Yankee Girls in Zulu Land

by Louise Vescelius Sheldon

Chapter Seventeen.

Next morning we resumed our journey, and after five hours’ trek, made most enjoyable by the mode of travelling and the rugged beauty of the scenery, we arrived at “Grasslands,” the home of our friends. The house was of one-storey, well built and roomy, and being on a rise, commanded a fine view of the wild, uninhabited surrounding country. Our host was a handsome, high-spirited Englishman, with a little English child-wife, a dainty little piece of humanity.

As the young wife leaned against the veranda talking to us in her pink calico dress, broad-brimmed straw hat trimmed with a bit of lace, and a spray of jessamine she had pulled from the vine covering the front of the house, she did not look much like one to live where wild monkeys chatter in the trees, and savage beasts come within rifle range of the front door.

Our friend was engaged in ostrich-farming, and many of these queer-looking bipeds, with their long necks and floating feathers, the beauty of which is certainly wasted on their own backs, were wandering around the house. It had been an addition to our stock of information to learn in the Cape Colony that ostrich feathers were as much the product of regulated human labour as wool, mohair, or silk. We had always supposed ostrich feathers to be procured by hunters, and had in mind stories of their tactics in the chase of the fleet-footed bird. We learned that Cape farmers buy and sell ostriches as they do sheep, and fence their flock in, stable them, and grow crops for them. The eggs are not yet considered as belonging to the Cape dairy, and are not sent to market with bread and cheese. They are too precious for consumption, and too valuable even to be left for hatching to the rude methods of nature. The act of laying has not yet been dispensed with, but as soon as the eggs have been laid the nest is discarded, the parents are “locked out,” and the mechanical certainties of the incubator are substituted for parental instinct and affection. We were glad to learn, for the sake of our cherished traditions, that this farming was only of comparatively recent date, a domesticated ostrich being fifteen or twenty years ago unknown. There are now 150,000 of these domesticated birds in the Cape Colony, giving employment to not less than 8,000,000 dollars capital.

Our host informed us that the rearing of ostriches was an extremely difficult operation, as the bird itself, although devouring everything that comes in its way, from a steel fork to a lemon, is very delicate, and liable to injury in all sorts of ways. They are housed at night in circular kraals, surrounded by a low rush fence, the ostrich, despite his fleetness and strength of legs, being unable to mount or jump over any obstacle, and turned out during the day into the veldt in charge of a herd.

An ostrich can give a mighty kick, sufficient to break a man’s leg, but you may easily choke him by throwing your arms around his neck. The bird can then do nothing, for he has no strength in his wings to beat his enemy off, and is only able to use his formidable legs, like a horse, backward. Still, he is an awkward enemy to engage, for it requires some courage to rush up to a bird and embrace him until help arrives, or until you succeed in choking him. Despite the strength of his legs they are easily broken if the bird accidentally strikes them against any obstruction, such as a hanging bramble or a wire fence. He must be carefully watched to prevent such accidents, and it is also necessary to drive him away from any food likely to disagree with him. The feathers are sometimes plucked, and sometimes separated from the body by a sharp curved knife, each feather being taken separately. To do this the fanner drives them into a small inclosure, where there is little room to move about, and insinuates himself in among them, selecting such feathers as have arrived at maturity, and leaving the others to grow. The bird has a fresh crop of feathers every year, and as the prime feathers are very valuable, it may easily be believed that a lucky breeder finds the occupation a very profitable one.

The prettiest sight to see on an ostrich farm is the nursery, where, in a large room, in inclement weather, a score or more of little chicks are attended by a black boy, whom they follow everywhere.

Many farmers are unfortunate and meet with accidents, and thus lose heavily. Sometimes the soil is unfitted to grow the herbage necessary for the ostriches’ food, and there are many accidents they are liable to, such as dangers from prowling jackals or from severe storms. Then there are tigers and vultures to be guarded against. It will thus be seen that the ostrich farmer’s life is not necessarily a happy one. Our stay at Grasslands was made very pleasant by Mr M— and his wife. What with picnics in the wild surrounding country day after day, musical evenings on the moonlit lawn, a week passed away before we knew it.