DIMINUTIVE BUSH ANTELOPES 
enough the nearest allies of these marsh lovers are quite 
their opposites in habits, — the rheboks, steinboks, and klip- 
springers, small, short-horned, shy creatures, with Steinboks, 
the agility of a diminutive chamois. They will are 
scale with ease a cliff that looks impossible to any- Duikers. 
thing but a bird, and will leap from point to point among rocks 
hardly large enough for a mouse to perch upon. “It seems 
extraordinary,”” Drummond exclaims, “how their delicate 
limbs escape injury when they take bound after bound like 
an india-rubber ball in places that’ a cat would shudder at.” 
The steinboks, of which several species are scattered through- 
out Africa south of the Sahara, are less acrobatic and feed in 
flocks on the veldt, mingled with springboks. Among them 
are the smallest of all ruminants, the bright chestnut-and- 
white “royal” antelope of the Guinea coast, which is only 
twelve inches tall; but the exquisite beni Israel, seen bound- 
ing along the arid, volcanic rocks and sands of the eastern 
coast of the Red Sea, and beloved of the Arabs and Abyssin- 
ians, is not much larger. 
Some of the species of the next group, the duikerboks (i.e. 
diving goats as the Boers named them, because they plunge 
headlong into the chaparral when alarmed), are also tiny, —the 
mouse-colored bluebucks, swarming in the Natal jungles, stand- 
ing only thirteen inches high; but most of the duikers are larger. 
“They abound in forested and bushy districts, moving about in small 
parties, leaping among the rocks, and dodging into and through the thickets 
with surprising agility, while their plain colors render them practically 
invisible when quiet. All have very convex foreheads, and very large eyes 
and ears between which, in both sexes, rise two little spike horns and a 
median tuft of stiff hairs. All these antelopes feed largely on berries and 
small fruits, and their flesh has an excellent flavor. The typical species, 
known in the North as ‘deloo,’ is very common in southwest Africa, and is 
often tamed as a pet.” 
To this group belong also the larger wood antelopes and 
zebra antelope of West Africa, which dwell in steaming 
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