In Uganda

Men (and women too) with heavy firearms standing in their cupboards and with portions of dead creatures affixed to the walls of their "dens" in lifelike poses, rejoiced last week at a report which came out of Africa via London. It was the first official report of a Captain Pitman, since 1925 game warden of Uganda, the portion of British East Africa lying inland from Kenya Colony and Tanganyika.

Captain Charles Robert Senhouse Pitman lamented the slaughter that has been wrought on gorillas, of which he estimated there were but 100 left in Uganda. He reported that there were perhaps 150 white rhinoceroses still at large and called attention to their placid, inquisitive, harmless nature. He said, as all big game hunters know, that the water buffalo was still the terror of the water holes. And he said (here was where the slayers of large animals rejoiced) that elephants are far from dwindling in Uganda.

On the contrary, Uganda is overrun by some 20,000 of them. Shrewd beyond telling, they seem to have learned which sections of the country are preserved by law as elephant sanctuary. Their numbers and appetites are so formidable that many of them have had, and will have, to be killed off annually to make gardening a rational pursuit for Uganda blackamoors.

With their trigger-fingers itching, elephant slayers prospective and proved pondered this story from Captain Pitman: A ranger fired one .256-calibre bullet into an elephant standing in a clearing on a slope. Down fell the elephant dead, and rolled down the slope. Like any good hunter in any good story, the ranger hurried to the spot. There he found, not one dead elephant, but four dead elephants. Explanation: the shot elephant had killed two others on its downhill roll. The fourth had chosen that spot to die of bullets, evidently a month before.