In the evening a straight-horned gemsbok (Oryx capensis) coming up from the river passed near the camp; her horns struck me as unusually long, and with some of the dogs I gave chase on foot; she moved very slowly, soon stood to bay, and dropped to the shot. She was evidently very old and worn out. I introduce her to air a theory.
In many of the Bushman caves the head of the oryx is scratched in profile, and in that position one horn hides the other entirely. In Syria, even up to the present day, I am told, a very near relation of the Oryx capensis is found; it is the habit of man in his hunting stage to try his hand at delineating the animals he lives upon. Probably the rocks or caves of Syria may show, or formerly may have shown, glyphs of the oryx resembling the work of the African Bushmen, and an early traveller may easily have taken them for representations of an animal with one horn, and have started the idea of the unicorn, Biblical and heraldic. With regard to the former, the word in the Hebrew in our version rendered unicorn is ‘reem’; in some old English Bibles, indeed, ‘reem’ has been preserved in the text untranslated. Again, I am told that the Syrian congener of the Cape oryx is called by the Arabs of to-day ريم ‘reem.’[9] Is it not likely then, that the Biblical Unicorn is the same as the ‘reem’ of the Arab? As an heraldic beast, the gemsbok lends himself most gallantly to the theory; he is a strongly marked equine antelope, and is the one of his family that frequently lowers his head to show fight, it is said even with the lion—and this is confirmed in song, though he certainly got the worst of it in poetry, as I very much think he would in real life.
The gemsbok is scarce, and hardly met with save in the barren open stretches of country like the Bakalahari desert; there were more near the colony in my day than further in. He can do without water for a long time certainly—indeed I believe altogether. He digs and eats watery roots such as luhoshé, a large tuber, and the bitter desert gourd; if rain falls, or he comes across water, he drinks, no doubt, but he does not need it to support life. His country is also the stronghold of the Bushmen, who can, as I have said before, live for months under the same conditions, but who generally obtain water by boring with a long pole through the sand, in hollows well known to them traditionally, down to the hard substratum. Enlarging the bottom of the boring as much as they can, by working their pole on the slant, and then tying a small bunch of grass to a long reed and inserting it in the hole, they suck up the water.
These maminas, or sucking holes, are common throughout the desert, and wherever we found the reeds we found water; in two instances, indeed, by digging to a depth of nine feet we were enabled to supply all our horses and oxen, for though the water never stood more than eight or ten inches, yet the oftener the well was emptied the quicker it filled again, obstructions to its free flow being removed by the continuous trickling.
Maneless lions
I have mentioned how much the elephants of the Zouga differ from those of the Limpopo, and the more southern and eastern districts; the lions too are, I suppose, influenced by the drier climate and surroundings, for very few of the males grow manes. I thought at first this might depend on their age, as the lion of the south is only furnished in this particular in full lionhood; but one day whilst lying on the Zouga, a few days’ march from Lake ’Ngami, a horse of mine fell into a pitfall, and in broad daylight three lions invited themselves to lunch. I was at the waggons, and ran out with a trader of the name of Wilson to get a shot at them. They saw us, and, leaving the horse, got into cover; as they had retreated very leisurely and were by no means scared, we took for granted they would come again. A low mound was within twenty yards of the pitfall, and gave an excellent standing-place behind a double-stemmed tree. Wilson took the right, I the left, and from our slightly raised position we commanded the only approach the lions could well return by. I can say that my eyes were never off that opening, and yet so quietly and glidingly did a lion fill it that I did not see him till he had come—the coming was a blank to me; he was looking at me. A ball in the chest killed him. A second closed the gap, halted inquiringly by his companion, who was stretching in the death spasm, and raising his head caught sight of us. I covered him, but let Wilson fire—the ball raked him from chest to tail, and he dropped dead alongside his mate. After watching some time vainly for the third, we walked up to the carcases; they were both males; the one I had shot was the longest I ever killed, teeth, claws, skin, perfect, in his very prime; the other the oldest, most worn-out specimen, no teeth, no claws, stumps only, his grizzled hide mangy and full of the scars of old wounds; in fact, he was, as the Kafirs said, ‘Ra le tao,’ the father of lions. Neither had a sign of mane.
A poor young fellow who had come out to shoot, but was utterly unfitted for the work, lost his companion on one of the lower reaches of this river, near where we now were. From the natives’ account, it appeared his friend had fired at a goose, which fell in the river. He stripped to go in after it, though they begged him not, as there were alligators; he would not listen to them and swam out. When two or three yards from the bird he was observed to strike sideways, as if he saw something, and in another instant rearing himself half out of the water, with a cry, he sank. There was no doubt what had happened. I first came across the former of these two travellers in a pass not many days’ trek from Kolobeng, Livingstone’s station; but the interview was a short one, as I was inspanned and on the move. Next morning I found all his men, they were Ba-Quaina and knew me, had followed my waggons, and upon my questioning them they said they really could not stay with that white man, as he starved them. They had found him elephants two or three times, but he never killed any; he only rode after their tails, expecting them to fall off. Of course I insisted on their going back, and shot a rhinoceros on their promise of doing so, just for the present distress. Here was a country swarming with animals, a man with guns and ammunition in abundance, and yet he couldn’t ‘keep his camp.’ I would not blame him for that; but why did he not give up at once when he discovered, as he must soon have done, his utter incapacity? My friend Vardon had interviewed him before he started, at the Cape, I afterwards learnt, and asked him what he had come out for. ‘To shoot a lion,’ he replied. ‘Was that all?’ he was asked; and he replied, ‘Yes; if he did that he should be quite content.’ ‘You’d better have given 200l. and shot the one at the Zoo; it would have been cheaper, less trouble, and less dangerous too.’ Poor lad! he picked up another mate and started on another journey, goodness knows what for; and on my second return from the Zouga we found his skull with a bullet-hole through it, and some small articles of dress, near an old camp-fire two or three marches only from where we first met. The hyænas had dragged away the rest of the bones. Rightly or wrongly, his death was attributed to his companion, and strangely enough this man, subsequently joining himself to an expedition, met a similar fate himself. I never could get full particulars of this sad story.
The way in which, according to the Kafirs, the native dogs worked the alligators on this narrow Zouga River amused us. Three or four of them wished to cross, either for better fare, or to see their friends on the other side; but, though alligator is very partial to dog, dog is not so fond of alligator. Assembling on the banks, they would run, barking violently, a quarter of a mile up stream in full view; halt; join in a chorus of barking, yelping, and baying; suddenly pull up in the middle of the concert, and dash at the top of their speed, absolutely mute, out of sight on a lower level, to the point they had started from, jump into the water and swim across, selling the alligators, who, hungry after their ‘course of bark,’ were eagerly expecting their dinner at the spot where they had had the largest dose. Whether this was eyes or ears, or both, I could not make out. One beast has wits, another power; and so the balance is pretty fairly kept.
While still in the desert, during our first trip, Livingstone called my attention to a wonderful bit of instinct in a bird—he mentions it in his works, but it is worth telling a second time. We had been a couple of days without water, and I was enjoying watching the cattle swell themselves out in a chance thunder-shower pond we had just come to, and sitting dabbling my feet, when to me the dear old Doctor, ‘I say, what do you think is the greatest proof of conjugal affection you ever knew?’ ‘Go along, I’m not occupied with such matters.’ ‘Don’t be cross; come here. Do you see the chink in that tree, and that large horn-billed bird going backwards and forwards to it? What do you think he’s doing?‘ ‘Oh, making a fool of himself generally.’ ‘No, he’s feeding his wife and his children, who are shut in behind it.’ And it was so. The ornithological name of the bird I don’t know, but he’s something between a toucan and a hornbill, neither one nor the other, about the size of a large pigeon, though, if I remember right, more like a woodpecker in build. After marriage the birds select a hole in a tree, and gather a few sticks for a nest; the hen takes some feathers off her breast to line it and lays her eggs. When this is done, and incubation begins, the male bird goes to the nearest pond, and brings wet clay, with which he stops up the hole at which his wife went in, leaving one narrow opening in the centre, and through this the excellent fellow feeds mamma and little ones, until the latter are fledged and ready to leave the nest, then he and she, from outside and in, jointly peck away the clay, which has by this time under the dry heat become as hard as a brick, and madame and her family make their début. The poor monsieur is a rickle of bones, madame as round as a ball; the Kafirs, knowing this, always dig her out as a tit-bit whenever they find the nest. And what’s it done for? An African wood is filled with all sorts of cats, and without a protection the toucan (that’s not right, but let it stand) family would soon be improved off the earth, for a hole in a tree comes handy to a cat; but the clay very soon gets too hard for his claws, and the bird hatches in security. Now come with me towards a Kafir kraal, such as those of the Ba-Quaina or Ba-Wangketsi, permanent tribes. We walk through the outskirts; there’s our friend the toucan again, but there’s his wife too, and they keep alternately flying to and from that hole in the tree, out of which many gaping mouths are protruded at each visit. They are the same birds, but the house-door is open. Within a radius of five to six miles of every large kraal no cat exists. The Kafirs kill everything that runs upon four legs for food or clothing, the best carosses are made of cat-skins (I have one with thirty-six pussies in it), and the birds have found this out—instinct? or reason?