Carl E. Akeley, Naturalist, Relates Experience of Being Attacked by Massive South African Beast.
The hunter and taxidermist, Carl E. Akeley, who has spent a great deal of painstaking effort in preparing the wonderful animal groups at the American Museum of Natural History, is known throughout South Africa as an elephant hunter. He has had many thrilling experiences, one of which he describes in the New York Sun as follows:
Elephants are no more conspicuous in their own country than jack rabbits are in theirs. They are the color of the shadows in the forest and almost indistinguishable. Intelligence and indictiveness are two of their most prominent characteristics. When one knows he is being hunted he will lie in wait, still as a rock, and looking much as one, and will hunt his hunter as a dog hunts a rat.
I had cut a big bull out from a herd and was following his spoor, knowing well enough that he was lying in wait for me somewhere. The big beast, as it turned out afterwards, got my wind as I was stalking him, and was searching for me.
I must have got within ten or twenty feet of him, because I remembered afterward that I heard a swift rush but did not catch sight of him coming. The first I knew of his presence was a quick vision of his trunk as he knocked me down. Then I caught one glimpse of his little eyes as he curled up his trunk out of the way and tried to impale me with his tusks.
I had just enough time to grasp a tusk with my left hand and twist myself so that my body was between the two shafts of ivory. I felt the impact of his tusks as they dug into the ground on either side of me, and his heavy nose crushed against my chest. That is all I remember.
My hunter fortunately shot him dead as he was preparing for another thrust. I was unconscious as they carried me to the camp, where I lay for three months, with my chest so smashed that it was doubtful whether or not I would live.
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