The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction

by John Buchan

There remain the numerous game-birds of the country. The finest is, of course, the greater paauw, but he is not very common in the Transvaal itself, though frequent enough in Bechuanaland, Rhodesia, and some parts of the northern bush veld. But of the bustard family, to which the comprehensive name of korhaan is applied, there are at least four varieties, two of which are very common. The bustard is an easy bird, save that he carries a good deal of shot, and has a knack of keeping out of range unless properly stalked or driven. The Dutch word “patrys,” again, covers at least eight varieties of the true partridge, and if we include the sand-grouse (called the Namaqua partridge), of two or three more. None of the South African partridge tribe are equal to their English brothers; but there is no reason why the English bird should not be introduced, and thrive well, and indeed experiments in this direction are being made. There are three birds which the Dutch call “pheasant,” two of them francolins and one the curious dikkop—birds which have few of the qualities of the English pheasant, but which are strong on the wing, offer fair shots, and make excellent eating. Quail are found at certain seasons of the year in vast quantities, and give good sport with dogs; but to my mind the finest South African bird, excepting of course the greater paauw, is the guinea-fowl, which the Dutch call by the quaint and beautiful name of tarentaal. There are two varieties, fairly well distributed—the ordinary crested (Numida coronata) and the blue-headed (Numida Edouardi). In parts of the bush veld they may be seen roosting at night on trees so thickly that the branches are bent with their weight. When pursued in broken country, what with dodging among stones and trees and his short unexpected flight, the guinea-fowl offers some excellent shooting, and as a table-bird he is not easy to beat. Wildfowl are an uncertain quantity on the uplands, though very common nearer the coast. They do not come to the rivers, but, on the other hand, they frequent in great numbers farm dams and the pans and lakes of Standerton and Ermelo. What the Dutch call specifically the “wilde gans” is the Egyptian goose; but several other varieties, including the spur-winged, are to be found. There are some ten kinds of duck, but it would be difficult to say which is the commonest, as they vary in different districts. The Dutch call a bird “teel” which is not the true teal, but the variety known as the Cape teal (Nettion capense), though there is more than one kind of proper teal to be met with. There is a black duck, a variety of pochard, a variety of shoveller, and a kind of shell-duck which is known as the mountain duck (bergeend). Wild pigeons exist in endless quantities; and I must not omit the pretty spur-winged plover, which cries all day long on the western veld, or that most cosmopolitan of birds, the snipe. Along the reed-beds of the Limpopo, in the bulrushes which fringe the pans in Ermelo, by every spruit and dam, you may put up precisely the same fellow that you shoot in Hebridean peat-mosses or on Swedish lakes, or along the canals of Lower Egypt. The little brown long-billed bird has annihilated time and space and taken the whole world for his home.

There is need of some little care lest we drive the wild birds altogether away from the neighbourhood of the towns. They are still plentiful, but, if over-shot, they change their quarters; and people complain that whereas five years ago they could get excellent shooting within three miles of their door, they have now to content themselves with a few stragglers. It is for the owners of land to see that its denizens are properly protected, for the disappearance of big game is an awful warning not to presume on present abundance. Some day we may hope to see the country farmer as eager to preserve his game as he is now to destroy it. There needs but the pinch of scarcity and the growth of a market value for shooting to turn the present free-and-easy ways into a perhaps too rigorous protective system.

There remain two sports which are still in their infancy in the country and deserve serious development—the keeping of harriers and angling. I say harriers advisedly, for though it would be better to stick to drafts from foxhound packs because of the greater strength and hardiness of the hounds, yet the sport can never fairly be dignified by the name of fox-hunting. The quarries will be the hare, the small buck, and in certain districts the jackal. The veld in parts is a fine natural hunting-ground, and the hazards, which will be wanting in the shape of hedges and banks, will exist very really in ant-bear holes and dongas. As the fencing laws take effect there will be wire to go over for those who have Australian nerves. The Afrikander pony is an animal born for the work, and once harrier packs were established there is every reason to believe that the Dutch farmers would join in the sport. The only two reasons I have ever heard urged against the proposal are—first, that hounds when brought out to South Africa lose their noses; and, second, that it would be hard to get a good scent in the dry air of the veld. The first is true in a sense, but only because a draft brought out from home is usually set to work at once and not acclimatised gradually to the change of air. There is no inherent impossibility in keeping a dog’s nose good, as is shown by the many excellent setters and pointers that have been imported. In any case, if the master of harriers breeds carefully he ought in a few years to get together a thoroughly acclimatised pack. As for the matter of scent, there is no denying that it would not lie on the ordinary hot dry day, but this only means that it will not be possible to hunt all the year round. I can imagine no better weather than the cool moist days which are common on the high veld in autumn and early spring, and even in summer the mornings up to ten o’clock are cool enough for the purpose. South African hunts must follow the Indian fashion, and when they cannot get whole days for their sport make the best of the early hours.

Fishing, I am afraid, has been in the past a neglected sport. The Boer left it to the Kaffir, and the uitlander had better things to think about. Had the land possessed any native fish of the type of the American brook-trout or the land-locked salmon, perhaps it would have been different; but in the high-veld streams the only notable fish are two species of carp, known as yellow-fish and white-fish, which run from 2 lb. to 6 lb., and the barbel, which may weigh anything up to 30 lb.[14] There are also eels, which may be disregarded. I do not think these South African fish are to be despised, for though they may be dead-hearted compared with a trout or a salmon, they give better sport than English coarse fish, and the barbel is quite as good as a pike. The ordinary bait is mealie-meal paste, a locust or any kind of small animal, a phantom minnow, and even a piece of bright rag. I have known both kinds of carp take a brightly coloured sea-trout fly, and give the angler a very good run for his pains. But the great South African fish is the tiger-fish, confined, unhappily, to sub-tropical rivers and malarial country. He is not unlike a trout in appearance, save for his fierce head, which suggests the Salmo ferox. In any of the eastern rivers—Limpopo, Letaba, Olifants, Sabi, Crocodile, Komati, Usutu, Umpilusi—he is the chief—indeed, so far as I could judge, the only—fish, and he is one of the most spirited of his tribe. He will readily take an artificial minnow, and also, I am told, a large salmon fly, but the tackle must be at least as strong as for pike, for his formidable teeth will shear through any ordinary casting line. His average weight is perhaps about 10 lb., though he has been caught up to 30 lb., but it is not his size so much as his extraordinary fierceness and dash which makes him attractive. When hooked he leaps from the water like a clean salmon, and for an hour or more he may lead the perspiring fisherman as pretty a dance as he could desire. If any one is inclined to think angling a tame sport, I can recommend this experiment. Let him go out on some river like the Komati on a stifling December day, when the sky is brass above and not a breath of air breaks the stillness, in one of the leaky and crazy cobles of those parts. Let him hook and land a tiger-fish of 20 lb., at the imminent risk of capsizing and joining the company of the engaging crocodiles, or, when he has grassed the fish, of having a finger bitten off by his iron teeth, and then, I think, he will admit, so far as his scanty breath will allow him, that an hour’s fishing may afford all the excitement which an average man can support.

So much for the fish of the country. But Central South Africa affords a magnificent field for the introduction and acclimatisation of the greatest of sporting fish. Ceylon and New Zealand have already shown what can be done with the trout in new waters, and in Cape Colony and Natal the same experiment has been made with much success. The high veld is only less good than New Zealand as a home for trout. To be sure, there is no snow-water, but there is the next best thing in water whose temperature varies very little all the year round. The ordinary sluggish spruits are of course unsuitable, but the mountain burns in the east and north are perfect natural trout-streams, with clear cold water, abundant fall, gravel bottoms, and all the feeding which the most gluttonous of fish could desire. The Transvaal Trout Acclimatisation Society, founded in Johannesburg in 1902, has established a hatchery on the Mooi River above Potchefstroom, and is making the most praiseworthy efforts, by the creation of local committees, to excite a general interest in the work throughout the country. It will still be some years before any trout-stream can be stocked and thrown open to anglers; but there is no reason why in time there should not be one in most districts. The Mooi and the Klip rivers near Johannesburg, the Magalies and the Hex rivers in Rustenburg, the Upper Malmani in Lichtenburg, every stream in Magatoland and the Wood Bush, the torrents which fall from Lydenburg into the flats, and all the many mountain streams which run into Swaziland from the high veld, may yet be as good trout-waters as any in Lochaber. The rainbow and the Lochleven trout will be the staple importation; but in some of the larger streams experiments might be made with the American ouananiche and the Danubian huchen. It is difficult to exaggerate the service which might thus be rendered to the country. If in the dams and streams within easy distance of the towns a sound form of sport can be provided at reasonable cost, the first and greatest of the amenities of life will have been introduced. At present on the Rand there are no proper modes of relaxation: most men work till they drop, and then take their jaded holiday in Europe. Yet how many, if they had the chance, would go off from Saturday to Monday with their rods, and find by the stream-side the old healing quiet of nature?

There is a future for South African sport if South Africa is alive to her opportunity. It is a country of sportsmen, and sport with the better sort of man is a sound basis of friendship. Game Preservation Societies are being started in many districts, and when we find the two races united in a common purpose, which touches not politics or dogma but the primitive instincts of humankind, something will have been done towards unity. The matter is equally important from the standpoint of game protection. The private landowner can do more than the land company, and the land company can do more than the Government, towards ensuring the future of sport. Many Dutch farmers have preserved in the past, and a general extension of this spirit would work wonders in a few years. Vanishing species would be saved, banished game would return, and our conscience would be clear of one of the most heinous sins of civilisation. As an instance of what can be done by private effort, there is a farm not sixty miles from a capital city where at this moment there are impala, rooi hartebeest, koodoo, and wild ostrich.

There are few countries in the world where sport can be enjoyed in more delectable surroundings. The cold fresh mornings, when the mist is creeping from the grey hills and the vigour of dawn is in the blood; the warm sun-steeped spaces at noonday; the purple dusk, when the veld becomes a kind of Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon, full of fairy lights and mysterious shadows; the bitter night, when the southern constellations blaze in the profound sky,—he who has once seen them must carry the memory for ever. It is such things, and not hunger and thirst and weariness, which remain in a man’s mind. For the lover of nature and wild things (which is to say the true sportsman) it is little wonder if, after these, home and ambition and a comfortable life seem degrees of the infinitely small. And the others, who are only brief visitors, will carry away unforgettable pictures to tantalise them at work and put them out of all patience with an indoor world—the bivouac under the stars on the high veld, or some secret glen of the Wood Bush, or the long lines of hill which huddle behind Lydenburg into the sunset.

[12] In other parts of British Africa the policy of reserves has received full recognition. In East Africa there are two large reserves, one along the Uganda Railway and the other near Lake Rudolf. In the Soudan there is a vast reserve between the Blue and the White Niles, and most of the best shooting-ground throughout the country is strictly protected.

[13] The eland is the one conspicuous exception.

[14] A Transvaal friend informs me that my classification, though the one commonly in use, is quite inaccurate. The yellow-fish and the white-fish are not carp but species of barbel, and what I have called barbel is another variant of the same family, called by the Dutch “kalverskop,” or “calf’s-head,” from its shape. There is no true carp, though the Dutch give the name of “kurper” to a very curious little fish about four inches long which is common in streams flowing into the Vaal. The other chief varieties are the coarse mud-fish and the cat-fish, which latter is often mixed up with the barbel. It is to be hoped that some local ichthyologist will give his attention to the native fishes—a very interesting subject, and one at present in the most unscientific confusion.