But Vrouw Van Vuuren looked meanwhile straight in front of her, with a rather grim look upon her strong old face.
“Cornelis Van Vuuren,” she said, after a little pause, looking now very hard at her husband, “that is an old and a foolish story that has been told far too many times already. I will not have it told in my house. If you wish to repeat tales that are better dead and buried, you must go outside.”
Cornelis looked at his wife. One glance, and a long experience—nearly fifty years of married life—told him plainly enough that the vrouw was in earnest.
“That is all right, Anna, my dear,” he said simply. “I won’t tease you with an old joke. Come, my friend (to me), we will smoke our pipes outside.”
We sat ourselves down upon the broad stoep (veranda) which ran round the house, and smoked our pipes. Franz had gone to the sheep-kraals to see that all was well for the night. The sun had just set, and the western heavens and horizon were still aflame with colour. A strange, mellow, refracted light filled the upper air, and threw the flat grass plains, stretching everywhere around, into strong relief. Far out upon these grassy flats, some half a mile away, grazed a troop of springbok, their shining white and cinnamon coats flecking the plain brilliantly. The mingled bleat of sheep and goats and the low of neat cattle came not unpleasantly from the kraals behind the dwelling. I saw that the old man’s eye was resting upon the springboks, now grazing so peacefully upon the plain. Presently he took his pipe from his mouth, shook his head regretfully, and said, “’Tis a pity the wilde (game) are going so fast. I never could have believed it. When I first trekked through this country, in 1837, the land was darkened with wild animals. Almighty! they ran in millions. Quagga, Bonte quagga, black wildebeest, elands, hartebeest, ostrich, springboks, blesboks. Ach! Kerel! (my boy) I tell you I have passed across these plains through a herd of trek-bokken (migrating springboks) three or four miles broad, and extending as far as a man’s eye could reach. All day we passed through that trek-bokken. I shall never forget it, never. We shot scores of buck, till we were tired; but we were chiefly anxious to get past the springboks, which had eaten off every blade of grass for miles upon miles, so that our oxen and horses looked like being starved. And now, almost all gone, all gone!”
“But,” I said, “although you Afrikanders have pretty well cleaned out the Free State and Transvaal, there is still a good deal of game beyond. Along the Sabi River, for instance!”
“Yes, yes,” said the old fellow, “that’s right enough; but even there the heavy game’s going. Why, how many elephants does a man now get in a season’s hunt? Eight or ten, perhaps,—if he is a good man,—and thinks himself lucky. Why, Kerel, when I first hunted along the Crocodile, I shot sixty elephants to my own roer (gun) in five months. That was something like a game country,—elephants and rhinoceros as common as goats in a kraal.”
“Was that the season you met the Frenchman?” I inquired, with a smile.
“No, no,” briskly responded Cornelis, with a sly look towards the room where the vrouw still sat. “Not that season, nor the next. But you would like to hear the yarn, and it always make me laugh to tell it. Laughter is good. I was always a merry one, and that, thank the Heer God, is the reason I have got so well through my troubles. Your sour-faced fellow is no good for the long trek through life.
“Well, well! It was a funny business that of the good vrouw there and the little Frenchman. It happened in this way. In the third year after we had got into the Transvaal, about two years after we had driven Moselikatse and his verdomde (infernal) Matabele rascals beyond the Crocodile, I was shooting elephants up in the north. The vrouw was with me, and the children,—we had three young children then,—and we had made a big scherm (camp) some way south of the Crocodile, a few miles out of reach of the ‘fly,’ (Tse-tse fly) which, I can tell you, was in those days a terrible pest.