26 THE ODYSSEY OF AN ANIMAL COLLECTOR 
He turned out to be an elderly man, rather rough and obviously 
tough—typical of the Dutch farm managers I had met in the 
Transvaal. Actually he had been a Cape farmer and was half 
English, half Boer; for the purpose of this book I shall call him 
Krantz. I soon found that there were a number of characters of 
British origin farming in this district—the Chimoio district—all 
previously from South Africa, and owing to the fertile nature of 
the soil and freedom from droughts, they were producing far 
more maize than the average in Rhodesia or South Africa. Most 
of them had black wives and half-caste children, but fortunately 
Krantz was not one of these. 
As we moved slowly along the dusty road—the oxen averaging 
less than three miles an hour—I heard something of his past life, 
which he related in his quiet way. Some of the more interesting 
episodes he never mentioned, but I found them out later from 
one of his closest friends. 
He was farming peacefully in the Cape when he was caught 
up, like so many others, in the gold rush to the Transvaal. This 
was in the early days of the Rand, and he set off on horseback 
from Kimberley with a friend, before the railway was built to the 
Transvaal, to seek a quick fortune. His friend concentrated on 
the area now known as Johannesburg and eventually became a 
millionaire, but poor Krantz favored the more speculative dig- 
gings in the Barberton district and lost most of his money. He 
went back to farming, married a young Dutch girl, and all went 
well until she started playing him up. He found that on one 
occasion, when he was away on business, she had even sold some 
of his cattle and pocketed the money. This so upset poor Krantz 
that he just walked out of the house, leaving her and his belong- 
ings for good. For weeks he wandered looking for work, and 
eventually found his way into Portuguese East Africa, where he 
found employment on the Busi sugar estates near Beira. Now 
here he was as manager of a farm, leading a very primitive 
bachelor existence, apparently perfectly sober, hard-working and 
efficient. The first of these virtues I found was spasmodic, depend- 
ing entirely upon cash in hand, and the period since his last lapse 
from grace. 
We duly arrived at the house, a two-roomed affair with no 
