“Between the wood clump and the one to the west there was maybe five
miles of country rolling and dipping, broken here and there with
euphorbia and mimosa trees. When we’d taken the tusks of the elephant
and some of the rhino meat, we determined to shove right across and
camp near the other woodside; first of all the elephant was getting
more punch in its perfume; second, we wanted to put a considerable
distance between ourselves and those confounded Pygmies, and third,
Cupid was evidently in earnest when he gave us the news of elephant
herds to the west.
“We hadn’t given much thought to the dwarf’s sign language, and as we
started we expected to see him go off back to his friends who were, no
doubt, watching us from the trees. Not a bit. He had stuck to us for
keeps, as the Yankees say, and when I look back and think how that
little chap stuck to us and followed us, it seems to me that there was
a bit of Christopher Columbus and Leefe Robinson mixed up with the
rest of his character. For it was plain as paint he’d never seen white
men or guns before.
“He kept along with us right in our tracks like a dog, evidently
thinking we had fallen in with his proposition about the elephant
hunting, and he wasn’t far wrong. We had, in a way, without knowing
it. For next morning when we were holding a hunt council, Tellemark,
seeing that Gombi was still hanging about, waded right in with the
proposition that we’d take the chap for guide—use him as a dog, so to
speak, to find the game. I thought our native boys would buck against
it, but our head man seemed to have lost his grudge against the chap;
got used to him, I suppose, and didn’t put up any difficulties. That
settled it. Leaving the main camp under our head man’s brother, we
started, twelve in all, not counting Gombi, with provisions enough for
a week, though we didn’t expect to be more than three days.
“We went along the wood belt due west for half a day, then the forest
took a big bend and as we turned it, just about three in the
afternoon, we came on great wads of chewed bowstring hemp lying about,
and the trees alongside of us looked as if a hurricane had stripped
them of their leaves and broken their branches. Elephants are
vegetarians and there’s not a vegetable they won’t eat from an acacia
tree to a cabbage; they’ll beat small trees down and eat them clear of
leaves and bark, and they’ll simply skin big trees, besides reaching
up with their trunks and stripping the branches. Fortunately the wind
had wandered round and was blowing from the west; for a moment after
sighting the chewed hemp Gombi gave us a sign to halt. We saw nothing,
but this little chap had eyes like a vulture and he saw away far ahead
of us a movement in the treetops at one particular spot as if a wind
was tossing them and then we knew there was a herd of elephants in the
forest just there, feeding and shaking the trees.
“It took us an hour to get within shot. They weren’t feeding in the
forest itself, but in a great bay among the trees; a fairish big herd,
bulls, cows, and calves, some of the calves not more than a week old,
little pinkish beggars, not bigger than a Newfoundland dog. We dropped
two bulls, and when we’d taken their tusks and had supper that night,
Gombi had fairly put his clutch on us and we were ready to follow him
anywhere.