Adventure Magazine Cover — page 108: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

106 The hunter raised his light .275 magazine rifle and aimed ’twixt little eye and big ear. The report that followed seemed to outrage the sublime stillness of centuries, and set the game thundering away out on the plains yonder under whirling dust clouds. All the trees and bushes and grass hurled forth birds. And Kifaru — Kifaru. never moved. Never moved! He remained there with that colossal head of his up, as utterly indiffer- ent and motionless as if he were posing for one of those Nature photographer’s pic- tures; at least, he did so for ten seconds. Then the white hunter backed off a bit— it may have been ten paces—and fired for the heart. By this time he had felt behind him for his heavy rifle and found it not. But it did not seem to matter very much, for Kifaru went down as if he had been struck by lightning—rigid. That last point ought to have put that white hunter wise to the truth, but it did not. He started to approach the huge mass in the grass, rubbing his hands at the length of the horn trophy he had captured. Then he—he did not. The alacrity with which these great pachyderms—pachyderm is right—can hoist their tons of weight on to their feet is only exceeded by the speed with which they can charge. And Kifaru did all these things between the time you could draw one breath and the next. I said that he had fallen rigid. That showed. The bullet; being aimed for the heart, naturally struck inches above where it should have and jarred the spine, in- ducing temporary stunning. His motion- lessness at the first shot showed that the bullet had flown over his head. Perhaps a gun bearer, or some clutching branch be- like, had been fooling with the rifle sights. The white hunter, who had got himself one hundred yards away in haste, fired now as quickly as he could—once. There was no time to shoot twice; Kifaru was upon him in ten seconds or less. The man tried to run to one side, caught his foot in some one of the thousands of foot entanglements all around, and fell headlong. Kifaru arrived just as his foe was strug- gling to his feet, aimed deliberately, dropped his terrible armed snout and, still deliberately, tossed the luckless one over his head. *I'was a shocking business throughout. Adventure Then he charged on into the scenery, snorting, rearing, dashing and rushing ta right and left, wheeling round as if to meet a following foe and generally making things hum in his immediate vicinity. The path that he left was like unto the path of a tank, and the distance that he went seemed as if it never, never was going to come to an end. Presumably that bullet under the hump was still rankling on the monster mind as well as in the monster carcass. Anyhow the other white hunter tracked him ten miles next day and gave it up. Indeed, true it is that if you do not hit a rhinoceros in the right place it is no good hitting him at all. A river he struck and went through and out on the other side—glistening most wonderfully black in the sun. A marsh he struck and went through and out on the other side, as did a lion asleep in a rushy bed in his path—red now from wallowing in the all-pervading red clay. An elephant herd he met, went through and out on the other side. One could in- deed see the towering backs swerving and dodging in all directions—for even Tembo the elephant, giant of all giants, had a wholesome horror of that long, low bat- tering ram running in and spiking his enormous fat tummy. Last but not least, the day he went through and out on the other side—his blood spore had long since stopped—and the spell-binding, mystic moon found him still going when she climbed aloft to show up the night. Kifaru did not seem to come out of that night anywhere at all, however. He just marched into it and the unspeakable thorn scrub and vanished like a spook. One supposes, however, that even he, with his back-number brain, knew his own business best; and that monastic retirement from the public eye, backed by as many and as fearsome thorns as possible to prevent at- tack by enterprising lions, who might take advantage of the .275 bullet, was urgently prescribed by Nature for a little while, at least till he mended. One week later after the red sun had gone down on the red hills, where red rocks stuck out of the red earth in all shapes and sizes among riots of red flowers, a red and monstrous shape hoisted itself swingingly up the steep slope with that effortless sure- ness of foot that—as with the elephant also —is one of the surprizes about a rhinoceros. MICLOOOK C@