Elephant dance (1937)

moved Up over half the area, the beaten carrying fire The Big wood with them to establish a new line. This done, vrive the shikari elephants would move up to the apex of the two lines, and the final drive, straight through to the river, would begin. From 2 p.m. our orders were to be in our machans, absolute silence, no smoking. Over-night, our machans and the stockade had been camouflaged; elephants had been tethered all about to destroy the scent of man. Elephants neither see well nor hear well. (How much more careful we had to be with crocodiles. You just knew that across the whole width of the river they could see and were watching every move.) The elephant depends on his trunk, scenting the air. Our machan was crawling with red ants, stinging beasts, almost as bad as bees, and was exposed to the sun without shade of branch or twig. Impossible! We stayed out of it to the last minute. At one o'clock Bordie abandoned his post inside the lines, without a shot, alas, and came over with the news that the herd, numbering eighty, was at the foot of Sanderson's Hill, way up from the river. But by three o'clock we could hear them coming . . . shouting, clapping, shots . . . volleys of shots and the clear, high, exciting 'wind' of the bugle . . . staccato explosions of shots. It sounded like a battle. It came directly at us with a rush. Our big lenses were pointed, like machine guns, at 125