Read 07 Elephant Adventure for Free Online

look at the herd. From their high perch they would be able to see how big a herd it was, whether it was made up of female elephants and their babies or bull elephants as well, just where they
    should attack and what beast they should try to take. Hal and his men followed on foot
    The crackling and rumbling and screaming sounds of the herd grew plainer every moment
    Now the pygmies were pointing and gesturing excitedly. They could see the herd.
    At a sign from Abu they swung along from vine to vine, from branch to branch, until they were gathered over the beast he had selected.
    They were eighty feet above the animals. If the elephants smelled them, it was only elephant smell because of the elephant grease they had rubbed on their bodies. Even if man smell remained it would not get down to the herd because the breeze would blow it away eighty feet above their heads. Roger had to admit that the little fellows were pretty smart.
    It was one of the safari men who gave the game away. He tripped over a root and fell with a thud.
    It was nothing compared with the racket made by the feeding elephants. But even when an elephant is making plenty of noise himself he has an ear sharply tuned for any other sound.
    At once the breaking of branches and crunching of teeth stopped. There was dead silence in the woods. It it remarkable how noisy an elephant can be when he is feeding - and how silent when he suspects he is being hunted.
    The herd began to melt away without a sound. How such huge beasts could move without cracking a twig underfoot had been a mystery to naturalists for years. Finally the secret had been discovered. The sole of an elephant’s foot is not a hard hoof. It is soft and elastic It is full of tiny muscles and delicate nerves. If a sharp stone is underfoot the nerves know it and the muscles make a hollow to fit the stone so it does not hurt the skin. If an elephant loves its keeper it can step on his hand without doing any harm even though the beast weighs many tons. But if it hates its keeper it can flatten that hand until it is as thin as a piece of paper.
    When elephants feed, and do not need to be quiet about it, they crush or break every branch they, step on. But if they wish to sneak away without being heard they can step on the most brittle twig without breaking it. A man, even barefoot, cannot step as lightly as an elephant, even though the elephant may be a hundred times as heavy as the man.
    But the pygmies did not let the herd silently slip away. Down they came from the tree-tops, sliding, swinging, jumping, screaming at the top of their lungs.
    It was enough to scare even an elephant. The great beasts spread their enormous ears, threw up their trunks, blasted the air with shrieks of anger and alarm. They milled about in circles. Everywhere they turned little black men danced before their eyes. The elephants tried to swat them with their powerful trunks. But when the trunk swooped down where the pygmy had been, he was no longer there.

Chapter 7
Pygmy and porcupine
    One man was caught. A snaky black trunk went round his body and he was tossed up into the air. The elephant waited to stamp him underfoot as soon as he fell to the ground.
    But he did not fall. The astonished elephant looked up. The little black man had caught hold of a branch and swung himself up on top of it. There he sat, laughing at the beast that tried in vain to reach him with its long trunk.
    An elephant doesn’t like being laughed at. It is almost the only one in the entire animal kingdom intelligent enough to know when it is being laughed at. The beast below the tree trumpeted angrily, and crashed his iron-hard forehead against the tree which, being a young one and not firmly rooted, promptly tumbled to the ground. The elephant poked among the branches in search of his victim. But the pygmy had scrambled out of reach.
    Another of the little hunters was not so fortunate. An elephant swung his trunk like a gigantic golf-club and knocked the