[Illustration: A GOOD BAG: 268½ LB. OF IVORY.] We returned to camp highly delighted with our success, and reached it with difficulty in the dark. On the way to camp we encountered a cow elephant feeding in a swamp, and Ryan took considerable pains to pass it, at some distance, without being detected, for he was afraid that if it had a calf and scented danger, it would charge, and prove a furious, fearless brute. I, in my ignorance, would, perhaps, not have foreseen danger there, but it afterwards made me think a bit of the risk of elephant-hunting, when I saw this seasoned hunter treating a single animal with such great respect and care. But Ryan told me that you may only have to make a mistake once, and pay the full penalty of it with your life. He said there are few men, who have hunted elephants long, who are not in the end caught; and long is his list of those who have been killed in Rhodesia by an enraged elephant, at the far end of their hunting days. We could hear many elephants moving near camp during the night—a herd of cow elephants, Ryan conjectured, for at this season the bulls roam singly or in very small numbers. At daybreak next morning we set out for the scene of yesterday’s adventure, taking all the boys with us. On reaching our quarry we started the natives to break in the skull to the root of each tusk, an undertaking that, even with axes that we had brought for the purpose, kept the boys incessantly labouring for nigh on two hours, so hard and so great are the bones of an elephant’s head. Meantime, I and a native had gone off to try to track my elephant, starting from the point of shooting and working out to where I’d last seen him. Soon, following his track step by step, we found he had swung to the right, and I then knew I had overrun him yesterday. In a quarter of an hour more, great was my joy to come on him stone dead, not 500 yards from where Ryan’s elephant lay. Again he proved to be all that he had looked (for Ryan had yesterday declared the leading elephant to be the best one), a grand old bull, with a beautiful pair of tusks, weighing, it later proved, 74 lb. and 77½ lb., = 151½ lb., and measuring 6 ft. 5½ in. in length. He was shot through the lungs, and his right hind-leg was crumpled up under him, so probably he was hit somewhere there also, though it was, of course, impossible to move him and see. We got back to camp in the late afternoon with our loads of ivory, which took six men to carry, and next day trekked to Kissaki, where our arrival with such fine trophies caused much interest and not a little excitement. [Sidenote: PREPARING TO ADVANCE AGAIN] The last weeks of the year 1916 marked various activities on our front, in preparation for another advance. Trees were felled in large numbers in the river neighbourhood, and with such crude timber more than one stout bridge was thrown across the Mgeta River, opposite our camps.