Chapter VII. 

 VAAL RHEBOK SHOOTING. 



IN the long and brilliant array of South African 

 antelopes, the vaal or grey rhebok {Pelea 

 capreola) has, like its fellow mountain dweller, 

 the klipspringer, for some reason or other, been 

 unaccountably neglected by hunters and naturalists. 

 Widely scattered though it is over nearly every part 

 of South Africa, affording as it does excellent hill 

 shooting, and possessing certain curious and indeed 

 unique characteristics amongst the antelopes, it has 

 yet been too frequently passed by unnoticed, in the 

 rush to describe the larger and nobler game of this 

 game-abounding country. From this unappreciative 

 category, however, Gordon Gumming must be 

 excepted, for, in his earlier days in the Colony, 

 before he passed on to the vast and then compara- 

 tively virgin hunting grounds of his beloved limpopo 

 and the far interior, he describes the vaal rhebok as 

 affording him the nearest approach to Highland 

 deer stalking of any game he had encountered. 

 Cornwallis Harris, too, in his magnificent book, 

 descriptive of South African game, has a good word 

 to say for this shy and active antelope. Since the 

 year 1836, when the emigrant Boers, discontented 

 with British rule, shook off the dust from their feet, 

 and trekked into the then unknown wilds of the 

 territories now known as the Orange Free State and 

 Transvaal, the tide of colonisation has too often 



