Camp Fire Yarns of the Lost Legion

by G. Hamilton-Browne

BUSH TRACK.

I had also tried to teach the new chums some simple facts in bushcraft. The country here swarmed with feathered game: partridges, pheasants, and guinea-fowls. It was my custom to walk on before the train of waggons, on the trek, with my gun, and shoot plenty of these birds sunning themselves on the road. One evening when the men were inspanning, a very noisy job when you have eighteen waggons, I took my gun and strolled along as usual. The road was about thirty yards broad, and well-defined, the wide river running some one hundred yards on the right-hand side of it. I had progressed about two hundred yards from the outspan, but was still well within earshot and sight of it, when I saw the man I have mentioned come rushing through the trees and thorn bushes, down the slope on the left-hand side of the road. At first I thought he had gone mad, and so, for a time, he was. He had lost his hat, his khaki clothes were torn to rags, his face worked convulsively, with his eyes bulging out of his head, while the perspiration ran down him in streams. He reached the road within a yard or two of me; but he neither saw me, the road, nor the river in front of him. I jumped forward and seized him, saying: “What’s the matter with you? What are you doing here?”

He struggled for a moment, as if to try and break away; then some expression came into his face, and he gasped out: “Oh, thank God, major, you have found me. I knew you would look for me.”

“Look for you?” I said. “Why, what’s gone wrong with you?”

“Oh, sir,” he cried—and, strong man as he was, he shook with fear—“I’m lost in the bush.”

“Lost in the bush?” I said. “What do you mean? Don’t you see you are on the road? Don’t you see the waggons? Don’t you hear the row the boys are making inspanning, or see the river in front of you?”

“I do now, sir; but I saw nothing, and heard nothing, when you caught hold of me. Oh, thank God you found me.”

As he was quite unnerved, I took him back to my waggon, and gave him a tot, at the same time making inquiries as to the time he had left the camp; and I found out he had not been absent more than an hour. So much for the rapidity with which bush fear unnerves a new chum, no matter how strong he is, unless he has the will-power to fight against it. On questioning this man, subsequently, he told me he had only strolled into the bush for a few minutes, then tried to find the waggons, had failed to do so, started running, and remembered no more. Fortunately he had run in a circle that crossed the road; had he circled in the other direction, nothing could have saved him, and another case of the bush having claimed a white man’s life would have been registered. Now anyone would think that one experience of that sort would have been enough for that man, but it was not, for, some time afterwards, he again went off by himself, and again got lost. At this time we were trekking through very rough country, full of steep, high granite kopjes, and, notwithstanding my strict orders to the contrary, he left the waggons, and went into the bush alone. On his absence that night being reported to me, I took a party of colonial blacks with a couple of Mashonas and ascended a big kopje, at the foot of which we were outspanned, and from that height examined the country. It was not long before I spotted a fire, about two miles away, that was evidently a white man’s fire; so I at once had an answering fire lit, and carefully took the bearings of the one I saw.