The Eland 423 



wherever these bushes grow. In the dry desert country through which 

 the Chobi River runs, I have always found elands very plentiful both north 

 and south of the river. 



Wherever I have travelled, too, in the country beyond the Zambesi I 

 have met with these animals. In Eastern Mashunaland, before the advent 

 of Mr. Rhodes's pioneers in 1890, elands were particularly numerous ; and 

 many and many a time I have seen large herds of these beautiful animals, 

 numbering often from 100 to 200 individuals, grazing like herds of cattle 

 over the open downs stretching from the Makubisi River, where the town 

 of Salisbury now stands, to Mount Hampden on the Gwibi River. 



The largest herd of elands I ever saw, I met with in December 1879 

 in the midst of the vast stretch of forest-clad country — often waterless for 

 many months in the year — which lies to the south of the Mababi River. 

 There must have been well over 200 animals in the herd, and amongst 

 them, or rather bringing up the rear, as they trotted away through the 

 open forest, were twelve massive old bulls, besides of course many younger 

 males, which, though larger than the cows, had not yet attained the 

 enormous bulk, and the frontlet of long black bristling hair, which are the 

 attributes of an old eland bull. I well remember the curious sight 

 presented by some 200 pairs of long straight horns, all held at almost 

 exactly the same slant, as this great herd of elands trotted off in a dense 

 phalanx ; and how, when they made a sudden turn and the sun glinted on 

 their straight black horns, my companion (the late Mr. H. C. Collison) 

 compared them to the fixed bayonets of a regiment of soldiers. 



I once saw a herd of elands in the Northern Kalahari entirely composed 

 of young animals. There were quite fifty of them, all last year's calves, 

 from ten to twelve months old, and there was not a single adult animal 

 amongst them. I have never seen anything of the sort before or since. 



The eland of South- Western Africa, as described by the earlier 

 European travellers who visited the Cape Colony in the seventeenth and 



