had time for a couple more shots.  The African buffalo is undoubtedly a dangerous beast, but it happened that the few that I shot did not charge.  A bull elephant, a vicious “rogue,” which had been killing people in the native villages, did charge before being shot at.  My son Kermit and I stopped it at forty yards.  Another bull elephant, also unwounded, which charged, nearly got me, as I had just fired both cartridges from my heavy double-barreled rifle in killing the bull I was after—­the first wild elephant I had ever seen.  The second bull came through the thick brush to my left like a steam plow through a light snowdrift, everything snapping before his rush, and was so near that he could have hit me with his trunk.  I slipped past him behind a tree.  People have asked me how I felt on this occasion.  My answer has always been that I suppose I felt as most men of like experience feel on such occasions.  At such a moment a hunter is so very busy that he has no time to get frightened.  He wants to get in his cartridges and try another shot.

Rhinoceros are truculent, blustering beasts, much the most stupid of all the dangerous game I know.  Generally their attitude is one of mere stupidity and bluff.  But on occasions they do charge wickedly, both when wounded and when entirely unprovoked.  The first I ever shot I mortally wounded at a few rods’ distance, and it charged with the utmost determination, whereat I and my companion both fired, and more by good luck than anything else brought it to the ground just thirteen paces from where we stood.  Another rhinoceros may or may not have been meaning to charge me; I have never been certain which.  It heard us and came at us through rather thick brush, snorting and tossing its head.  I am by no means sure that it had fixedly hostile intentions, and indeed with my present experience I think it likely that if I had not fired it would have flinched at the last moment and either retreated or gone by me.  But I am not a rhinoceros mind reader, and its actions were such as to warrant my regarding it as a suspicious character.  I stopped it with a couple of bullets, and then followed it up and killed it.  The skins of all these animals which I thus killed are in the National Museum at Washington.

But, as I said above, the only narrow escape I met with was not from one of these dangerous African animals, but from a grizzly bear.  It was about twenty-four years ago.  I had wounded the bear just at sunset, in a wood of lodge-pole pines, and, following him, I wounded him again, as he stood on the other side of a thicket.  He then charged through the brush, coming with such speed and with such an irregular gait that, try as I would, I was not able to get the sight of my rifle on the brain-pan, though I hit him very hard with both the remaining barrels of my magazine Winchester.  It was in the days of black powder, and the smoke hung.  After my last shot, the first thing I saw was the bear’s left paw as he struck at me, so close that I made a quick movement to one side.  He was, however, practically already dead, and after another jump, and while in the very act of trying to turn to come at me, he collapsed like a shot rabbit.