Quoted by Nigel Rothfels, 'Preserving History: Collecting and Displaying in Carl Akeley's In Brightest Africa', in Thorsen et. al., Animals on Display (2013) pp. 58-73.
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Rothfels notes that 'There are many tales of hunting elephants in the book... intended to convey the excitement of hunting in the jungle for those who had never been there and to awaken thoughts and memories of similar great adventures for those who had. If they seem strikingly bloody and brutal today, the stories cloearly shone with a very different luster for Baker and his avid readers. As he put it, for his own part, "These days will always be looked back to... with greatest pleasure; the moments of sport lose none of their brightness by age, and when the limbs become enfeebled by time, the mind can still cling to scenes long past with the pleasure of youth."

A typical account in the book focuses on the hunt of a "cunning family" of three elephants, which had become targets for Baker because they were raiding crops. According to Baker, the elephants quickly scented the hunters and fled "down wind" through such a thick jungle that he was "very doubtful whether we should kill them." Nevertheless, Baker and his companions followed the animal though a mass of thorns, crawling at times on hands and knees. baker writes, "I was leading the way, and could distinctly hear the rustling of the leaves as the elephants moved their ears. We are now within a few feet of them, but not an inch of their bodies could be seen, so effectually were they hidden by the thick jungle. Suddenly we heard the prolonged wh-r-r, wh-r-r-r-r-r, as one of the elephants winded us; the shrill trumpet sounded in another direction, and the crash though the jungle took place with nothing but an elephant can produce." The three animals split up, and Baker decided to follow the female, running after her for half an hour. She remained downwind, however, and always seemed to stay ahead of him. He writes:

"Speed was our only chance, and again we rushed forward in hot pursuit through the tangled briars, ahich yielded to our weight, although we were almost stripped of clothes. Another half hour passed, and we heard no further signs of the game. We stopped to breathe, adn we listened attentively for the slightest sound. A sudden crash in the jungle at great distance assured us that we were once more discovered. The chase seemed hopeless; the heat was most oppressive; and we had been running for the last hour at a killing pace through a most distressing country. Once more, however, we started off, determined to keep up the pursuit as long as daylight would permit."

Having run for two hours, Baker decided, because of the approach of dusk, that his only chance was to run faster, and he rushed after the elephant. Suddenly he found himself in a thick but low jungle, "through which no man could move except in the track on the retreating elephants." But then he saw the female at forty yards running quickly. In "the hopes of checking her pace," he fired at her ear. According to Baker, the elephant was now "inclined to fight, and she immediately slackened her speed so much that in a few instants [he] was at her tail, so close that [he] could have slapped her." Because fo the thick jungle, though, Baker was suck behind her and decided to fire his "remaining barrel under her tail, giving it an upward direction in the hope of disabling her spine."

Casting his empty gun aside, Baker reached and felt the "welcome barrel" of his spare gun pushed into his hand at the same moment that he "saw the infuriated head of the elephant wit ears cocked charging through the smoke." When the smoke cleared, the elephant "lay dead at six feet from the spot where I stood. The ball was in the centre of her forehead, and B., who had fired over my shoulder so instantaneously with me, that I was not aware of it, had placed his ball within three inches of mine. Had she been missed I should have fired my last shot." With this, Baker pauses to contemplate the "glorious hunt": the great distance that he and his brother ("B.") had travelled, the remarkable fact that despite the distance they had ended up three miles from their camp because the female had circled back, the disappointment that the bull and the younger elephant had "escaped," and the realization that shooting in thick jungles, especially because of the "obscurity occassioned by the smoke of the first barrel," is extraordinarily dangerous.' (61-62)