In the six years Michel had hunted this area, he believes to have lost just one elephant to poaching. In the same period he had taken less than a dozen bulls, each time finishing the hunt in a manner I've never heard of before. Michel believes in the memory of elephants. After one is shot, the meat, ivory and skin are recovered, then the skeleton is consumed in a massive funeral pyre. The intent is to leave no trace of death, so that in months and years to come, no passing elephant will be traumatized by the scene. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't, but I've never seen elephant so calm.

The Lukwika-Lumusilla Game Reserve's low elevation made for hot weather. The camp's "dining room" was right on the sandy bank of the Ruvuma River.

Ours was an elephant safari, perhaps the most specialized of all African hunts. We started anew on the Ruvuma but had only ten hunting days left. We needed to concentrate. Jim Crawford, with far less African experience than I, did this far better than I. He had opportunities to take several fine trophies, but he steadfastly passed, keeping his focus. The days were miserably hot, and Bernard walked him hard.

Every night he dragged into camp, pale and exhausted, and I worried about him. I needn't have. He understood what he was there for and what he wanted. Only once, in twenty-one hard days, did he stray. Toward the end he and Bernard chanced across a huge East African greater kudu, a massive old bull with deep curls and worn tips and still almost sixty inches around the spiral. Bernard insisted, and Crawford shot it. The only other animal he shot at was his beautiful elephant, taken just before dark on the twentieth day.

That's the way to hunt elephant.

On another blistering afternoon after turning down that first bull, we tracked two big-footed bulls into a sand river and caught them dead to rights at twenty yards. Both were legal, one fairly long and the other shorter and heavier. We turned them both down.

Sand rivers are likely places to pick up elephant tracks, but it takes a real expert to age tracks in soft sand.

Then there was the river bull, feeding on an island across a deep channel of the Ruvuma just at sundown. He was not in Mozambique, but he might as well have been. By Tanzanian law, no game may be taken within two kilometers of an international boundary, where this bull stood. His tusks almost touched the ground.

Boddington took his bull after seventeen days of hunting. He used a Rigby .450-3 1/4 and 500-grain Hornady solids. Left to right: Michel Mantheakis, Jim Crawford, the author and PH Bernard Sehabiague with the results of four weeks of hard hunting.

Late in the afternoon on the seventeenth day at the upper Lukwika, our scouts found a group of feeding bulls. As we closed in open miombo forest I saw a flash of long ivory, and it seemed too easy. It was. As we approached, a light swirling breeze caught us, and the elephant spooked and moved off. It was just a puff of ill wind, and they didn't go far. We caught them again in 200 yards in more open ground with the wind steady. We closed to fifteen yards, and I expected a shot at long last. There was a shot at each and every bull in the group except the good bull, which was no longer there. He had tasted our scent and left his buddies to fend for themselves.