346 KLOOF AND KARROO. 



wool or mohair when sheared was put on ox- waggons 

 and sent to the Port Elizabeth market ; now, there 

 is a railway station at Klipplaat, within thirty miles 

 of the farm, and the process is thereby expedited 

 very materially. 



The system of nightly kraaling the flocks, which 

 even to this hour obtains to a very large extent 

 over the whole of Cape Colony, is a survival of those 

 wild and primitive days when the early Boers had 

 to defend their fleecy charges from the lion and 

 leopard, the various hyenas, the Cape hunting dog 

 {Lycaon pictus) and jackals, and the smaller of the 

 Felidae and Viverrse innumerable. But of all these 

 destroyers, the jackals, the African lynx, a hyena or 

 two, and certain of the wild cats, alone remain to 

 the karroo plains ; the rest have been shot or 

 poisoned off, or driven northwards to the interior. 

 The leopard, it is true, still haunts the mountain 

 ranges, but even he is being surely, if slowly, 

 exterminated, just as is the jackal from the karroos. 



With the disappearance of these carnivora, the 

 advent of wire-fencing on an enormous scale has 

 come. Huge runs are being completely girdled by 

 wire-fencing, which is rendered proof against jackals 

 and other vermin. Our host, whose complete and 

 perfect system of wire-fencing now patented and 

 shown in England, after years of patient and 

 practical working out in the Colony, was one of the 

 first to recognise its utility. Since the time I write 

 of, Mr. Evans has fenced his entire estate with some 

 fifty miles of wire-fencing, and the Cape Stock 

 Farming Company, to whom he has sold the run, 

 have now a fine property, wherein their flocks can 

 pasture by day and night without being brought into 



