ABSTRACT
Of all the stories of elephant hunting in the nineteenth century, only a few have been as well known as those written by Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, a British hunter and adventurer, who was arguably "the most celebrated of all nineteenth-century hunters in southern Africa". Arthur H. Neumann, for example, hunting sixty years later, repeatedly succeeded in killing more than ten elephants in a single day, bringing down elephant after elephant with only one or two shots. The reason people hunt elephants for sport, according to Mary Midgley, is because they are able to convince themselves that they have set themselves against an aware, dangerous, difficult, and, in some sense worthy opponent. Among all the accounts of hunting adventures from the period, this story, intended as it is to demonstrate the prestige of the hunter, seems to show even more the pathos of the elephant.
