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Updated: June 7, 2025
He was a tall, lean, bony man, as was to be expected from his nickname, with a long hooked nose, a scanty brown beard, and a high conical head. His only garment was a shabby gray woollen tunic, which served him both as coat and kilt, and laced brogues of untanned hide. He might have been any age from twenty to forty; but his face was disfigured with deep scars and long exposure to the weather.
He was a tall, strong man in the prime of youth, wearing a plain, almost mean suit of dust-coloured leather, and carrying no weapons except a hunting-knife, which hung in a sheath at his girdle. He rode a powerful silver-roan horse, and was splashed to the top of his high untanned boots, as if he had come by the worst of paths, if by any.
This he took off too, showing his thick red hair, damp and matted from the heat of the fur. With a knotted hand he pushed back the locks pressed down on his forehead. The skin there was untanned and lay like a white band above the darkness of his face, thin, edged with a fringe of red beard and with blue eyes set high above prominent cheek bones.
On his feet were veld-schoen of untanned hide, on his back a battered tin case was strapped, and in his bony, nervous hand he clasped a long staff made of the black and white wood the natives call unzimbiti, on the top of which was fixed a butterfly net. Behind him were some Kaffirs who carried cases on their heads.
'When the dogs were killed and eaten, and your stomachs were heavy with untanned hide and strips of moccasins; when the old men died, and the old women died, and the babes at the dry dugs of the mothers died; when the land was dark, and ye perished as do the salmon in the fall; aye, when the famine was upon you, did the Shaman bring reward to your hunters? did the Shaman put meat in your bellies?
They looked carefully about them, mostly glancing down the cliff, and sometimes conferred together. They were dressed in close-fitting dark clothes, which seemed as if made out of some kind of skin or untanned leather, and their whole air was sinister and terrifying. They passed quite close beneath us, so that I saw the bald head of one of them, who carried a sort of hook in his hands.
In the growing darkness their expressions were imperfectly visible; but I could see that most of them were weary, and hungry, and all were depressed and ashamed. Some were wrapped in blankets of rag-carpet, and others wore shoes of rough, untanned hide. Others were without either shoes or jackets, and their heads were bound with red handkerchiefs.
Their head-gear is much after the Chinese style, except, that in addition to the queue, they allow the remainder of the hair to develop itself, which it does in the wildest and most elfish manner. For dress, the untanned skins of the animals caught in the chase, with the hair outboard, answers all their requirements.
That day I was not ashamed of my plain clothes or my homely face, for they suited well with the road. My great boots of untanned buckskin were red with dust, I was bronzed like an Indian, and the sun had taken the colour out of my old blue coat. But I smacked of travel and enterprise, which to an honest heart are dearer than brocade.
Round the spur of the cover I came, and there before me I saw a wild throng of men, savage as any I have ever seen in the mines of our Mendips bareheaded save for great shocks of black hair, barefooted and hoseless, dressed in untanned hides of deer and sheep, and armed with uncouth clubs and spears on rough ash poles. They did not hear my coming, and they had their faces from me at first.
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