CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.
"JERKING" AN ELEPHANT.
Next day was one of severe, but joyful labour.

It was spent in "curing" the elephant, not in a _medical_ sense, but in the language of the provision-store.
Although not equal to either beef or mutton, or even pork, the flesh of the elephant is sufficiently palatable to be eaten.

There is no reason why it should not be, for the animal is a clean feeder, and lives altogether on vegetable substances--the leaves and tender shoots of trees, with several species of bulbous roots, which he well knows how to extract from the ground with his tusks and trunk.

It does not follow from this that his _beef_ should be well tasted--since we see that the hog, one of the most unclean of feeders, yields most delicious "pork;" while another of the same family (_pachydermatii_) that subsists only on sweet succulent roots, produces a flesh both insipid and bitter.

I allude to the South American tapir.