brain. It is fairly safe as I afterwards often found, to fire at the head of big game with the new small-bore rifles; for though it is improbable that the game will be bagged, except by accident, the animal is too stunned to know what he is doing, and his mad charges are without method.

The use of a small-bore rifle for big game seems, however, hardly sportsmanlike, since the number of animals wounded in this way compared with those killed outright must always be enormous. Some two years after this I had nine close careful shots with a Mauser rifle at a big bull elephant, the bullet used being within half a grain of the same weight as our Lee-Metford rifle; yet I did not succeed in bagging him, and eventually he made off” at a pace which defied pursuit. The poor beast probably died in the depths of the jungle before