HORSES 
3 
and woollen socks, which are the best footgear for work of 
this kind ; also a couple of coats apiece. Hamrnar preferred 
to wear a helmet, while I wore a veldt hat, supplemented by 
a Panama straw hat, over which the veldt hat was drawn 
and fixed, with good ventilation holes punched through the 
sides, to allow the air to circulate freely over the head. 
Three of the best salted horses we could get were taken 
along, and very useful these good beasts proved for hunting 
game, or going after the cattle, which often got lost among 
the bush-grown plots on the way up to the Zambesi. Salted 
horses, I should explain, are those that have passed through 
a disease known throughout South Africa as ‘horse-sickness,’ 
and consequently are supposed to be impervious to similar 
attacks in the future. It is proved, however, that horses, though 
they may have survived the ‘ horse-sickness,’ are only ‘ salted ’ 
so far as the district in which they contracted the disease 
is concerned. They often die of ‘ horse-sickness ’ in other 
districts, although not so readily as ‘unsalted horses.’ The 
disease is very virulent, generally carrying off eighty per 
cent, of the attacked animals; therefore salted horses are 
in much demand by hunters and travellers in the lower 
lying, and therefore more unhealthy, parts of South Africa. 
The symptoms of ‘ horse-sickness ’ are high temperature, great 
lassitude, dulness of the eye, violent coughing, and finally 
frothing at the nose, with heavy dyspnoea. When these last 
symptoms appear the case is hopeless. The post-mortem 
appearances are frothy injection of the highly vascularised lungs, 
with strong serous injection of the pleura, and a black, blotchy 
patchiness, like splashes of ink, over the otherwise normal 
intestines. After the first symptoms appear, the disease runs 
its course in about three days, although there are some observers 
who declare that one can detect the disease earlier by means 
of the thermometer. However, as the horse generally appears 
to be perfectly healthy to within three days of its death, it 
is hardly probable that horse owners will bother themselves 
by taking temperatures or even have any suspicion of possible 
