Quatermain tells a hunting club how he was hired by Maiwa, a chief's daughter, to make war on the man who had her child killed — an elephant hunt, a stockade, and a small campaign fought with borrowed rifles. Haggard went to South Africa at nineteen and helped raise the Union Jack over the Transvaal; this short 1888 book is the tightest thing he wrote, and the elephant hunting is from life.