BUCK'S TENACITY OF LIFE. 103 



and looked at me. I jumped off my horse, and was 

 quickly on the ground ; but the buck was down first. I 

 ran up to him, and found that my bullet had entered the 

 back without touching the bone or principal muscles, had 

 passed through his body, and come out in the breast; 

 he was bleeding at the mouth, and lay quite dead. Major 

 K , on coming up, told me that this apparent tough- 

 ness as regarded life was, during his experience, by no 

 means an uncommon thing. The secret of the crooked 

 eye was now explained, and I afterwards made a practice 

 of watching for a considerable time bucks that I had 

 fired at, unless I was perfectly certain that I had missed 

 them. So tough were some of these reitbok, that a gen- 

 tleman once told me that he thought, after the first bullet, 

 all others seemed to do them good. It was not quite as 

 bad as this, although the following instance that happened 

 to myself may give an idea of their tenacity of life. 



I sighted a buck, and saw him lie down in some long 

 grass. Leaving my pony at some distance, I stalked up to 

 the buck ; he rose, and afforded me a fair shot at twenty 

 yards. I gave him a dose of buck-shot near the shoulder, 

 which knocked him over. He jumped up again instantly, 

 and went away on three legs. Not having my dog with 

 me, I ran back to my pony, and mounting him, galloped 

 to the hill over which the buck had disappeared. I 

 looked all round, but could discover no signs whatever of 

 the reitbok. I held up my hand, in order to find which 

 way the little wind that there was happened to be blowing, 

 and, riding with my head to the wind, went nearly a mile 

 without seeing a sign of the buck. I was about making a 



