The Blesbok 187 



past, and are now only to be found, chiefly on protected farms, in some few 

 portions of the Orange Free State, the Lower Transvaal, and British 

 Bechuanaland. In British Bechuanaland they still ranged freely in small 

 herds until about 1882, and, in tact, in that year, when the land pirates 

 and freebooters were encamped in tents and waggons on the site of the 

 present town of Vryburg, blesboks occasionally galloped right through 

 the encampment. But after the expedition of Sir Charles Warren in 

 1884-85, and the influx of white settlers, blesboks disappeared. I was 

 extremely glad to hear a year or two since (1897) tnat a f ew blesboks 

 were straying back into Bechuanaland, and were appearing on the great 

 grass plains in the neighbourhood of Vryburg. These timid migrants 

 undoubtedly came from one or two farms on the Western Transvaal border, 

 where they have for some years been preserved. As a rule the only 

 blesbok- shooting to be obtained nowadays is on Dutch farms in the 

 Transvaal and Orange Free State, where a head or two may be shot by 

 paying a handsome fee to the owner of the land. These blesboks are 

 usually stalked with a trained horse, behind which the gunner shelters 

 himself, until he has got within shot of the herd. Blesboks were, how- 

 ever, always extremely wary creatures, and their stalk at the present time 

 is a matter of some skill and difficulty. 



Blesboks were to be found in the good days, like the springboks with 

 which they were and still are often intermingled, in immense herds, 

 numbering in the aggregate, over a fair tract of country, tens of thousands. 

 In the same country were usually to be seen black wildebeest (white-tailed 

 gnu), quagga, Burchell's zebra, ostriches, and hartebeest. The Vet River, 

 a tributary of the Vaal, in the centre of the Orange Free State, seems 

 always to have been a very favourite headquarters of these antelopes. 

 Harris in 1837, for instance, thus speaks of this locality : — 



" We passed over a low tract about eight miles in extent, strongly 

 impregnated with salt, and abounding (it was then the wet season) in lakes 



