Note 1. “Uncle.” Among the Boers, “Oom” and “Tanta,” “Uncle” and “Aunt,” are used as complimentary prefixes when addressing elderly people, though these stand in no relation whatever to the speaker.
Volume One—Chapter Eleven.
Venatorial.
It is early morning, and a party of mounted men, consisting of our friends of the previous day and their genial host, is riding along the high ground away from Jim Brathwaite’s homestead. All carry guns, mostly of the latest and most improved pattern, though one or two still hold to the old-fashioned muzzle-loader, and a pack of great rough-haired dogs, the same which greeted our travellers with such hostile demonstration last evening, careers around and among the party, now and then getting a paw or a tail under the horses’ hoofs, and yelping and snapping in consequence. The horses step out briskly in the fresh morning air—for the sun is not yet up—which briskness will, I trow, have undergone considerable abatement when they return at the close of the proceedings, laden with a buck apiece—perchance two—and their riders to boot. And the dogs break out afresh into a mighty clamour, leaping and curvetting, and each striving to outbay his fellow as he realises more and more fully the important part which is to be his in the coming destruction; and as the full-mouthed chorus rings over hill and valley, many a graceful spiral-horned antelope starts in his dewy lair far down in the tangled brake, where yet a white curtain of mist hangs, waiting till the rising beams shall disperse it into warmth and sunshine, and listens, it may be, apprehensively to the distant baying.
“Here. Spry! Tiger! Shut up that infernal row, you brutes. A fellow can’t hear himself speak!” And loosening a strap from his saddle, Jim makes a sudden cut with the buckle-end at one of the chief contributors to the shindy, who, starting back hurriedly to avoid the infliction, unwarily places his tail beneath the descending hoof of Naylor’s horse, and yells in frantic and heartrending fashion for the next five minutes.
“Noisy devils, they’ll scare away all the bucks in the country-side before we get near them,” remarks that worthy, shading a match with his hand and lighting his pipe without reining in.
“They haven’t had a hunt for some time now, you see. I’ve been away a good deal, and now they’re letting off steam a bit,” says Jim. “Hallo, Allen! Look out! If you dig your heels into that horse like that, he’ll have you off as sure as his name’s Waschbank.”
For Allen, whose weedy nag had gone lame, is now bestriding a mount which his host has provided for him—a youthful quadruped, given to occasional bucking. And at the time of the needed warning the playful animal is going along with his back stiffly and ominously arched.