Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 Excerpt:...on perilous venture the man who carries a tomtom would drum them along, but they go to kill elephant--to release a spirit, and all the spirits must know of their intention and be angry. The light of dawn shows ahead, where the jungle meets the open feeding grounds of the elephants. By the time the hunters get there the sun is painting yellow the high grass, which is as high as their heads, and reaches almost to the backs of seven elephants, grazing in the middle of the plain and looking like nothing so much as seven overturned derelict hulls in a yellow sea, out of which rise sinuous lengths of a sea serpent, or, rather, the hand-nose trunk of a bull elephant with a pair of gleaming sixty-pound tusks. The bull trumpets to the sun, as joyously, if not as melodiously, as lark sings to the morn. The hunters make out two cows and four young elephants. The thrill of the hunt--a thrill as old as Adam--tingles their blood. Five minds working as one pick the bull for their arrows. Five minds working as one wordlessly decide the strategy. They weave grass around their heads and make a kind of grass veiling for their faces. Now they shout at the top of their lung power--a prodigious shouting. The result is foreseen. The cows and immature elephants are stampeded in the opposite direction. But the bull shoulders the courageous duty of paterfamilias when danger threatens. He turns toward the shouting and with straight-flung trumpeting trunk charges. One hunter stands his ground, shouting. The others, two and two, slip into the grass, to either side of the line of the bull's charge for the intrepid shouter. The smelling herb--the "invisible magic"--which the wizard rubbed into their ebony skins fools the elephant's keen scent for man. Two hunters get on the bac...