228 NATURE AND SPORT IN SOUTH AFRICA 



a representative of those good old times when the 

 Cape Dutchman, clad in leather, wandered with his 

 long " roer " (gun), the uncontrolled lord of a very- 

 paradise of game, as a man may now find between 

 the Orange and the Zambesi. 



In the old days, when the Dutch first settled at 

 the Cape (1652), the hartebeest roamed all over 

 South Africa to the very shores of the Indian Ocean 

 and Atlantic. " Harts and elands " grazed upon 

 the site of the present Cape Town. Now-a-days, 

 unhappily, in common with many other noble 

 animals, this antelope has been well-nigh exter- 

 minated from the Cape Colony. A few still linger 

 in the desert region just south of the Orange River, 

 between the Great Falls and the sea. These are 

 specially protected, together with a few gemsboks 

 still to be found in that region. Yet protection in a 

 thinly-populated country is extremely difficult, and 

 it is doubtful whether hartebeest or gemsbok will 

 much longer be found, even in the solitary wastes 

 of Bushmanland. In Natal, too, the hartebeest is 

 protected, and survives in one or two localities, 

 as, also, it does in Zululand. Crossing the Orange 

 River the hartebeest is still to be found here and 

 there in the remoter parts of Griqualand West. 

 In South Bechuanaland, in the great unsettled grass 

 plains and open acacia forests towards the Kalahari, 

 and in the South Kalahari itself it is to be found 



