"During the intensely hot weather in September and October, just before the rains fall, elephants soon become fatigued if driven about and exposed to the fierce sun. When they get hot and tired they insert their trunks into their mouths and draw out water from their stomachs, which they dash over their breasts and shoulders to cool themselves; and when the supply of water is exhausted they will sometimes throw sand over their bodies, which one would suppose would only make them hotter than they were before. Though, as I have said, elephants get knocked up comparatively soon when hunted during the hot weather, yet, as may be imagined, it is killing work following them on foot at that season, in deep sandy ground and under a tropical sun, and with nothing to drink but a very limited allowance of water carried in a gourd, which soon gets lukewarm from the intensity of the heat."[13] On September 11th he made a start for home, reaching Daka on September 26th, after an absence of three months. He then went east to trade at Wankie, where he got 300 lbs. of good ivory. In December he trekked south to the Tati, where he shot his first lion. Thus it was three years before Selous actually shot a lion in Africa--a fact that may seem somewhat strange, but not so much when we consider the nocturnal habits of these animals. I knew a man in East Africa who lived in a district where lions are far more abundant than they were in South Africa, who, though constantly shooting and travelling in lion haunts, had never once seen one of these beasts in the course of several years. Selous' first lions were evidently of the fighting order, as they always are, when pressed by a mounted man.[14]