90 NATURE AND SPORT IN SOUTH AFRICA 



rainfall of but 12 in. to 15 in. can seldom afford 

 them. During the long months of the dry season 

 our river appeared usually in a chain of pools, which 

 lay beneath the mountain rocks. In the seasons of 

 severest drought even the biggest of these pools dis- 

 appear, or become so brackish that the very fish 

 sicken and die. Yet the floods come round in 

 time, and the fish somehow return to their old 

 haunts. 



In normal seasons one might usually reckon on 

 some few good pools along the stream, and for this 

 reason, no doubt, bird and animal life was always 

 pretty abundant with us. In the Cape Colony, as in 

 so many parts of Africa, there is still steadily going 

 forward a slow process of desiccation. When the 

 frontier Boers first entered these wild kloofs and 

 valleys at the end of the last century, and began 

 their long warfare with the fierce Bushmen who then 

 inhabited them, our stream was much bigger, and 

 held in its deeper reaches many hippopotami. These 

 reaches, or " Zee-Koe gats" (hippopotamus holes), as 

 they are called, could now-a-days scarcely afford bath- 

 ing room for these unwieldy monsters; yet they 

 serve to attract and sustain much bird life, and are 

 therefore very welcome to the naturalist. 



On quiet days, when the rifle was laid aside and 

 the shot-gun carried, it was an infinite pleasure to 

 stroll down the watercourse and watch by some 



