4 THE MONKEYFOLK OF SOUTH AFRICA 



WONDERFUL STONES 



Those Bushmen not only drove us from our homes and 

 killed and ate us whenever they got the chance, but they 

 actually took possession of our feeding-grounds ; for it 

 seems these Bushman people eat the same sort of food 

 as we do. They dug up our roots and bulbs with sticks 

 which had stone weights on them. These stone weights 

 were wonderful things. They were hard, round boulders 

 which the pigmies bored holes through. We often sat 

 on ledges of rock and watched them patiently boring these 

 stones. A Bushman would find a round, hard, water-worn 

 rock, as big as a baby's head, in some river drift, and, with 

 some flinty sand, a little water, and a bit of hard rock, would 

 actually bore a round hole right through that stone. They 

 bored it half-way through from one side, and then started 

 at the other side. Day after day these fellows would sit 

 on a rock out in the warm sun, boring away quite cheerfully. 

 Sometimes it took a month, and even three to six months 

 of daily work to bore one of these wonderful stones. Some- 

 times they tied them to the ends of sticks and threw them 

 at us, just as David threw the stone which killed Goliath, 

 only he threw it from a sling instead. In my young days 

 I saw a Bushman cast one of these stones and hit a bushbuck 

 in the ribs. The buck fell all of a heap, and the Bushman 

 ran up and killed it with his kerrie, which is a stick with a 

 big round knob at the end. 



THEY STOLE OUR FOOD 



These crafty pigmy men scoured the country and killed 

 the antelopes and the ostriches with their poisoned arrows ; 

 but we didn't mind that, because we don't care much for 

 flesh food. But they gathered the wild fruits, the berries, 



