'2 • . ON SAFARI 



A book that fascinated in only less degree was 

 Hawker, and for five-and-twenty years I followed " the 

 Colonel" in what certainly represents the hardest and 

 most strenuous form of wild sport that is attainable 

 within our British Isles — that of wildfowling afloat. 



Then, after a cjuarter of a century, when there came 

 at length opportunity to visit the far-aw^ay veld of 

 South Africa, already its long-dreamt charm had faded. 

 During the second half of the nineteenth century the 

 erewhiles wondrous fauna of the sub-continent had 

 steadily, incredibly melted away before Boer breech- 

 loaders.^ 



It was in May 1899 that the author first landed in 

 South Africa — in those days of deep anxiety and unrest 

 that soon afterwards culminated in war. There still 

 roamed then on the broad bush-veld that lies towards 

 the Limpopo the superb sable and roan antelopes, the 

 koodoo, tsesseby and brindled gnu, waterbuck and 

 many more. The elephant, it is true, had finally disap- 

 peared ; so had the rhino, buff"alo, girafi"e and eland — all 

 of these abundant but a generation before. 



The first-named, however, all survived in some 

 numbers, together with smaller antelopes which, if less 

 imposing, are no less graceful. To have seen these 

 mamificent wild beasts in their haunts, and to have 

 secured specimens of most — that, at least, was something 

 efi'ected. It was, nevertheless, with a certain undefined 

 sense of disappointment — or, at any rate, of aspirations 

 not fully realised — that, after four months on the veld, 

 I turnecl homewards. The circumstance and condition 

 of wild-life had perceptibly changed. These were no 

 longer purely pristine. They had lost that ineffable 

 original charm of which I had read, and which it had been 



1 Though the Boers, being the most numerous, were the chief 

 instruments of slaughter, yet other settlers were only less to blame 

 in the proportion of their numbers. The Boers, moreover, never 

 permitted the aboriginal natives to possess firearms ; and this, in 

 other tex-ritories (especially Portuguese), has been a deadly source of 

 destruction. 



