Trained hounds with hanging ears, each with a stiff leather collar on its neck;
They beset her and she turned to meet them with her horns
Like to spears of Semhar in their sharpness and their length.
To thrust them away: for she knew well, if she drove them not off,
That the fated day of her death among the fates of beasts had come;
And among them, Kesâb was thrust through and slain and rolled in blood lay there,
And Sukhâm was left in the place where he made his onset.”
There the description breaks off. In spite of the haunting cry of the cow of Lucretius, in spite of the immortal tears of Shakespeare’s “poor sequester’d stag”—no vision of a desperate animal in all literature seems to me so charged with every element of pathos and dramatic intensity as this cow of Lebid. How fine is the altogether unforeseen close, which leaves us wondering, breathless: Will she escape? Will no revengeful arrow reach her? Will the archers do as Om Piet did to the wildebeest?—
“A wildebeest cow and calf were pursued by Om Piet with three hunting-dogs. The Boer hunter tells the tale: ‘The old cow laid the first dog low; the calf is now tired. The second dog comes up to seize it; the cow strikes him down. Now the third dog tries to bite the little one, who can run no more, but the cow treats him so that there’s nothing to be done but to shoot him. Then Om Piet stands face to face with the wildebeest, who snorts but does not fly. Now though I come to shoot a wildebeest yet can I not kill a beast that has so bravely fought and will not run away; so Om Piet takes off his hat, and says, “Good-day to you, old wildebeest. You are a good and strong old wildebeest.” And we dine off springbuck that night at the farm.’”[[7]]
[7]. “A Breath from the Veldt,” by Guille Millais, 2nd edition, 1899.