Great and Small Game of Afric 



and pools. The number of wild animals congregated on this swampy flat 

 almost realised fable, the roads made by their incessant tramp resembling 

 so many well-travelled highways. At every step incredible herds of 

 bontebucks, 1 blesbucks, and springbucks, with troops of gnus and squadrons 

 of the common or stripeless quagga, were performing their complicated 

 evolutions ; and not unfrequently a knot of ostriches, decked in their 

 white plumes, played the part of general officer and staff with such 

 propriety as still further to remind the spectator of a cavalry review." 



And again Gordon-Cumming, some nine years later, in 1848, thus 

 describes the same country : — " When we came to the Vet River, I beheld 

 with astonishment and delight decidedly one of the most wonderful 

 displays which I had witnessed during my varied sporting career in 

 Southern Africa. On my right and left the plain exhibited one purple 

 mass of graceful blesboks, which extended without a break as far as my 

 eyes could strain : the depth of their vast legions covered a breadth of about 

 six hundred yards." Elsewhere Gordon-Cumming thus describes these 

 antelopes : — " Throughout the greater portion of the year they are very wary 

 and difficult of approach, but more especially when the does have young ones; 

 at that season, when a herd is disturbed, and takes away up the wind, every 

 other herd in view follows it, and the alarm extending for miles and miles 

 down the wind, to endless herds beyond the vision of the hunter, a 

 continued stream of blesboks may often be seen scouring up wind for 

 upwards of an hour, and covering the landscape as far as the eye can see." 



These pictures may seem incredible ; yet, such was the enormous 

 plenty of wild animal life on the plains of the Orange Free State and 

 Transvaal in those days, they were, in every circumstance, true enough. I 

 have conversed with English and Dutch hunters, who remembered well 

 the Free State in those glorious days of the past, and their statements 



1 Here, undoubtedly, as Mr. Selous shows in his article on the Bontcbok, Harris confused blcsbok 

 with bontcbok. There were no bontcbok in this region, and Harris saw in reality only blcsbok. 



