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Updated: June 11, 2025
The Hottentot, with a sulky "Good-day," took that path which led towards Jan Smit's cattle kraal, while Considine followed the other and rejoined his waggons. The two friends mounted their horses, the drivers set the ox-teams in motion, and the huge waggons lumbered slowly over the karroo towards the rising sun.
Among them were hardy Englishmen from the Zuurveld, tough with the training of fourteen years in the wilderness, and massive Dutchmen from the karroo, splendid horsemen and deadly shots. While the bustle was at its height a party of horsemen galloped up to the gate, headed by a giant.
Next morning, the hunters were early in the saddle, and off for the karroo. For some distance, they rode along the bank of the stream which was fringed by a growth of willow-trees. This course was taken to get to windward of the ostriches, in the hope of having a shot at them as they ran up the wind.
The young Dutchman's eyes kindled, and his stern face flushed as he spoke, for although his own homestead had escaped the ruthless savage, friends and kindred had suffered deeply in the irruption referred to, which took place in 1819, and one or two of his intimate comrades had found early graves in the wild karroo.
Hans and Considine sprang to the ground, while two or three of the eleven brothers, of various ages also in leathern crackers, but without coats or hats came forward, kicked the dogs, and led the horses away. "Let me introduce a stranger, father, whom I have found lost in the karroo," said Hans. "Welcome to Eden!
One was a sturdy Hottentot named Ruyter, one a Malay named Abdul Jemalee, both of whom had travelled with Considine on the up journey. The third was the Bushman whom he had encountered when lost on the karroo, and who, owing to his inveterate stupidity, had been named Booby.
"Peace comes too late for us, Gertie," said Hans Marais to his wife, on their return to the old homestead on the karroo, which presented nothing but a blackened heap of dry mud, bricks, and charred timbers; herds and flocks gone dreary silence in possession the very picture of desolation. "Better late than never," remarked Charlie Considine sadly. "We must just set to work, re-stock and re-build.
"He was a long way off from our place," said Mr. Hoopdriver. "We had a little ostrich farm, you know Just a few hundred of 'em, out Johannesburg way." "On the Karroo was it called?" "That's the term. Some of it was freehold though. Luckily. We got along very well in the old days. But there's no ostriches on that farm now."
Leaping on its back as if he had been a youth of twenty, he drove the spur into its flanks and galloped away at full speed away over the dusty road leading from Somerset to the hills: away over the ridge that separates it from the level country beyond; and away over the brown karroo, until at last, covered with dust and flecked with foam, he drew up at his own door and burst in upon the family.
Signs of animal life in the Karroo are few and far between. There are scarcely any flowers to attract butterflies, and I never saw more than four or five species of birds. Sometimes too, at nightfall, a large bird would fly with a strong harsh note across the stony veldt to the kopjes in the distance. Of the larger fauna I saw only the springbok.
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