216 NATURE AND SPORT IN SOUTH AFRICA 



— they shoot elands merely for skins and meat, and 

 all game when heavy with young, or with young at 

 foot — the Namaqua Hottentots from the German 

 side of the Kalahari, all of them skilled and daring 

 hunters, and fair shots, can still ravage the Central 

 and Western Kalahari, and are absolutely under no 

 restraints. 



It is a melancholy fact to acknowledge, but I fear 

 even the Kalahari and its most difficult recesses can 

 scarcely resist the utter extermination of great game 

 for another twenty years; by that time, unless a 

 very rigid protection sets in immediately — a thing 

 well-nigh impossible — the eland will have been for 

 some years quite shot out in other parts of Africa 

 south of the Zambesi. 



For untold centuries, the Bushmen and Baka- 

 lahari of the desert have roamed its flat, trackless 

 forests and grassy wastes, wresting their food sup- 

 plies from the teeming herds by poisoned arrows, 

 pitfall, and assegai, with no perceptible diminution of 

 the apparently inexhaustible store of animal life. 

 Then, presto ! appear the hunting-horse, the per- 

 cussion gun, and the breech-loader, and in fifty short 

 years the ancient fauna — tenants of the plains for 

 ages of the past — the giraffe, eland, gemsbok, harte- 

 beest, zebra, quagga, gnu, elephant, rhinoceros, lion 

 — all the other units of that unexampled array of 

 feral life — are clean effaced from the land. All this 



