THE DECADENCE OF GREAT GAME 309 



impossible to say whether the remnant of the game 

 will be able to be retained permanently in the 

 districts south of the Orange Kiver. 



In the vast countries of the interior, where the 

 veldt is wider, and the population much more 

 scattered than in Cape Colony, preservation is almost 

 a matter of impossibility. How are you to restrain 

 men a hundred miles from a single policeman or 

 representative of justice ? How are you to prevent 

 the hungry prospector and digger in those remote 

 solitudes, when a great buck stands temptingly 

 within gunshot ? ^ How are you to check the native 

 gunner, creeping about the dense bush, always on 

 the look-out for a pot shot? The thing is, I fear, 

 an impossibility. I know that in Bechuanaland the 

 game laws are constantly broken by Dutch, natives, 

 and colonial settlers, and that the game still 

 disappears. 



Quite recently a project was set on foot among 

 some prominent sportsmen and naturalists, which, 

 if successfully carried out, may help in some degree 

 to preserve many of the rarer species of the African 

 mammalia — especially the larger antelopes — in some 

 district of the interior. 



1 Under recent regulations of the British South Africa Com- 

 pany, travellers and prospectors killing game for their own 

 consumption ten miles beyond a township are exempt from 

 penalties. Occupiers of land may also kill game upon their 

 own holdings. Here is a fruitful source of extermination ! 



