The Prince George's enquirer and southern Maryland advertiser. (Upper Marlborough, Md.) 1882-1925, 1910-07-01
MR.. ROC sEvELT's ESCAPE.

MR.. ROCSEVELT'S ESCAPE.
In S2rit ner's Magazine ex-Presi-
dent r, osevelt. continuing his series
Oh 'African Game Trails tells of
Elephant Hunting cn Mount Kenia.
The African elephant has never been
trained as the Indian elephant, there
fore neither the natives nor the hunt
ers have the kind of intimacy and
knowledge which domestication gives,
moreover, hunting in the forest is
surrounded with danger and excite
ment. which Mr. Roosevelt has gra-
phicaily portrayed in this article. The
ex-President writes.
mo other animal, not the lion him
self, is so constant a theme of talk
and a subject of such unflagging in
terest round the camp fires of African
hunters and in the native villages Of
the African wilderness as the ele-
phant Indeed, the elephant has al
ways profoundly impressed the imag-
ination cf mankind. 1t is, not only
to hunters, but to naturalists, and to
all people who possess any curiosity
about wild creatures and the wild life
of nature, the most interesting of all
animals. lis huge bulk. its singular
form, the value of its ivory, its great
intelligence-in which it is matched,
if at all, only by the highest apes, and
possibly by one .r two of the highest
carnivores-and its varied habits, all
ccn bine to give it an interest such as
attaches to no other living creature
Lelow the rank of man. In line Of
descent and in physical formation it
stands by itself, wholly apart from all
the other great land beasts, and diff
terir g from them even more widely
than they differ from c, e another.
The two existing srecies-the Afri-
can, which is the larger and finer ami
NAL, and the Asiatic-differ from one
another as much as they do from the
mammoth and similar extinct forms
which were the contemporaries of
early man in Europe and North Amer
lea The carvings of our palaeolithiC
forefathers. etched Oh bone by cavern
dwellers, from whom we are sun
dere1 by ages which stretch into an
immemorial past. show that in their
lives the hairy elephant of the north
played the same part that his remote
collateral descendant now plays in the
lives of the savages who dwell under
a vertical sun beside the tepid waters
of the Nile and the Congo
That Mr.. Roosevelt had a narrow
escape from death while after his big
quarry is shown in his account OF a
flank attack by a companion of an
elephant he had brought down. He
says:
AT last we came in sight Of the
mighty game. The trail took twist
to one side, and there, thirty yards in
front Of us. we made out part of the
gray and massive head of an elephant
resting his tusks on the branches Of a
young tree - elephants hardly ever
feed at noon. A couple of minutes
passed before, BY cautious scrutiny,
we were able tr tell whether the ami
nal we could see was a COW or a
bull, and whether. if bull, it carried
heavy enough horns. Then we saw
that it was big bull with good
ivory 1T turned it's head in my di-
reCtion and | saw its eye; and l fired
a little to one side of the eye at a
| spot which I tho1ght would lead tC
the brain. struck exactly where
aimed, but the head Of an elephant is
enormous and the brain small, and
ha hull or II lnT1 hf
shock momentarily stunned the beast
He stumbled forward, half falling
| and as he recovered | fired with the
second barrel, again aiming for the
brain. This time the bullet spec
| true, and as | lowered the rifle from
| the forest come crashing to the ground
! But at that very instant, before
! there was a moments time in which
| to reload, the thick bushes parted i'm
! mediately on my left front anC
| through them surged the vast bulk o
a charging bull elephant. the matte'
mass of tough Creepers swapping ik,
packthread before his rush. He wa
so close that he could have touched
NE with his trunk. l leaped to on
side and lodged behind tree trunk
opening the rife, throwing out tn
empty shells and slipping in two ear
tridges. Meanwhile Cuninghame fire.
right and left. at the same tim
throwing himself into the bushes G.
the other side Both his bullets weE
home and the bull stopped short i
his charge, wheeled and immedlatel
disappeared in the thick cover. W
ran forward. but the forest had close
over his wake. We heard him trum
pet shrilly, and then all sound
| ceased :"