224 A Breath from the Veldt 



most heart-breaking things in the wide wide world. If ever, dear reader, you 

 contemplate a visit to the " fly," never go with a waggon and donkeys, or you 

 will come back with grey hair and a chronic kink in the back from chopping 

 down trees. Native porters (if you can get them) and donkeys with packs are 

 ten times better. From the third day our troubles commenced, and I must 

 say that for the next month I never had such a rough time in my life. Nobody 

 knew for certain which way we were going, and with so many trees and other 

 obstacles in our path, we never made more than six miles a day in the thick 

 bush. Then we could not get water when we wanted it, and when we did, it 

 was stinking and half mud. Game, too, was very scarce, and, to add to our 

 distress, the old man got dysentery, and nearly died. 



For two days we made our way quite happily down the east bank of the 

 river ; for, though sleeping on the ha:rd ground in your kaross is a big change 

 from your comfortable bed in the waggon, you get cunning by experience, and 

 may even in time find out the soft side of a flint. You just cut a big hole where 

 your thigh goes, fit yourself to it, and make your boy bring some grass for a 

 bolster ; and, save for the attentions of small visitors anxious to know how you 

 taste, the situation is not half bad. At some short distance from the river, the 

 old man showed me a steep bank that a troop of panic-stricken buffaloes had 

 surmounted two years previously. The place was so steep and rocky that it 

 would have taken a wiry, active man some time to get up ; but, scared by some 

 lions that had made a rush on a cow, the whole herd had managed to surmount 

 it, assisted by the impetus they had gained in descending the near side bank. 

 Of buffaloes, however, I shall say but little, my own experience being too 

 limited ; and much the same observation applies to the lion. I leave them 

 with pleasure to other and abler pens, every writer on Africa delighting to let 

 himself go on these interesting subjects. 



Van Staden, however, told me of a scene he witnessed some years ago — an 

 attack by lions on an old buffalo bull — too interesting to be passed over. One 

 day, when hunting near the Limpopo, he saw the dust rise near the river, and 

 knowing that some big herd was on the move, he ran as hard as he could, 

 hoping to get a shot. But he was too late. The retreating animals — doubtless 

 a herd of buflfalo — -escaped, and while they were making off he heard sounds of 

 bellowing and scuffling in the bush close by. He was soon on the scene of the 

 tumult, for a buffalo makes a great noise when he is collared. And this is what 

 he saw : — 



A lion and a lioness were fixed on the two hind legs of a buffalo bull. 



