THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
ment of from forty to forty -two inches is a good average length for gems- 
buck cow horns, and from thirty -eight to forty inches quite good for bull 
horns. Very large numbers of gemsbucks used to be killed annually by 
the Bechwana tribes, whose hunting-grounds were in the Kalahari, and all 
the finest horns they obtained were bought from them on their return to 
their homes by white traders, by whom they were eventually sold to 
merchants on the diamond fields. Large numbers of gemsbuck horns used 
also to be annually brought by sea to Gape Town from Walfisch Bay, and 
from amongst such stores collectors were now and then able to select 
exceptionally fine specimens. But the man who only values trophies of his 
own shooting should think himself very fortunate if he can add to his 
collection the head of a gemsbuck in which the horns measure forty -four 
inches in length. Of the first sixteen gemsbuck heads the horn lengths of 
which are given in the last edition of Rowland Ward’s “ Records of Big 
Game,” only a small proportion were, to the best of my belief, shot by their 
owners, all the longest specimens known having been bought originally 
from native hunters. 
The range of the gemsbuck has always been confined to those regions of 
South-Western Africa in which surface-water becomes non-existent for 
months at a time every year, and there can be no doubt that these antelopes 
live and thrive in countries where during long periods they cannot by any 
possibility drink. In certain parts of the Kalahari they doubtless obtain, 
like other antelopes living in the same districts, an abundance of watery 
juice from the wild water-melons which there grow in profusion, and in 
other districts they dig up certain water -conserving tubers; but gemsbuck 
are also found in the height of the dry season where neither of these excel- 
lent substitutes for water exist, and it has always been a mystery to me 
how such large animals were able to live and grow fat in an intensely hot, 
dry climate and in a country where there was no open water, and where at 
the same time both grass and the leaves of all bushes seemed parched up. 
Less than a century ago the gemsbuck was a common animal all over the 
karroos of the Gape Colony, and is said to have been plentiful on the open 
plains near the present city of Port Elizabeth, within sight of the sea. It 
is no longer found in any of its old haunts in the central or southern portions 
of the Cape Colony, but in the north-western districts of that province, 
in the dry, inhospitable wastes of Bushman Land, immediately to the 
south of the Orange River, it has always maintained a footing; and, thanks 
to the protection of the game laws now in force in the Cape Colony, has of 
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