An excerpt from Ruark Remembered by Alan Ritchie who served as Ruark’s personal secretary for 12 years.
Meanwhile, our horse and camel safari continued, and there were plenty of unusual and even frightening incidents along the way. One day we were charged by a very angry female elephant, and it was only by luck and good fortune that we didn’t have some serious casualties. We were out with the horse on a reconnaissance to see if there were any elephants in the area, and were loping slowly along a dry riverbed when the horses stiffened a fraction. Just in front came a charging elephant with its trunk straight out going 50 miles-an-hour toward the three gunbearers acting as vanguard to our party. As these three dived onto the other side, the maddened elephant sheared off into the jungle, presumably in search of the rest of the herd.
This was an unnerving experience. As Bob pointed out, if we had been just 50 yards ahead, we would have been in real trouble. Riding a horse on soft sand allows for absolutely no maneuverability, and I doubt that even an unmounted horse could have avoided the charging elephant with its big, flat feet designed to run over any surface. Then we got to wondering what would have been the outcome if it had been the previous day, when we had passed the same spot with a long line of slow-moving camels laden with camp gear. From then on, it seemed advisable to take the horses up over rocky crags where we figured an elephant would not normally go.
Another near miss came a few days later when an aggressive rhino treed a couple of boys. They were so frightened that even when the rhino was away in the distance, they still didn’t want to return to the ground. Here again, if we had been confronted by this beast at close range while on horseback, the story would have been quite different.
