Chapter Thirty Two.
A Vast Herd of Antelopes.
Next day the young yägers were witnesses to a most extraordinary spectacle; and that was, a vast herd of blesboks,—so vast, that the plains appeared literally covered with their purple masses!
This herd was not browsing, nor at rest, but scouring up against the wind—as those hunted the day before had done—and evidently running as if some dreaded enemy in their rear had given them an alarm.
The mass of bodies was nearly half a mile in width; but it would have been difficult to estimate its length, as it continued to pass before the eyes of the yägers for more than an hour! On the animals poured, sometimes running in line, and sometimes the hindmost leaping over those that preceded them, moving like an impetuous torrent. All of them ran with necks extended forward, their noses close to the ground, like hounds running upon the scent!
Here and there they were closely packed in dense masses, while in the intervals between, the bucks were thinly interspersed; and now and then were wide breaks, like an army marching in column.
The cause of these openings was simply that the immense drove consisted of a great many separate herds, all running by one impulse; for it is a curious habit of the blesboks and bonteboks, that when one herd becomes alarmed, all the other herds that chance to be in the same plains with this one, both to windward and leeward of it, start off in succession; and as all, from their habit of running up the wind, must follow the same direction, a constant drove, or rather a continuous succession of droves is formed, and passes in open column before the spectator who may be on either flank. The wonderful spectacle of so many living creatures, running together in such countless numbers, brought to mind the accounts, which the young yägers had read, of the migrations of the buffalo on the prairies of America, and also those of the passenger-pigeon. Of course, the resemblance to the “trek-boken” of their own springboks, which all of them had witnessed, was also remembered.
On this day our hunters were more successful than upon the preceding. They had learnt by their experience of yesterday how to “jäg” the blesbok.