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volition—combining to render it one of the most beautiful objects in the animal creation. 
As the traveller advances over the trackless expanse, hundreds of this delicately formed 
antelope bound away on either side of his path with meteor-like and sportive velocity, 
winging their bird-like flight by a quick succession of those singularly elastic leaps 
which have given rise to its colonial appellation, and which enable it to surpass, as well 
in swiftness as in grace, almost every other mammiferous quadruped. 
“ But although frequently found herding by itself, the Springbok is usually detected 
in the society of Gnoos, Quaggas, Ostriches, or Blesboks. Fleet as the wind, and 
thoroughly conscious of its own speed, it mingles with their motley herds, sauntering 
about with an easy careless gait, occasionally with outstretched neck approaching some 
coquettish doe, and spreading its own glittering white folds so as to effect a sudden and 
complete metamorphosis of exterior from fawn-colour to white. Wariest of the wary, 
however, the Springboks are ever the first to take the alarm, and to lead the retreating 
column. Pricking their taper ears, and elevating their graceful little heads upon the 
first appearance of any strange object, a dozen or more trot nimbly off to a distance, and 
having gazed impatiently for an instant to satisfy themselves of the actual presence of 
an enemy,—putting their white noses to the ground, they begin, in colonial phraseology, 
to ‘pronken’ or make ‘a brave show.’ Unfurling the snowy folds on their haunches so 
as to display around the elevated scut, a broad white gossamer disk, shaped like the 
spread tail of a peacock, away they all go with a succession of strange perpendicular 
bounds, rising with curved loins into the air, as if they had been struck with battledores 
—rebounding to the height of ten or twelve feet with the elasticity of corks thrown 
against a hard floor ; vaulting over each other’s backs with depressed heads and stiffened 
limbs, as if engaged in a game of leap-frog; and after appearing for a second as if 
suspended in the air,—clearing at a single spring from ten to fifteen feet of ground 
without the smallest perceptible exertion. Down come all four feet together with a 
single thump, and nimbly spurning the earth beneath, away they soar again, as if about 
to take flight—invariably clearing a road or beaten track by a still higher leap than all 
—as if their natural disposition to regard man as an enemy indicated them to mistrust 
even the ground upon which he had trodden. 
“The ‘trek bokken’—as the Colonists are wont to term the immense migratory 
swarms of these antelopes which, to the destruction of every green herb, occasionally 
inundate the abodes of civilization—not only form one of the most remarkable features 
in the Zoology of Southern Africa, but may also be reckoned amongst the most extra- 
ordinary examples of the fecundity of animal life. To form any estimate of their 
numbers on such occasions would be perfectly impossible—the havoc committed in their 
onward progress falling nothing short of the ravages of a wasting swarm of locusts. 
“« Pouring down, like the devastating curse of Egypt, from their native plains in the 
interior whence they have been driven, after protracted drought and by the failure of 
the stagnant pools on which they have relied, whole legions of Springboks abandon the 
parched soil and throng with one accord to deluge and lay waste the cultivated regions 
around the Cape. So effectually does the van of the vast column destroy every vestige 
of verdure, that the rear is often reduced to positive starvation. 
