“Well, you fellows,” concluded the old trader, “that’s the true story of the saddest Easter morning I ever remember to have experienced or even heard of. Englishmen who come into this country scarcely, I think, make sufficient allowance for what the Transvaal Dutch have gone through in the conquest and settlement of their territory. Few families there are among the Boers but can tell you of some such experience as I have given you to-night. To my mind, it is scarcely wonderful that these people cling so tightly to the soil on which so much of their best blood has been spilt. Good-night, all. It’s late and I must turn in.” And the old fellow rose from the fire, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, stretched himself, and climbed into his waggon.
Chapter Thirteen.
The Mystery of Hartebeest Fontein.
Upon a morning of early December in the year 1880, Arend Van Driel, the Trek Boer, stood upon his waggon-box anxiously scanning the plains for any sight of game. Leaning upon the tilt and shading his eyes from the already powerful sun, his feverish glance swept the great grass plains for the faintest token of animal life. Alas, it appeared that here the veldt was deserted. The big Dutchman’s eyes ran fruitlessly over the waste again and again, until they rested upon a little chain of brown hills, just now rose-tinted by the flush of the early morning sun, but nothing in the shape of a herd of game was to be seen. With a deep sigh the Boer climbed slowly down from the waggon and joined his family at their miserable breakfast, by the remains of the overnight camp fire. And, indeed, Arend Van Driel had good cause for dejection.
Two years before, he and his family had quitted the Transvaal with a great body of Trek Boers, who had made up their minds to leave a country upon which misrule and misfortune had long rested, and which now lay beneath the hands of the hated British Government. The misfortunes of that ill-fated Trek have long since become historical in the annals of the Transvaal Dutch. Thirst, famine, fever and dysentery were soon busy among the members of one of the most disastrous and ill-managed expeditions ever known in South Africa. The trek cattle perished by hundreds in the Thirstlands of the Northern Kalahari, the flocks and herds, left masterless, wandered and strayed, and disappeared by thousands. Along the rivers and swamps of Ngamiland and the Okavango, sickness and suffering destroyed whole families. The trek had set forth with the highest and most exaggerated hopes, chiefly based upon the gross ignorance of these misguided and fanatical farmers. They moved north-westward towards some unknown Land of Canaan, where, as they fondly imagined, great snow mountains stood, where the veldt was always rich and flourishing, where clear waters ran abundantly, and where the wild game wandered as thick as sheep in a fold. Some even believed, as their fathers had believed, when they moved into the Transvaal country, that somewhere in this new and unknown land, the great Nile river itself would be found. After more than two years of disastrous trekking, most of these vain imaginings had been rudely dispelled, but still, their faces set ever doggedly westward, these stubborn people toiled on.
During the expedition, the trekkers had necessarily become much scattered; thus Arend Van Driel and his family stood alone this December day of 1880 by a small pan of muddy water, where they had halted to recruit their exhausted trek oxen and the two horses that remained to them. They had quitted the Transvaal with two hundred head of cattle and six hundred sheep and goats. These once thriving flocks and herds were now represented by some two score of miserable sheep and goats, mere bags of bones, which could scarcely drag one limb after another. It was absolutely necessary to husband even these slender resources, and Van Driel had therefore been anxiously surveying the surrounding veldt for some herd of game from which he could secure a meal or two for his starving family. He now moved up to the camp fire with disappointment written plainly upon his gaunt, sun-tanned and bearded face. His wife knelt in a ragged old stuff dress stirring some thin porridge of Kaffir corn—their only present sustenance—in an iron pot. She looked up from underneath her sun-bonnet, and, catching the gloom upon her husband’s face, ejaculated, “Nie wilde, Arend?” (“No game, Arend?”) “Nie wilde, nie,” returned Arend disconsolately. “I think the Lord means us to die after all in this desert. Cursed was the day we ever left the Transvaal.” He sat himself down in the red sand by his children, after they had been helped to a small plateful of porridge each, and took and ate his own portion. There were four children left to the Van Driels. There had been seven when they quitted the Transvaal. Three had died of fever at Vogel Pan, a little to the south of the Okavango. Of those remaining, Hermannus, a big lad of fifteen, seemed fairly strong; the other three, a boy and two girls, ranging from five to twelve, looked, poor things, pale, weak and dispirited from fever, misery and semi-starvation. The clothes of all were tattered and ragged and hung loosely about them.
The interior of the big waggon hard by looked very bare for a Dutchman’s. But, as a matter of fact, almost all the little stock of furniture and house gear had been perforce abandoned. Ploughs, farming implements, tables and chairs, and other impedimenta, all now lay in the middle of that dire Thirstland between Khama’s and the Botletli River, where they had long since been cast away to lighten the load. Even the very waggon chairs—dear to every Boer—had been thrown away. Hermannus, the eldest lad, was the first to finish that meagre breakfast of ground millet, boiled in water. He now rose and in his turn climbed to the waggon and took a survey over the country. Suddenly an exclamation broke from his lips. “Father, there’s game half a mile away, just moving from behind that patch of bush. I think they are hartebeest.”
The stolid, melancholy-looking Boer was roused in an instant from his apathy. He climbed quickly to the waggon, and in his turn gazed intently at the game. “Yes, that’s right enough, Hermannus,” he said; “they’re hartebeest—they must have slept behind those bushes last night—and they’re coming straight this way. Ah! see, they have got our wind.” Even as he spoke the troop of game, some thirty in number, suddenly halted, turned in their tracks, and cantered in that heavy, loping fashion, which these fleet antelopes adopt in their slower paces, towards the heart of the plain.
Calling to the two Kaffir servants still remaining to him to bring in the horses, just now feeding, knee-haltered, upon the veldt a hundred yards away, Van Driel and his son looked to their saddles and bridles, filled a water bottle, reached down their Westley-Richards rifles and bandoliers from the waggon hooks, and buckled on a rusty spur apiece.
“We shall be back before sunset, wife,” said Van Driel. “I think, after all, the Heer God means us to have a right good dinner.” And so, mounting, he rode off with Hermannus.
“The Heer God be with you both,” echoed Vrouw Van Driel, “and may you bring meat—we want it badly enough.” The three younger children cried luck after their father and brother, and waved their hands, and so, watching the horsemen cantering away, gazed and gazed until the two forms presently faded from mere specks into absolute oblivion, and were swallowed up in the immensity of the great plain.