usually prefer to fade away and leave for a distant destination at the first hint of trouble.

Following up a wounded bull is another matter; then a charge is not unlikely and should be expected. A close-quarter attack can also develop when an elephant suddenly detects a danger within its “critical distance,” as it may then feel that the only option left to it is a desperate charge. In reasonably open country where there is time to take a good, if quick, aim, a charging elephant is not a terribly dangerous problem. Even if a shot between or just above the eyes does not kill it, it should go close enough to the brain to stun it, at least momentarily.

It’s a bloody mess taking the tusks out of Alec’s 60-pound-plus elephant. Note son Erik and baby buggy in the background.

In close cover, though, a wounded bull is a decidedly sticky proposition. An elephant can go through stuff you would not believe as if it were meadow grass. The hunter may see nothing but trees and branches crashing down toward him until the elephant bursts through the flying debris right over his head, giving him time for a hasty head shot at best. Under these conditions the heaviest artillery will enhance one’s chances of survival to some degree, but nothing, not even a .600 Nitro Express, will unfailingly stun or even stop an elephant if the brain is missed by more than a few inches.

In the old days lion killed more hunters in Kenya than did any of the other dangerous game, partly because those who survived the mauling would die anyway of septicemia. Sulfa drugs changed that, and since World War II fewer lion have been hunted by inexperienced men. I have not kept close count, but right off I can recall three hunters who were killed by elephant in recent decades, as opposed to one each by lion, buffalo, and rhino.

Sasha resting on his 66-pound elephant while Finn, Mickey, and Kinuno look on.

One of the three was a Kenya professional whose lady client insisted that he not collaborate on her elephant. She put two shots into a big bull, which nevertheless disappeared into a tangle of brush and trees. After escorting the lady back to the safari car, the professional and his tracker went into the thicket after the jumbo, the hunter carrying his .577 Nitro Express double rifle. A lot of noise and a couple of shots were heard, then the horrified tracker came running back to report that his employer had been blotted out. (My journal comments: “Any client who wants to avoid my collaboration on dangerous game must drop it in its tracks with his first shot!”)

The brain shot on elephant has been quite aptly likened to trying to hit a loaf of bread suspended inside a fifty-gallon drum. The brain sits at the back of the skull, and a line drawn from ear-hole to ear-hole would pass nearly through the center of it. The old advice to hold halfway between the eye and the ear for the side brain shot directs the bullet too far forward; it ought to get the front of the brain, but allows little leeway. I think it better to hold for the ear-hole itself or, depending on the angle, a few inches below it.

The frontal shot is trickier because the brain is end-on, presenting a smaller target, and is deeper in the head, farther removed from the external reference points a hunter may use to gauge its position. Considerable allowances may have to be made for the angle, depending on how close one is and how the elephant is holding its head. “Karamojo” Bell wrote that the best advice he could give those attempting the brain shot was to shoot for the center of things.

The heart and lungs present a larger vital area that is easier to hit than the brain. As with most mammals, a shot placed so as to pass through the center of the chest cavity between the front legs, and a good third of the depth of the chest up from the brisket, will get the top of the heart or the great blood vessels arising from it, and the elephant will generally go down within fifty to one hundred fifty yards. The bullet should not be allowed to strike any distance behind the front leg on a broadside shot, for it is then quite easy to miss the lungs altogether. An elephant cannot jump, nor can it travel on three legs, so a shot that breaks the humerus or the shoulder joint definitely anchors it. I am uncertain whether cartridges smaller than the .375 H&H have the necessary power to fracture these very heavy bones; it was the legal minimum for use on dangerous game in Kenya, and I have no experience with lesser cartridges on elephant. Strongly constructed full-metal-jacket “solid” bullets are in any case the only type that should be used on elephant, to obtain the requisite penetration.

Naturally, there are rare exceptions. With the bigger bores it would be possible to use heavy softnose bullets for broadside chest shots, if care was taken to avoid massive bones. And a schoolmate of mine brought down a tusker with a side brain shot using a softnose 175-grain bullet in a 7x57mm. But whether it would have stayed down is uncertain, for his companion immediately hammered it a couple of times with his .470. Actually, on the side brain shot there is not a great deal of bone thickness to penetrate, so a stout softpoint might get through.

Elephant inhabit a wide variety of very different habitats, from the arid thornbrush and doom-palm country of the northern Uaso Nyiro (where the Samburu tribesmen still remember the great ivory hunter Neumann by his native name of “Nyama Nyuangu”—literally “my meat”) or the monotonous gray scrub of the Tana River district to the cool, damp forests and bamboo thickets fringing the moorlands ten thousand feet up on the slopes of Mount Kenya. Consequently one has to adapt his hunting methods to suit the circumstances.

The classic method of hunting elephant is to track big-footed bulls up from their night’s drinking spot at a river or water hole. It seems to be de rigueur to track them twenty miles out and then march twenty miles back—at least, seldom does anyone admit to taking a shorter stroll after elephant. Actually, there are darned few visiting sportsmen (and, in truth, not many professionals) who could make even the first twenty miles in the heat common to most good elephant country. But the jumbos can go a lot farther than that if they have to. One year when it was exceptionally dry and the browse near the river had all been eaten out, we started tracking a lone bull from the bush road that ran parallel to the river but ten miles inland. When we caught up with the elephant about noon he was a good twenty miles from water and was still marching away from it. A bull will travel thirty or more miles from water and remain several days without drinking if necessary.

Apart from checking watering spots, one can crisscross elephant country looking for tracks or the beasts themselves, or spot them from the ridges and rocky outcroppings that are features of the Voi and Tsavo areas and of much of Kenya’s Northern Frontier District. (I acquired my first spotting scope for the specific purpose of ascertaining whether distant elephant herds contained ivory worth pursuing.) Local tribesmen may be able to give information, especially if their crops are being raided (although to them, all elephant carry huge ivory), or they may be employed as scouts and sent to search in all directions, with the promise of a suitable reward for news leading to a big bull. Or, quite likely, a combination of such tactics may be used.

Of course, the hunter’s capabilities also have some bearing on the matter. One of my favorite clients was a chap who had flown Messerschmitt ME 109 fighters for Yugoslavia against the Germans during World War II, and who afterward, being no Communist, settled at Graz in Austria. Sasha was a perfect gentleman with graceful and charming European manners, a gifted raconteur, and a delightful companion in every way. But he had drunk at least half a bottle of scotch every day for the previous twenty years (it had not the slightest visible effect on him), and had both diabetes and a bad heart. He was not supposed to walk for more than thirty minutes at a time, and slowly at that. His wife, Mickey, always came with him to see that he did not overdo it. And, naturally, he wanted an elephant very badly.

Sasha and Mickey with 66-pound (each), 7½-foot-long, beautifully shaped even tusks.

Hunting along the Tana River below Garissa, we found where a small group of bulls had drunk during the night. One set of footprints was of promising size, so we decided to track them up. I sent Kinuno and a local we had hired ahead to follow the spoor while we followed behind, bashing through the brush in the Land Rover. Toward midday I stopped, for fear the elephant might be alarmed by the sound of the motor, and sent the trackers on to find the jumbos while I gave Sasha and Mickey some lunch. Three hours later the local came back and said Kinuno was watching the bulls, which were taking their noontime siesta in the shade of a thicket. We drove on for another mile or two and then had to leave the vehicle. The guide said the elephant were close. We walked slowly for twenty minutes in the searing dry heat, and the guide again said the elephant were close. Sasha struggled gamely along without any complaint, but Mickey was beginning to look worried. After thirty minutes she caught my arm and asked how much farther we had to go, and the guide said the elephant were close. We had been walking forty minutes when Mickey insisted that we could not continue, and even Sasha had to admit that he was about done in. The guide said they were very close, just beyond that little rise ahead of us, so we went on, and at last found Kinuno, who led us into the thicket where the bulls were resting.

The faint breeze in our faces carried the pungent, exhilarating odor of fresh elephant droppings, and as we crept in closer I heard the smack of a fanning ear against a shoulder and a slight stir as an animal shifted its weight from one foot to another. In the middle of the thicket was a little glade, and there we found our elephant standing under a wide-spreading, flat-topped thorn tree. Two were just young bulls, but the third carried thin but very long and even tusks. I told Sasha they would go perhaps sixty pounds a side at the most, but that with their length they would make a beautiful trophy, and he replied that was fine.

We eased in a little closer, then Kinuno set up the crossed shooting sticks on which Sasha could rest the fore-end of the .375. I watched the two young bulls, because one can never be quite certain what their reaction will be, and they were so close that any attempted charge would have to be stopped immediately. But at the shot they turned and fled, as they almost always do. I saw dust fly from our bull’s shoulder as Sasha’s bullet thwacked home. It wheeled around and disappeared before he could shoot again, but presently we heard a great crashing of brush and found the great beast dead less than a hundred yards away.

The tusks were 7½ feet long, beautifully shaped and even, and weighed exactly 66 pounds apiece. Sasha was delighted. He had worked himself to his absolute limit, and he deserved them. But as Robert Ruark said, a dead elephant is a grievous amount of death. I loved to hunt elephant, but Lordy how I hated to kill them.

That was nearly twenty years ago, when the Tana River area was among the best elephant country in Africa. Seven years later it was finished, with not an elephant or even a track to be seen anywhere, poached clean by Somali ivory raiders, many of them armed with automatic weapons. Rather than make any genuine attempt to stop the illegal slaughter, the Kenya government merely closed first licensed elephant hunting and then all legal hunting.

It has been all downhill since then. Now in Kenya the elephant are gone from the Tana and the Athi, the Tsavo and Galana Rivers, and from all the country between them, gone from the Ndotos and the Matthews Range, from the Barsaloi lugga, and from all that great sweep of the Northern Frontier District up to the fabulous Mount Marsabit with its Paradise Lake where Martin and Osa Johnson camped. It may be possible to preserve a few small populations in some of the national parks, where the animals can be heavily guarded, but that seems to be the best we can hope for. And it appears that within a few years the same could be true for the rest of Africa as well. This saddens me immensely, for though I would never willingly kill an elephant again, a world that harbored no room for elephant—and elephant hunters—is not one I would care much for.