It was the last day of a five week hunt, the last two weeks of which we had spent up on the Tana River, walking the soles of our boots off, looking for a bull bigger than the one I already had. We had more or less given up and were driving back toward Nairobi, when a native flagged us down with a tale of a bull with a gigantic tusk. The two gun bearers and the tracker went with him to appraise the situation. They came back grinning, so we started walking, too. We soon came up on our bull, munching away behind a tree. I tried to line up a frontal brain shot, but there was a big branch in the way and I elected to move around for a shot from the side. The wind shifted or we made too much noise, but at any rate, he left and moved about 50 yards away in some thick undergrowth. He had an "askari" with him, which complicated matters. My PH got down on his hands and knees and looked underneath the bushes. He could see the elephant's feet, the tip of his trunk and the tip of the tusk. There was only one, the other one having been recently broken off. The nerve was still festering.
Eventually, the bull moved a short distance away, and we followed. We came to a small clearing and could see him on the other side, his body masked by the undergrowth, but his head visible, cocked back as he reached for a succulent morsel in a tree. We couldn't cross the clearing without alarming the "askari", so I had to take a longer shot than I was really comfortable with. On top of that, with his head cocked back, it was difficult to visualize the location of the brain in the skull, but I thought I could make the shot. He dropped at the shot from the .458 WM, but was only wounded, and I had to deliver several follow up shots, I'm not sure how many, to finish him off. He lay, as shown in the photo, with the camera roughly in the same direction from whence the shots had come.
The tusk weighs 94 pounds, just short of the magic 100. Even so, I have no complaints. It is hanging on the wall of my library, about 15 feet from me as I write this.
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