find them. The comparatively few men who have tried to study the elephant have not gained as much knowledge as one would imagine, because without trying it one cannot realize how extremely difficult it is to study the live African elephant.
For example, as I said before, I spent a day with seven hundred elephants in the Budongo Forest, but although I heard them all the time and was very acutely conscious that they were near me, I do not believe that I actually had my eyes on an elephant more than half an hour, all told, during the day. It happened this way.
One night about dark, after a week or two of hunting, we heard the squeal of an elephant while we were sitting at dinner. A little later there were more squeals and occasional trumpeting—more and more, clearer and clearer—and by the time we had finished dinner the noise was only a mile or so away. It was a continuous row which suggested a tremendous herd. We went to bed early with elephants getting closer to camp all of the time. There is little danger of elephants attacking a camp, and, as there is no way to study them at night, about the only thing left to do was to go to bed and get in good shape for the next day. Along about midnight Mrs. Akeley came over to my tent and said that she had loaded my guns and that they were all ready. She could not sleep; so she went out to sit by the fire. The elephants were then within a hundred yards of our tents and there was a continuous roar made up of trumpetings, squealing, and the crashing of bushes and trees.
