139 
SHOOT A GRAND KOODOO 
horns erect in the air looking at me from eighty yards distance, 
half sideways, as if making up his mind whether I was a thing 
to fly from or not. Without calculating the chances of the act, 
I levelled the Swinburne-Henry and broke his neck at the base 
with the shot. He fell with a grand crash, his horns scraping the 
bark off a sapling in their sweeping descent, and there he lay, the 
finest koodoo I have seen, with horns over four feet six inches 
long in a straight line. In a moment I realised that if the 
bearers came upon this ‘ bit of meat ’ it meant a halt for the rest 
of the day, so I hastily ran away, looking in another direction, as 
if after some fleeing game, to mislead the boys, several of whom 
came hurrying up in expectation of meat at the sound of the 
shot. We simply passed on and left him, and I may say that, 
even now, as I write it, I do not feel particularly elated over 
this event. Towards evening I shot a single letzwee, quite 
enough for the supper of the bearers, who, at the least occasion 
for feeding, made a halt and thus influenced the progress of our 
expedition by the insatiable capacity of their stomachs. 
The ruling idea in our minds was to get as far as possible on 
our journey before the rainy season set in. Should we be caught 
by the rains while in the basin of South Africa, we knew that, if 
we were not actually compelled to come to a halt at one place, our 
progress would be much retarded, on nearing the west coast, by 
rising rivers overflowing their banks, which at present were 
either dry or could be easily forded, before the heavy rains set 
in; and that, worst of all, if caught by the rains before reaching 
the mountains westwards, we would be exposed to the malarial 
influence of fever in a much higher degree than during the dry 
weather season prevailing at present. And then, in case of illness, 
we would probably be compelled to stay at some place quite in the 
hands of savages, who had never seen a white man before, and 
who would only look upon such an arrival as a lucky dispensa¬ 
tion of Providence in their favour to loot and rob the unhappy 
victims so opportunely left to their mercy. Therefore our 
anxiety increased at these protracted delays, and every day lost 
seemed like sinful waste of time. But the native mind is beyond 
