A herd of elephant with their young off for a casual stroll where the forest ends and the plains begin. Their progress is slow and utterly undisturbed. A flashlight picture of a spotted hyena caught in the act of satisfying a natural curiosity and incidentally a slight hunger. Shortly after this he made himself exceedingly scarce. elephants splash and trumpet in the lake every night, and spend a good part of the day in the forest breaking branches and feeding. On nights when we have a bright moon, we sit outside after dinner and watch the game. First come the hyænas, trotting through our park, then a wild dog, then rhino, and then elephants come and go all night. We never see buffalo until early morning, when they are always across the lake, but go into the forest at the first ray of light. I figure there are about ten rhino that come nightly. We recognize a mother and a half-grown toto, every night. Of course the others all look alike, but we will see one go to drink, roll about a short time, and leave, then one or two more come along. We recognize a small herd of five elephants, and a mother and a very little toto, and one big bull with broken tusks. None of them pay any attention to us except the bull; he seems to wish to go up the trail past us, and almost every night he comes into the park and starts up, then he sees our house and screams and goes off into the forest. Many a night he has got us out of bed with our guns ready. And now comes the news I have been aching to tell. I have made the finest elephant films I have ever made; in fact I have no doubt they are the best ever made by any one. Now that I have developed the nine hundred feet I find that I have elephants so close that only their heads and big tusks show. I have made. closer pictures of the elephants than I made of the giraffes and zebra in my other films, and the detail is perfect. And we had quite an adventure in making the films. The boys had reported elephants in various places now and then, places in the clear, and Osa had come back from her trips out of the forest, wanting me to go out next day and get films, but I wanted to get my laboratory finished so I would have a place to work in when I did get started in making pictures. I have a one-track mind and can do only one thing A striped hyæna caught at close range by flashlight. The hyæna is not a handsome creature and possesses a particularly nasty eye. The mountain comprising Lake Paradise is about twelve miles wide by twenty-two at a time. I wanted my lenses and cameras tested and in such working shape that I would know instantly what to do with them when they were needed for serious work, so I stuck to the hill and worked from before sun-up to after sunset every day. When the grass began drying up near our camp (that is, the tall grass that American Museum of Natural History Mrs. Johnson, the Memsab Kedogo, with two Meru we use for thatching) we found we had gathered all there was in the open glades in the forest and would now have to send many miles away after it. We decided that a couple of field days with every one on grass would finish all we would need. So, leaving four boys to look after camp, we took every one else, and with our tents went to a point about six miles away, where the forest ends and the plains begin. Here were numerous dongas running into the forest, all wooded and likely places for rhino and elephant. We camped on the side of a hill about four in the afternoon. By six o'clock everything was shipshape and we were sitting by the fire when Osa called our attention to seven young elephants marching single file at the forest's edge, not half a mile away, so close that we could see them very plainly without glasses. They wandered about for an hour until it got too dark for us to see them. They seemed to be exactly alike: I'll wager their tusks would weigh about thirty-five |