232 KLOOF AND KARROO. 



I found that H. had shot a koorhaan (a fine game 

 bird of the bustard species) with a single bullet as 

 it stood on an ant-heap; and I was further informed, 

 amid roars of laughter, how Bob, whose horse had 

 put its foot in a meercat hole, had described an arc 

 with unerring precision in, his passage through the 

 air to mother earth. While we were at breakfast, 

 a pretty little fawn of the vaal or grey rhebok, which 

 had been caught in the adjacent mountains, trotted 

 about the room as tamely as a domestic cat, and 

 evidently fully appreciated such luxuries as bread 

 and sugar. The fawns of this antelope, and 

 more commonly still of the springbok, are often 

 taken when young, and make pretty gentle pets. 



After a memorable breakfast, we adjourned to 

 the stoep or verandah for a smoke, and a chat upon 

 sport and antelopes. Mr. Evans told us of his 

 experience of the last great trek bokken (migration) 

 of the springbok in the Colony, which happened, I 

 think, in 1858. In old days, these trek bokken were 

 a source of the greatest alarm and danger to the 

 colonist ; quite as much, in fact, as the locust flights. 

 Countless thousands of these antelopes, impelled by 

 drought and the loss of their more secluded pastures, 

 migrated from their true nursery and headquarters 

 in the country formerly known as Great Bushman- 

 land, now forming the districts of Namaqualand, 

 Calvinia, Fraserburg, Clanwilliam, and Victoria 

 West, and even from the far Kalahari Desert its6lf, 

 where also they abound in vast numbers, into more 

 fertile districts in the interior of the Colony. A trek 

 bokken might be witnessed for a whole day, and 

 the veldt would be left denuded of every scrap 

 of pasturage. The immense numbers of the 



