began to travel away. We followed until the trail led through a pass in the mountains and we realized that they were going into a different region altogether. That trail in the pass was a little wider than an elephant's foot and worn six inches deep in the solid rock. It must have taken hundreds of years for the shuffling of elephants to wear that rock away.
At another place on Kenia I found an elephant passage of a stream where the trail was twenty feet wide. Single paths came in from many directions on one side of the stream and joined in this great boulevard, which crossed the stream and broke up again on the other side into the single paths radiating again in every direction. In many places where the topography of the ground is such that there is only one place for a trail there will be unmistakable evidence that the trails have stayed in the same place many years—such as trees rubbed half in two by the constant passing of the animals or damp rocks polished by the caress of their trunks. And along all the trails, old and new, are elephant signs, footprints, dung, and gobs of chewed wood and bark from which they have extracted the juices before spitting them out.
But finding the elephants is not so frequent or easy as the multiplicity of the signs would indicate. One reason is that the signs of elephants—tracks, rubbed trees, and so forth—are more or less enduring, many of them being very plain in places where the elephants have not been for months or even years. If, however, you come on fresh elephant tracks, not more than a
