During the progress of one of his conversations with Mr. Evans, who, like all the rest of those whose acquaintance he had made since leaving his native land, was an ardent and experienced sportsman, Oscar spoke of the loss of his goat, and asked what sort of an animal it was that carried it off.
"It was a hyena—a spotted hyena—the pest of this country," replied his host. "It was well for your dogs that they did not take hold of him, for he would have made mince-meat of the whole pack before they could have yelped twice. In point of cunning and rapacity, the spotted hyena surpasses every beast of prey in Africa. I except nothing. An animal that can take a child out of its mother's arms when both are asleep, and get away with it without alarming anybody, would not have much difficulty in stealing a goat from under a wagon, would he?"
Oscar could only look the surprise that these words occasioned.
"What I am about to tell you I know to be a fact, although you will scarcely credit it," continued Mr. Evans. "When I first came to this country wolves, as we call them here, were in the habit of paying regular nightly visits to the streets of Cape Town, and it was not so very long ago that their howling (the cries they utter sound more like laughing than howling, and for that reason they are sometimes called laughing hyenas) was heard from Table Mountain.
"In the Kaffir country they are so numerous and daring that they make a business of entering the villages of the natives and carrying off young children. When a native builds a house, which is in form something like an old-fashioned straw bee-hive, the floor is raised two or three feet from the ground, and covers only part of the house—the back part. In the space between this raised floor and the door, which is nothing but a piece of antelope hide, the calves are tied every night, for protection from the storms and from wild beasts. Now you would suppose that when a wolf got into one of these houses he would grab the first thing he came to, but he won't do it. He'll not look at lambs or calves if he has once tasted human flesh. He will pass them without alarming them, get upon the raised floor, and take a child from under its mother's kaross, and he will do it in so gentle and cautious a manner that no one is awakened. What do you think of that?"
Oscar did not know what to think of it. It beat anything he had ever heard of.