208 Great and Small Game of Africa 



and fantastic antics and capers are always a source of wonderment to the 

 onlooker. Looking at this most singular animal, one might well compare 

 it at one and the same time with four different animals, the buffalo, the ox, 

 the antelope, and the pony. The heavy, fierce, savage-looking head reminds 

 one of the buffalo ; the arched neck, hog mane, neat body and quarters, and 

 sweeping tail resemble a pony ; the slender yet wiry legs are truly 

 antelopean ; while the eyes, mouth, and nostrils are wonderfully like those 

 of a domestic ox. 



Until forty or fifty years ago, the white-tailed gnu, although, like many 

 others of the South African fauna, singularly and capriciously restricted as 

 to its habitat, was to be found on one of its chosen headquarters, the karroos 

 or vast open plains of the Cape Colony, in almost incredible numbers. In 

 fact, if it had not been for a devastating disease known as the "brand-sickte," 

 or burning sickness, which periodically thinned the herds of these and other 

 game, their numbers would have been far too many even for that vast 

 country to have supported. In the old days, before the Boers began to 

 push their way northward, and with their death-dealing roers or smooth 

 bores to scatter destruction everywhere, the numbers of these animals in 

 the Cape Colony must have been immense. Down to the year 1850 an 

 immense amount of slaughter had been performed by the Dutch hunters 

 and farmers for something like eighty or a hundred years among these and 

 other creatures. Yet even in Gordon Cumming's time (1843), and later, 

 great herds of these antelopes, with much other game, still roamed the 

 northern plains of the old Colony. The range of this wildebeest never 

 seems to have extended eastward in the Cape Colony beyond the Kei River. 

 The animal was found also in the territory now known as Griqualand West, 

 just north of the Orange River, and, in immense numbers, in the Orange 

 Free State, where to-day the poor remnants of its once innumerable legions 

 are still to be found, eking out a precarious existence on two or three Boer 

 farms, where they are more or less carefully protected. North of the Vaal 



