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Game is abundant but wild; we shot two poku antelopes here, called "tsébulas," which drew a hunter to us, who consented for meat and pay to show us a ford. We made only about three miles of northing, and found the people on the left bank uncivil: they would not lend a hut, so we soon put up a tent of waterproof cloth and branches. 18th December, 1866.
We went along a rivulet till it ended in a small lake, Mapampa or Chimbwé, about five miles long, and one and a half broad. It had hippopotami, and the poku fed on its banks. 15th January, 1867. We had to cross the Chimbwé at its eastern end, where it is fully a mile wide.
We venture to call the poku after the late Major Vardon, a noble-hearted African traveller; but fully anticipate that some aspiring Nimrod will prefer that his own name should go down to posterity on the back of this buck. Midway between Tabacheu and the Great Falls the streams begin to flow westward. On the other side they begin to flow east.
Whirling round and round in great eddies, it swept up hundreds of feet into the air a continuous dense dark cloud of the black pulverized soil, mixed with dried grass, off the plain. Herds of the new antelopes, lechwe, and poku, with the kokong, or gnus, and zebras stood gazing at us as we passed.
Herds of lechee or lechwe now enliven the meadows; and they and their younger brother, the graceful poku, smaller, and of a rounder contour, race together towards the grassy fens.
When we first saw koodoos, they were so much smaller than those we had been accustomed to in the south that we doubted whether they were not a new kind of antelope; and the leche, seen nowhere south of 20 Deg., is succeeded by the poku as we go north. This is, in fact, only a smaller species of that antelope, with a more reddish color.
In the evening I shot a poku, or tsébula, full-grown male. It measured from snout to insertion of tail, 5 feet 3 inches; tail, 1 foot; height at withers, 3 feet; circumference of chest, 5 feet; face to insertion of horns, 9-1/2 inches; horns measured on curve, 16 inches. Twelve rings on horns, and one had a ridge behind, 1/2 inch broad, 1/2 inch high, and tapering up the horn; probably accidental.
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