So how about you start at age 18 and tell us about your 1st Elephant.
There you go:
My very first elephant was downed somewhere in the tall grass of the Ruvu flood plain, just an hour's drive from Dar es Salaam where I and a band of merry men taken from a nearby village to act as trackers sought out a legal bull from the numerous groups that literally infested the area and often played havoc in the local maize shambas; a legal bull back in those days was classified as having no less than 11 lbs of ivory per side.
Thus my first elephant, taken solo if you wish, was an affair that other than the silent stalk into an almost non-existent wisp of an early morning breeze towards a group of 3 bulls spotted from a distance that were peacefully browsing and moving slowly towards the forested area along the edge of the flood plain where they would spend the rest of the day protected from the heat beneath the pockets of heavy canopy and dense undergrowth, the approach and shot at the one which had the most appealing pair of tusks, was quite straightforward and uneventful.
My 375 did not disappoint after I discharged the first shot broadside to the shoulder and surprisingly ejected and chambered a fresh round which was promptly dispatched to a fast retreating rear-end and needless to say that the first round had found its mark as the elephant ran several hundred yards before keeling over on its side where a 3rd round to the brain put it out of its misery.
The traditional rite of severing tail and tip of the trunk was performed and the ivory was hacked from the skull without much ado and within a couple of hours were on our way back to the village. I noticed that some members of the party were leaving marks on trees, cutting saplings, tying tufts of grass into a knot, etc. The purpose of the exercise I later discovered was for the villagers to be able to back-track their way to the carcass where they would later in the morning recover the meat.
And so it was that upon arriving back at the village, almost every able-bodied member of the community was anticipating our arrival looking for signs of success and once they saw the leading tracker (kiongozi) waving the elephant's tail which would herald the dismembering process of the carcass and the meat-eating orgy that would follow that night, the entire village would follow the signs back to the downed elephant.
The tusks were carefully removed from their sockets without nicking any of the ivory and the respective nerve pulps twisted and removed. I was back home by 4pm of the same day wearing a grin from ear to ear proudly displaying my booty to the old man who while congratulating me also made it a point of boxing my ears for going at it alone. At the Game Dept weigh-station several days later for registration, they tipped the scales at 31/29 lbs.
