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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 3 3 thought better of the idea once the shooting started. When the clients left, Gordon and I turned our attention to the small bull with the bad attitude. Ezekiel "put the word out" and the bull was located within a couple of days. Scouts found his tracks in the cornfields adjacent to a trio of huts in the general area where we had tracked a big bull the year before. We decided to check out the reports, and when we arrived in the area the local residents briefed us on the habits of a small bull that rarely came in daylight and was known for striking first. He had no reservations about charging humans and frequently did so without warning. T HE NEXT EVENING the elephant woke early. The moon was high and the sun was low, and some thing, some unknown force compelled him to begin his downward trek a little earlier than usual. He took a trail that he seldom used, one that pitched steeply off the ridge and switch-backed through a series of small canyons. Like Kafka's famous "maus," he chose to make his way slowly up one canyon where the rock walls narrowed progressively around him and then down another where the trail crossed a small stony hill and opened into a little valley with several fields. One of them was a small circular planting of mealies that looped around a small grove of trees in the middle. In the dimming light, the trees would shield him from the eyes of the two-legged creatures that lived in the tiny group of huts on the far end. A BOUT THE SAME TIME, we were preparing our gear to go back to the area when word came that the bull had made a rare dusk appearance, and that we should hurry. Ezekiel magically appeared at the cruiser with the compulsory government game scout and a couple of trackers. We made it there in a little over an hour but darkness had fallen in the meantime. Another pair of trackers from the village joined us as we circled to the downwind side of a small field, moving past a couple of huts on a well-worn trail that ran along a finger of trees to another group of dwellings where a frightened young fellow met us in the yard. In a whisper, the fellow told us that the bull was only 50 or 60 yards away on the other side of a small island of trees in the middle of the field. Since the wind was blowing directly from the trees, we held a hushed confab and rechecked our guns and gear, while the villagers fell back to the shadow of the huts. Visibility was not an issue, as the night was clear and the moon was nearly full. We could clearly see the small copse of trees that gave us cover as we closed the distance, slipping carefully among the standing stalks. Our approach worked almost too well. When we cleared the trees and saw the elephant, we were far too close for comfort. His head was erect, his trunk was testing the wind, and we were only yards away. In the instant I saw him, his head came down and Ezekiel's light flashed on and we all experienced the strange phenomenon that human nervous systems do when it's impossible to move fast enough, and senses go into hyper-speed and everything external seems to slow down. The world went into slow motion. We were facing each other at hand-shaking distance and the bull had already begun to make his move. My focus narrowed to a tiny tunnel, and I could see only the massive disembodied head floating in the air above me. All thought of zygomatic arches and earholes and conventional guides to shot placement disappeared and were replaced with instinctive, gut feelings of where the tiny brain should be located inside the pitching, 50-gallon-drum-sized head. By any measure the shot was ill-placed. It simply couldn't have ended up where it needed to be, but somehow it did, because in the same moment that his head started forward, the shot broke of its own accord and his hind end collapsed, snatching his head back and up, pitching his trunk high into the air. And when he lay still, the only thing that mattered was the number 8. It was the number of paces from the toe of my boot to the tip of his trunk. The next morning, as the crowd was gathering for a ration of meat, I ran my hand along his side and felt his wounds and the scars where someone had "stitched him up" with an ineffectual weapon. Later, I held in my hand the puny projectile from an AK47 that we dug from the side of his skull, and wondered how all this could be. A FEW MILES AWAY, and a couple of miles down a dusty footpath from the church at Chakapuleza, Hope wept when she heard that the elephant was dead. She lived in the bush, and one of the elephants had killed her husband the year before and white men had come to kill the elephant, but failed. She couldn't know that it was the one, but it might be and she hated the elephants and cried when she heard that any elephant was killed—that retribution had been exacted from any one of their kind. The elephants had taken her husband and taken the mealies while the specter of hunger stalked her and her child. When the tears stopped, she prayed, as she often did. She prayed for divine help and she prayed for the souls of the dead and for mercy upon all creatures except the elephants. And she asked God for forgiveness, but she could not pray for the elephants. IF YOU WANT TO GO Gordon Stark guides hunters in pursuit of the big five and plains game throughout southern Africa. He can be e-mailed at nhorosafaris@aol.com.