THE SPRINGBOK 
farmers of the Cape Colony “ trek-bokken,” which signifies “bucks on 
trek’’ or “migrating antelopes.” When passing through a small frontier 
village near the Orange River in the north-west of the Cape Colony some 
forty years ago, I was informed by a storekeeper there that he himself 
had witnessed a great migration of springboks not long before. He told 
me that the open ground round the village seemed to be covered by a solid 
mass of springboks, and that they poured through the village in a 
continuous stream for a long time. He also said that some small flocks 
of goats and sheep were carried away and lost during this great migration 
of springboks. One must allow something for imagination, but I am sure 
my informant had actually witnessed an enormous concourse of these 
antelopes. A migration of springboks was taking place on a much smaller 
scale in the north-west of Cape Colony when I was in Cape Town in the 
latter part of 1896. 
As a rule, springboks appear to be able to live quite comfortably without 
drinking water, but in periods of excessive drought, when there are no 
night dews and no moisture in the dry herbage they are forced to live on, 
they undoubtedly suffer much from thirst. Mr W. C. Scully, formerly 
Civil Commissioner for Namaqualand, and a thoroughly trustworthy 
authority, has recorded the fact of a vast concourse of springboks 
migrating westwards through Little Namaqualand, in the north-west of 
the Cape Colony, until they reached the Atlantic seaboard. Here they drank 
eagerly of the salt water and perished in tens of thousands, their dead 
bodies lining the seashore in one continuous line for a distance of thirty 
miles. Springboks which live in open country and have been much shot 
at naturally become very wild and wary, and can seldom be approached 
to within three hundred yards; and, speaking of thirty years ago, it was 
almost impossible to hit a springbok with a Martini -Henry rifle anywhere 
in the neighbourhood of the Diamond Fields if it was standing looking at 
one at three hundred yards, and it would be very unlikely to have done so 
at a closer range. At the flash of the shot it would always spring to one 
side, and would be yards away from the spot on which it had been standing 
when the bullet reached that place. I have very often seen blue wildebeests 
do the same thing. 
Further north in Bechuanaland, and in the neighbourhood of the salt 
pans to the east of the Botletlie River, springboks were in my time 
moderately tame, and in those localities I have shot a few with a ten-bore 
rifle and round bullets. In the days when a Martini -Henry rifle (‘450 bore) 
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