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The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon by Sir Samuel White Baker
page 6 of 283 (02%)
sometimes enormous. I have seen a pair of tusks that weighed 300 lbs.,
and I have met with single tusks of 160 lbs. During this year (1874) a
tusk was sold in London that weighed 188 lbs. As the horns of deer vary
in different localities, so the ivory is also larger and of superior
quality in certain districts. This is the result of food and climate.
The average of bull elephant's tusks in equatorial Africa is about 90
lbs. or 100 lbs. the pair.

It is not my intention to write a treatise upon the African elephant;
this has been already described in the `Nile Tributaries of
Abyssinia,'*(* Published by Messrs. Macmillan and Co.) but it will be
sufficient to explain that it is by no means an easy beast to kill when
in the act of charging. From the peculiar formation of the head, it is
almost impossible to kill a bull elephant by the forehead shot; thus the
danger of hunting the African variety is enhanced tenfold.

The habits of the African elephant are very different from those of his
Indian cousins. Instead of retiring to dense jungles at sunrise, the
African will be met with in the mid-day glare far away from forests,
basking in the hot prairie grass of ten feet high, which scarcely
reaches to his withers.

Success in elephant shooting depends materially upon the character of
the ground. In good forests, where a close approach is easy, the African
species can be killed like the Indian, by one shot either behind the ear
or in the temple; but in open ground, or in high grass, it is both
uncertain and extremely dangerous to attempt a close approach on foot.
Should the animal turn upon the hunter, it is next to impossible to take
the forehead-shot with effect. It is therefore customary in Africa, to
fire at the shoulder with a very heavy rifle at a distance of fifty or
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