TWO MIGHTY HUNTERS.* Two excellent books on big-game shooting will
be welcomed by sportsmen. Good books on sport are deplorably rare, probably because those who shoot cannot write. Mr. James Sutherland is a professional ivory-hunter who, during the last ten years, has killed four hundred and forty-seven bull elephants; and he has the additional qualification of writing a plain, vivid, modest, and businesslike style in which he tells of some of the most amazing adventures with elephants that have ever been published. Having kept an unbroken diary for III any years, he has fortunately been persuaded to describe a series of episodes in the professional life which he has adopted after a somewhat chequered early career. Besides elephant stories, Mr. Sutherland has something to say about lions, leopards, snakes, dogs, and the natives he has come in contact with. Most of his elephant-hunting has been done in German and Portuguese East Africa ; and he assures those who believe that ivory-hunters have almost completed their ruthless work of extermination that, apart from game reserves, there are thousands of square miles of quite uninhabited country in which there are hundreds of thousands of elephants, and of every other kind of game with the exception, perhaps, of giraffes. Mr. Sutherland, who pursues his business all through the seasons steadily, gets most of his elephants during the last four months of the year, partly because the herds then congregate near water, and partly because, owing to the heat, the quarry more quickly tires. The elephant he declares to be the most dangerous of all beasts to hunt. Wounded lions and buffaloes he places next. Leopards come third. To keep fit for the strenuous life of a hunter, he travels with such comforts as are obtainable, begins the day with dumb-bells and a cold tub, ends, after sunset, with a fair allowance of port and whisky, and, before turning in, rubs himself all over with cocoanut oil. Mr. Sutherland tells of more than one experience he has had of unprovoked attacks by elephants. Moreover, the best shot with the best rifle cannot be certain of stopping a charging tusker, and he tells of curious cases where elephants have travelled on with bullets in their brains. Elephants have the reputation of possessing wonderfully poor sight. Mr. Sutherland declares it is extraordinarily keen, but that, owing to the position of his eyes, an elephant cannot see clearly straight in front of him. There is little in the book on the habits of elephants that is new except that they often rest lying flat on their sides. Having said so much, it will be enough to end by saying that those who read The Adventures of an Elephant Hunter will not be disappointed.
We pass to a variety of hunting grounds and a cheerful, pleasure-seeking sportsman. Sport in Five Continents, by Mr. A. E. Leatham, is the work of a much-to-be- envied, much-travelled sportsman who has now, he tells us, started a family and settled himself down to a humdrum country life in England. His narrative is never, as he fears, " tame " or "ponderous," and though he is not enough of a zoologist to add much to what is known about the many beasts he has shot or seen, he did bring back from Central China a new species of tufted deer (Elaphodus ichangensis). Some of Mr. Leatham's trophies will be familiar to those who visit the Pavilion at Lord's, and others adorn his country house. Having first duly sung the praises of the nomad hunter's life, Mr.
• (1) 7'he Adventures of an Elephant Hunter. By James Sutherland. With Illustrations. London Macmillan and Co. [7s. 6d. net.]—(2) Sport in live Continents. By A. E. Leathern. With Illustrations. London: William Black- wood and Sons. [15s. net.] Leatham takes us to the Spanish Pyrenees, where he got his one and only ibex on a Sunday afternoon. In 1890 he got his first tiger in Nepal, only a half-grown cub, but many good ones followed. His comrade was the colonel of a native regiment who knew the ropes. Mr. Leatham's share of the six weeks' trip, which produced three tigers, three leopards, and any amount of small game, was 215. Twenty-five years later be was back in India and bagged two fine old bull gaurs in the Nilgiris in a day. In China we get to comparatively little- known ground, and quite the most interesting part of the book describes an expedition with Chinese hunters after tigers which lived in caves. No tigers resulted. But what matter ? Somali- land produced lions, and in 1900 a trip up the Uganda railway produced three in a few seconds, shot right and left. We will not dwell on the ordinary adventures in British East Africa; the fauna of the Athi plains is almost as familiar now as that of Richmond Park. Mr. Leatham was very successful and got his giraffe at the foot of Kilimandjaro. Expeditions after grizzlies in British Columbia and after moose in Manitoba follow, with interludes of trapping martens and beavers. It is a wonderful sporting career, and amusingly told with much appreciation of the delights of such a life. Mr. Leathern's yellow-throated goral heads were the first ever brought to England, bat, if we remember rightly, there is one in Paris collected by Pere David. When all is said and done, this lucky sportsman declares that nothing can surpass stalking red deer in the highlands of New Zealand, of which be gives a. pleasant but too scanty description. Both these books are fairly illustrated with photographs.
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