With Dog and Gun. 75 



mines, and the incidents of the journey lead me to 

 offer a few remarks upon the presence of game and 

 the prosjDects of sport in the Transvaal. My friend 

 and I, who were naturally not competent to form 

 any practical judgment on mining values, took with 

 us our guns and dogs in order to while away the time 

 during Avhich the engineers and experts would be 

 at work. Not very many years ago these wide 

 and grassy j)lains abounded with game of almost 

 every description. Persons whose word can be 

 imj^licitly relied upon have informed me that 

 within the last fifteen years they can remember 

 these plains being covered as far as the eye could 

 reach with countless thousands of wildebeest, 

 blesbok, springbok, and other varieties of the deer 

 and antelope tril^es. So desolate and lifeless is 

 the appearance of these i^lains now that it is diffi- 

 cult to credit the assertion. It happened, how- 

 ever, unfortunately lor the s23ortsman, that not 

 long ago the demand for hides was considerable, 

 and the wise, prudent, and intelligent Boer im- 

 mediately set to work and slaughtered Avithout 

 discrimination every wild four-footed animal. So 

 reckless and ruthless was the slaughter that these 

 Boer sportsmen (?) never cared to carry home the 

 animals they had slain. Forming themselves into 

 large shooting parties, they shot the beasts down 

 everywhere by scores, l)y hundreds, and by thou- 

 sands, leaving the carcases to be devoured by the 

 vultures, and going a few days afterwards to 

 gather up the skins which the vultures had neg- 

 lected, and which the sun had dried and tanned. 



