Page:In brightest Africa.djvu/167

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second was still in his possession. According to the laws of the land he should have turned in the two tusks to the government officials, who would have paid him a nominal price for the ivory, and I, having filed a claim with the Government, would have come into possession of the tusks; but the native had evidently thought that he could get more out of them by selling them one at a time, and had taken a chance. But he made a mistake in leaving Bill out of his calculations. Bill followed up the case with the final result that the remaining tusk was taken and sent to me, and the Government confiscated a certain number of cattle belonging to the native as penalty for the one he had sold. Thus, to both Bill and me, the final results from that particular elephant hunt were satisfactory.

One time in Uganda I was using Bill as a gun-bearer in preference to the regular gun-bearers, because I had by that time realized that Bill was the best tracker as well as the most keen and alert hunter, black or white, that I had ever known. We had followed a small band of elephants into some dense forest, and for a long time had been crouching beneath some undergrowth where we could get an occasional glimpse of the elephants' legs, but nothing more. They had been quietly feeding during this time, but at last they moved away and crossed a trail down which we had a vista of a hundred yards or so. When we thought the last one had passed, we went down this trail quickly and quietly to the point where they had crossed, and there we stopped, listening