out a coil of rope and extended an oar. Tom, brought onboard again, stood
and ‘‘gave three hearty cheers,’’ assuring men in the other boats of his sur-
vival. William was furious, however, that oarsmen in the other boats were
so intent upon the spectacle of Tom atop the manta that they neglected to
row hard to the rescue. Simultaneous looking and rowing, William decided,
‘‘was expecting too much from African forethought and self-posession!’’
(–). However sagacious, Tom was no May, and grandsons and great-
grandsons of May’s black generation were not, either.
A less complex scene, redolent of European elite hunting imagery, was
the finale to Elliott’s ‘‘Wild-Cat Hunt in Carolina.’’ He, his companions,
horses, and servants had a remarkable day, killing a fine male before Wil-
liam’s wizardly one-shot kill of a female in midair, fifty feet up, as she at-
tempted to leap from one tree to another: ‘‘I...letslip at him in mid-flight.
The arrowy posture...wassuddenly changed, as the shot struck him to
the heart,’’ and the ‘‘beautifully spotted’’ creature, shortly to be identified as
female, fell to the dogs. Now it was late, the sun was sinking, and they ‘‘had
more than five miles to ride to our dinner.’’ The party galloped for about two
miles to a prearranged rendezvous where they were met by a large, luxuri-
ous carriage—a ‘‘barouche.’’ From that point, ‘‘in high spirits, we dashed
into town, our horns sounding a flourish as we approached—and our wild-
cats, flanked by the raccoon [an incidental kill], showing forth, somewhat
ostentatiously, from the front of the barouche’’ ().
William Elliott was surely a lucky hunter. On another occasion he killed
two bears with one heavy load of shot. He intended the first kill; the sec-
ond was a fluke of that bear’s standing position behind the first. The sec-
ond bear crawled a short distance and died. The first must have died in-
stantly, for William recorded that it slumped against a tree and remained
upright, imitating life, but motionless. The bizarre scene evoked a memory
of a large specimen, taxidermied upright, standing in the entrance hall to
a fellow hunter-planter’s big house (–). Elliott would have been the
first to deny that flukey, merciful hunting was the norm, however. Indeed,
he relished and repeated the most sanguinary of woodland slaughters.
On a jolly day at Chee-Ha, not far from Beaufort, horsemen converged
on a shotgunned deer apparently downed by young ‘‘Tickle,’’ a novice. Out
came a knife, the deer’s throat was cut, and the novice ‘‘bathed his face with
the blood of his victim. (This, you must know,is hunter’s lawwith us, on the
killing a first deer).’’ The young hunter arose ‘‘from the ablution, his face
glaring like an Indian chief ’s in all the splendor of war-paint’’ (). Elliott
assured his reader that the triumphant hunter, by custom disdaining to