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But we had not a thousand pounds among us, or anything like it; and we had to reserve money to live on for the first year, to buy our axes and spades and milk-pans, and to buy the nucleus of our future herds and flocks and droves. We have done all we had to do, and now we are beginning to see that our joint work during all these years will eventually produce for us homes and comfort.
Grouse in the thickets and quail in the high oak openings, or small prairies, with droves of wild turkeys among heavy timber, were met with almost hourly, and there was scarcely a day on which I could not have had a standing shot at a bear. But the most interesting point about the game was to me, at least the marvelous abundance of deer.
And of the Western, that they once had two dynasties in the neighbourhood of Armenia, and were for a time very powerful, but that they are now subjects of the Turks, who never have been able to subdue their roving habits; that they dwell in tents of thick felt, without fixed habitation; that they profess Mahomedanism, but perform its duties no better than their brethren in the East; that they are governed by their own chiefs according to their own laws; that they pay tribute to the Ottoman Porte, and are bound to furnish it with horsemen; that they are great robbers, and are in perpetual warfare with their neighbours the Kurds; that they march sometimes two or three hundred families together, and with their droves cover sometimes a space of two leagues, and that they prefer the use of the bow to that of firearms.
They sell very numerous droves of oxen yearly to England, and therefore cannot be supposed to want beef at home. Sheep and goats are in great numbers, and they have the common domestick fowls. But as here is nothing to be bought, every family must kill its own meat, and roast part of it somewhat sooner than Apicius would prescribe.
"Your logic, at times, young man, is unassailable." Chunky nodded. He had a faint idea of what Professor Zepplin meant. Late that afternoon the travelers came upon a shack in the foothills, where an old rancher, a hermit, lived when not tending his little flock of sheep, most of which, Kris Kringle said, the old man had stolen from droves that came up over the trail going north.
Droves of one hundred million chamois are not unusual in the Swiss hotels. Indeed, they are so numerous as to be a great pest. The romancers always dress up the chamois-hunter in a fanciful and picturesque costume, whereas the best way to hunt this game is to do it without any costume at all.
To the eyes of all who loved their fatherland and their race, the sight of a desolate country, with its ancient charters superseded by brute force, its industrious population swarming from the land in droves, as if the pestilence were raging, with gibbets and scaffolds erected in every village, and with a Sickening and universal apprehension of still darker disasters to follow, was a spectacle still more sad, hideous, and abominable.
"It was a pleasing and refreshing sight," continues the good father, "to behold this pious knight and his followers returning from one of these crusades, leaving the rich land of the infidel in smoking desolation behind them; to behold the long line of mules and asses laden with the plunder of the Gentiles the hosts of captive Moors, men, women, and children droves of sturdy beeves, lowing kine, and bleating sheep, all winding up the steep acclivity to the gates of Alhama, pricked on by the Catholic soldiery.
Next morning, we set out in earnest on our travels for St Thomas in the Vale, in two of our friend Bang's gigs, and my aunt's ketureen, laden with her black maiden and a lot of bandboxes, while two mounted servants brought up the rear, and my old friend Jupiter, who had descended, not from the clouds, but from the excellent Mr Fyall, who was by this time gathered to his fathers, to Massa Aaron, rode a musket shot ahead of the convoy to clear away, or give notice of any impediments, of wagons or carts, or droves of cattle, that might be meeting us.
And, with this, another question was raised, namely, that of the use of weapons. The party were in the country of the Man-gnaja, a tribe of negroes who were continually harried by the fiercer and more powerful neighbour-tribe of Ajawa, great slave-catchers, who supplied the slave- hunters who came out from Tette to collect their human droves.
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