Then
if the elephants appeared I should get a shot at them. I announced my
intentions to the head man of the kraal, who was delighted. 'Now,'
he said, 'his people might sleep in peace, for while the mighty white
hunter sat aloft like a spirit watching over the welfare of his kraal
what was there to fear?'
"I told him that he was an ungrateful brute to think of sleeping in
peace while, perched like a wounded vulture on a tree, I watched for his
welfare in wakeful sorrow; and once more he collapsed, and owned that my
words were 'sharp but just.'
"However, as I have said, confidence was completely restored; and that
evening everybody in the kraal, including the superannuated victim of
jealousy in the little hut where the mealie cobs were stored, went to
bed with a sense of sweet security from elephants and all other animals
that prowl by night.
"For my part, I pitched my camp below the kraal; and then, having
procured a beam of wood from the head man--rather a rotten one, by the
way--I set it across two boughs that ran out laterally from the baobab
tree, at a height of about twenty-five feet from the ground, in such
fashion that I and another man could sit upon it with our legs hanging
down, and rest our backs against the bole of the tree. This done I went
back to the camp and ate my supper. About nine o'clock, half-an-hour
before the moon-rise, I summoned Gobo, who, thinking that he had seen
about enough of the delights of big game hunting for that day, did not
altogether relish the job; and, despite his remonstrances, gave him my
eight-bore to carry, I having the .
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