8 
THE NEW AFRICA 
stituted oook and stable-boy. We found, when left to our own 
resources, that we got on very well, although the duties attendant 
upon herding wilful oxen and driving lazy ones were very irk¬ 
some ; still, anything was preferable to sticking fast for want of 
help. Thus we travelled on at the rate of about twenty miles 
a day to Shoshong Bamangwato, the capital of King Khama’s 
country. Small game, hitherto scarce, commenced to be plentiful 
in the wooded neighbourhood of the Limpopo, along whose left 
bank we travelled for several days. A notable feature in this 
district is the enormous quantities of pheasants found in the 
bushes, their hoarse, croaking cry filling the air in the morning 
and at sunset. In size equal to the European pheasant, variegated 
grey in colour, their chief distinction is a bare red membranous 
covering of the throat, and an absence of long tail feathers. I 
suspect that they belong to the tribe of francolines, and are not 
pheasants at all, although bearing the name. Hammar, while 
searching for a convenient spot to water the cattle on the Limpopo 
banks, came upon an enormous crocodile, over fifteen feet long, 
lying in the sun. It ran towards the river with a peculiar swing¬ 
ing motion of its head from side to side, which, as it has never 
been described before, deserves mention. Here we heard the first 
wolf utter its long-drawn, hungry howl one night while camped 
on the banks of the Notuani, an affluent of the Limpopo, and 
here also we found the country infested wkh venomous serpents 
to a degree necessitating the greatest caution in walking in the 
grass and bushes away from the road. 
Lured one morning by the inviting cackle of a koorhan, a 
game bird of the bustard kind, living in the bush, I took my 
gun to hunt him up, and had hardly gone fifty yards when a 
hare jumped up, which I hit hard with a charge of No. 3 shot. 
He crawled into a hole a few yards off. While running after 
him, I was brought to a sudden halt by coming upon a grey 
cobra, quite seven feet long and three inches thick, who quietly 
sailed out of my path with outspread neck. I let him go, 
though much astonished at his size, not wishing to waste a 
charge over him, and went on more carefully, when a few yards 
