THE BUFFALO 
once that I acknowledge the buffalo to be a very dangerous animal to 
follow into thick bush, or reeds, or long grass, once he has been wounded; 
but, although old buffalo bulls, when standing looking at one with out- 
stretched noses and sullen eyes half hidden by their massive horns, 
certainly look very truculent, not to say menacing, yet I have never yet 
been charged by an unwounded buffalo bull, and I have encountered very 
many of these animals, possibly more than any other white man now living, 
since for many years together I lived and hunted in countries in which 
buffaloes simply swarmed, before they had been much hunted, and long 
before these fine animals were well-nigh exterminated by the terrible 
visitation of rinderpest. 
Although I have never been charged myself by an unwounded buffalo, 
some few cases of such unprovoked attacks have come within my own 
knowledge. The most remarkable of such incidents is, I think, the 
following: 
A young Boer hunter of my acquaintance, Petrus Potgieter, was riding 
after a herd of giraffes one day, nearly forty years ago now, in Western 
Matabeleland, when suddenly, without any warning, an old buffalo bull 
charged out from a patch of bush just as he was passing and dashed both 
man and horse to the ground. As Potgieter struggled to his feet, the buffalo 
turned and came at him, and, getting the end of its sharply crooked horn 
under his coat, tore it from his back and tossed it into the air. But whilst 
the infuriated animal’s attention was engaged with his coat, the young 
hunter ran to a small tree and gained a place of safety. His valuable 
shooting -horse, however, died from the effects of the terrible wound it 
had received. Now, Potgieter himself told me that he attributed this 
unprovoked attack upon him to the fact that on the previous day another 
Boer hunter, old Petrus Jacobs, had chased a herd of buffaloes over this 
same ground and had wounded and lost an old bull, besides those which he 
had killed, and he had no doubt that it was this animal, rendered savage 
and morose by the ill-treatment it had received, which had so unexpectedly 
charged and overthrown him and his horse. 
Another friend of mine was terribly injured by a buffalo bull which he 
never saw until it charged him at close quarters, and, striking him with 
the point of one of its horns, inflicted a wound from which it is a marvel 
that he ever recovered. In this instance also there is good reason to believe 
that this buffalo had been wounded by another white hunter on the previous 
day. A buffalo bull which has been mauled by, but made its escape from, a 
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