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It was nearly three hundred yards away but the cloud was drifting in again and I dropped down for a shot. The hunters were running up the slope, frantically waving for me to come on, thinking it madness to shoot at that distance. I could just see the gray form through the sights and the first two shots spattered the loose rock about a foot low.
Then he passed on, and his men after him, tall, lean, and silent amidst the shouting. All these men bare bows, for they were keen hunters; each had at his girdle a little axe and a wood-knife, and some had long swords withal.
The girl, who helped her mother cook for the 'hands, was crazed by the shock, and that night stole forth into the woods and was never seen or heard of more. There are old hunters who aver that her cry may still be heard at night at the head of the valley whenever a tree falls in the stillness of the forest."
Hendricks had got within ten or a dozen yards of him; Umgolo had crept up to about the same distance from another fine-looking brute. The younger hunters had each selected an animal, but, obeying orders, refrained from firing. Presently Hendricks, who was kneeling, raised his rifle, and a loud report was heard.
This discovery appeared to me of inestimable value, as indicating an entirely new and feasible route to King William Land, and, since my return to camp, Esquimau Joe, who had been away with the hunters for about three weeks, was here for a few hours, and told me that his hunting-camp was on the east bank of this same river, and the inquiry he has already made of the Inuits in his party confirmed my judgment of the feasibility of this route.
So numerous and so fierce have they grown; that the neighbouring tribes feel great unwillingness to extend their range to where they may fall in with these canine hunters.
They were then halted about two miles down the river, and were talking of going back to their home, quite certain that the white hunters would have nothing more to do with them. The folly of having left their property unprotected, when in the neighbourhood of African tribes whose honesty could not be relied on, now, for the first time, occurred to our adventurers.
"Oh! let me pray to you an instant, thus!" cried the count. "I have so longed for this place." "Yes, but to come to it, you jumped over the wall. Not only is it not suitable for a man of your rank, but it is very imprudent." "How so?" "If you had been seen?" "Who could have seen me?" "Our hunters, who, a quarter of an hour ago, passed by this wall."
As we walked across the yard into the long low field, speaking in whispers, watching a shaft of light, perhaps some distant projector that trembled in pale white shadows on the horizon, we seemed to me to be, in actual truth, the hunters of Trenchard's dream. Never, surely, before, had I known the world so silent.
Delme has sold all his hunters, and sold them at very extraordinary prices; his hounds too sold excessively well; it was fortunate at all events to part with them, but the people who bought them, according to all accounts, were as mad as he had been in keeping them. . . . Opposition were without several of their plumpers that evening, either from their being ill or their being out of town.
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