THE SABLE ANTELOPE • 269 



between the Zambesi and the Pungwe river they 

 are, however, very plentiful. This country has 

 only recently been opened up, and although hunters 

 are now busily engaged in reducing its stores of 

 animal life, the bush is thick, fever and dysentery 

 are rife for some months in the year (November 

 to May), and it will be some years before it is 

 shot out. 



In 1890, when the pioneers opened up Mashona- 

 land, they traversed a good deal of almost virgin 

 veldt. Even the Boer hunters from the Transvaal, 

 those wholesale destroyers of animal life, had left 

 this country severely alone, fearing to incur the 

 wrath of Lobengula. In much of this territory the 

 rifle had seldom or never been heard, and game of 

 all descriptions were not only extremely abundant, 

 but excessively fearless. Sable and roan antelopes, 

 in particular, were found in extraordinary numbers. 

 Lord Randolph Churchill in 1891 seems to have 

 encountered quantities of these antelopes. So un- 

 used to mankind were they that a friend who was 

 among the pioneers described to me how a troop 

 of sable antelopes came trotting boldly up to him 

 and his horse, mistaking them for some new and 

 harmless kind of creature thus penetrating their 

 solitudes. Another pioneer shot to my knowledge 

 three sable antelopes in succession from behind a 

 screen of bush before the troop became alarmed 



