370 LARGE GAME. CHAP. vm. 



We all know how the first of anything lives in one's 

 recollection, and there assumes an importance utterly in- 

 commensurate with its real worth ; how the boy's first 

 day with hounds, his first grouse or partridge, or his first 

 salmon, remain, even in old age, distinct and vivid pictures. 

 In the same manner the killing of my first antelope, and 

 all the details connected with it, are far more clearly im- 

 pressed on my memory than the death of many a rhino- 

 ceros, buffalo, or lion that I have since witnessed or taken 

 part in effecting. It occurred during my first journey, in 

 1862, over the Drachensberg Mountains and through the 

 Dutch States into the northern interior, but we had not 

 as yet reached the confines of the colony of Natal, and 

 had outspanned the oxen for the night on the hills above 

 Bushman's River. Next morning, hearing that there 

 were plenty of antelopes of the Vaal raebuck species to 

 be found close by, I started early with a Hottentot named 

 Klaas to try and get one, the Dutch owner of most of the 

 waggon-train with which I was travelling agreeing to my 

 request that they should only go on a few miles and then 

 wait for me. 



The ground over which we were to shoot was very 

 broken, consisting of bare stony hills without a vestige 

 of cover, and very rough to walk over, and a great part 

 of it had lately had all the grass burned off by one of 

 those fires which are so common in autumn, when the 

 country gets so dry that a chance spark may often burn an 

 enormous tract. I have since more than once travelled 

 two or three days at a time (a hundred miles or more) 

 without seeing any green thing ; the ground — except a 

 few dark-coloured ashes — being as bare as a floor, and not 



