422 Great and Small Game of Africa 



can be no doubt, for, besides the records of European travellers who visited 

 South Africa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have the 

 evidence of the bushman paintings, met with in the caves of the mountain 

 ranges of the Cape Colony and the Orange Free State, bearing dumb 

 witness to the fact that the eland was once plentiful in those territories. 

 Even now, or at any rate as lately as 1896 — for it is impossible to tell just 

 at present how much havoc the terrible plague of rinderpest which has 

 recently swept through South Africa has worked amongst the elands — the 

 range of this species, although it has long been banished from all the settled 

 states of South Africa, is or was still very extensive. It is said that a few 

 elands yet survive amongst the fastnesses of the Drakensberg mountains, where 

 that range divides Basutoland from Natal ; but with this exception I doubt 

 whether any of these animals are still to be found anywhere within the 

 borders of Natal, Zululand, Swaziland, the Cape Colony, British Bechuana- 

 land, the Orange Free State, Griqualand West, or the Transvaal. From 

 all these territories they have been driven long ago, but throughout the 

 desert tracts which lie to the west of the southern portion of the Bechuana- 

 land Protectorate, and from thence northwards through the western and 

 northern portions of Khama's country, and from thence eastwards through 

 the northern portions of Matabeleland and Mashunaland, and indeed 

 throughout the whole of South-Eastern Africa from the Transvaal border 

 to the Zambesi, except where European settlements have lately been 

 formed, elands are, or were, quite recently to be met with, often in 

 considerable numbers. In the Northern Kalahari between Khama's old town 

 of Shoshong and the Botletli River, elands are always wandering about in 

 small herds, which sometimes collect into great droves, and migrate east- 

 wards as far as the old waggon track leading from Shoshong to the Zambesi. 

 These migrations take place towards the close of the rainy season, in 

 February and March, at which time of year a small shrub bears berries of 

 which elands are very fond, and they therefore collect in large numbers 



