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Tuskers in the Dust by Frederick Everett
The legend continues. We learned in Heat, Thirst, and Ivory that Fred Everett had left his home in Bechuanaland (Botswana) when he was only a teenager to make his living off the bush, mainly by poaching elephant. In this second volume, we pick up his story in 1937, just as he starts out from Bulawayo on a series of elephant-hunting adventures that are nothing short of extraordinary. Taking his favorite .404, Everett finds a remote corner along the Zambezi River near Binga and starts shooting elephants to earn a living. With a single elephant license in his pocket, he shoots dozens of elephants, which means he frequently had to move to avoid the district commissioner. Acquiring a massive cache of ivory and rhino horn, he manages to return to Bulawayo where he hides his loot-only to be betrayed! After this scrape with the authorities, he returns to the bush, this time to guide a visiting Frenchman to lion and leopard. Next he moves to the Okavango with his two loyal trackers before going to Zambia, where he finds elephant hunting is good but runs into some bad characters. When he finally returns with his ivory, WWII has started and the bottom has dropped out of the ivory market in the British territories. He tries his luck in Mozambique where he acquires a 10.75 Mauser and has some hair-raising adventures there because the bullets of his Mauser fail to penetrate the skulls of the elephant reliably. He meets all the famous elephant hunters of his time: Harry Manners, the famous South African elephant poacher Bvekenya Barnard, and Fletcher Jamieson. His story of elephant hunting is easily as compelling and just as full of adventure as are the stories of Bell and Sutherland.
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