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Updated: May 7, 2025
Here again were oxen, mules and asses, or great bucks such as we now know as eland or kudoo, carried in on rough litters of boughs to be disposed of by parties of savage huntsmen who had shot them with arrows or trapped them in pitfalls. Every Eastern tribe and nation seemed to be represented in the motley crowd.
Once or twice a big buck an eland or a koodoo broke cover, and at the sight of me went off snorting down the slope. Also there were droves of smaller game rhebok and springbok and duikers which brushed past at full gallop without even noticing me. The sight was so novel that it set me thinking. That shy wild things should stampede like this could only mean that they had been thoroughly scared.
And now I found myself in a very hunter's paradise, for the country was literally swarming with game of almost every description, consisting of eland, gemsbok, springbok, reitbok, and antelope of all kinds, often in herds numbering several thousands; also that curious-looking beast the gnu, of which I now got my first glimpse; troops of quagga and zebra; giraffes, rhinoceroses, lions, leopards, and ostriches; hippopotami and crocodiles in the rivers; but still very few elephants, and those so shy that it was only with the utmost difficulty I succeeded in securing three within the first fortnight after crossing the Klip River.
An eland may be sometimes disembowelled by a lion so completely that he scarcely seems cut up at all, and the bowels and fatty parts of the interior form a full meal for the lion, however large or hungry he may be.
Hunters of different animals of different countries. African hunters for lion, rhinoceros, elephant, buffalo, eland, hartebeest, giraffe, and a hundred species made known to all the world by such classical sportsmen as Selous, Roosevelt, Stewart Edward White. But they are all hunters and their game is the deadly chase in the open or the wild.
Till then the place had been a solitude, but now it began to fill in the strangest way, as if the lord of the forest could call all his subjects together with a trumpet roar: first came two lion cubs, to whom, in fact, the roar had been addressed. The lion rubbed himself several times against the eland, but did not eat a morsel, and the cubs went in and feasted on the prey.
There were all sorts of them, springbucks in myriads, blesbok and quagga and wildebeeste in thousands, sable antelope, sassaby and hartebeeste in herds, eland, giraffe and koodoo in troops; while the forests were full of elephant and the streams of sea-cow.
A full gallop by an eland or giraffe quite dissipates its power, and the hunters, aware of this, always try to press them at once to it, knowing that they have but a short space to run before the animals are in their power.
For one thing, there was no long tuft of hair on the forehead, while from the lower corner of each eye ran an incomplete white stripe similar to, though smaller than, those found in the giant eland. The sides of the forehead were of a reddish colour, and on the lower part of the face there was a much larger brown patch than is to be seen on the ordinary eland.
How great this good fortune was I did not know till long after; but even then, when I came to examine the head and skin carefully, I found that they both differed materially from those of any other eland that I had ever seen.
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