Occasionally—and even at this time and distance it is hardly to be recalled without a shudder—the incubator would contain a bad egg. Imagine all the horrors of a bad hen's egg, multiplied by twenty-four! The whole drawer would be so pervaded by the odour that it was difficult for some time to discover the actual offender; and when at last it revealed itself by an uncanny moisture exuding through the shell, an amount of courage and caution was required for its removal and safe depositing outside, which suggested very flattering comparisons of one's own conduct with that of a soldier winning the V.C. by carrying away a live shell.
An incautious friend of T——'s was too closely investigating a doubtful ostrich-egg, when it exploded with a loud report. He was an old gentleman, with a beautiful white beard; and his condition, as described by T——, who—luckily from a safe distance—witnessed the accident, is best left to the imagination. Suffice it to say that an immediate and prolonged bath was imperative, and that a whole suit of clothes had to be destroyed.
In the days when chicks were so valuable, people who did not possess incubators sometimes had recourse to a strange way of hatching those eggs which, during the sitting, were either left orphaned by accident, or, as in the case of Jackie, deserted in consequence of floods. Some poor old Hottentot woman would be carefully tucked up, in company with the eggs, under numerous blankets,—where she would remain bed-ridden until she had hatched out the last chick. Sometimes, even, the stout, lethargic Dutch vrouw herself, to whose indolent nature the task was doubtless congenial enough, would perform the part of foster-mother.
When, either by natural or artificial means, the little ostriches are safely brought into the world, the farmer's next anxiety is to keep them there. They do well enough on the coast; but in the Karroo they are most difficult to rear, and our experience with them has been sad and disheartening. Numbers of them die, when about a month or five weeks old, from an epidemic which comes and goes in the strangest manner. During a whole season, for instance, one farmer will lose nearly every chick; while brood after brood will be successfully reared by another at no very great distance. Next year, perhaps, it is the turn of the latter to be the sufferer; and vice versa. Our unlucky year had a most promising beginning, unusually good rains having filled the country with nests; yet at the end of the season all we had to show of the rising generation of ostriches was a poor little troop of fifteen lanky, ragged-looking creatures, which through some rare toughness of constitution had survived the perils of infancy—over two hundred having succumbed.
The disappointment of losing the chicks is much intensified by the fact that they always begin so well. For the first three weeks nothing can be more encouraging than the appearance of the stout, sturdy toddlers; they eat voraciously and are full of life and spirits, waltzing, in absurd imitation of their elders, to show their joy on being first let out in the morning—the effort usually ending in a comical sprawl on the back.
Again and again comes the delusive hope that the spell is broken at last; that the luck has turned, and that this little brood is really going to live. But alas!—one morning, during that fatal fourth week, you notice that one little head, instead of being held up saucily and independently, is poking forward and downward in a dejected manner with which you are only too well acquainted. You know at once that the owner of that head is doomed, and that it will not be long before most, if not all, of his brethren show the same dreaded symptom. The disease is quite incurable—indeed, I have never known of an ostrich, old or young, recovering from any illness whatever; and though we tried all possible kinds of medicine, diet, and treatment, resolutely refusing to despair of any case while a spark of life remained, those chicks persisted in dying, sometimes at the rate of three or four a day. I was hospital nurse, and so deeply did I take to heart the loss of patient after patient that it became a joke with T——; and a plentiful sprinkling of grey happening just at this time to make its appearance on my head, he still attributes each silver thread to a little dead ostrich. A post-mortem examination of chicks which have died of this disease shows the liver to be of the bright colour of orange-peel.
Internal parasites also destroy a good many chicks; and altogether the little lives are precarious, and every troop of young birds successfully reared in the Karroo is a triumph.
For the first two or three months the chicks are herded near the house by boys, whose duty it is to keep them well supplied with prickly pear leaves and other green food, cut up small. This work ought to take up the greater part of the young herd's time; but—small boys being no more satisfactory as servants in the Karroo than they are anywhere else—we found it necessary to keep a very strict watch; and often during the day, however busy I might be, I would "make time" to run down to the shady spot which was the chicks' place of encampment—generally to find the infants hungry, and their useless nurse either asleep or plunged in some absorbing business of his own with a knife and a piece of wood. Sometimes, too, the boys, getting impatient with the chicks, were rough and cruel; one budding criminal especially was several times caught making footballs of his innocent charges, kicking them up several feet into the air. And on a farm where T—— was once staying, a juvenile black fiend was found to have deliberately broken the legs of some twenty chicks under his care; and, when asked the reason of his conduct, said, "They run about, give me too much trouble."
The chicks are often attacked by old birds—always spiteful to little ones which are not their own—and we have had several kicked to death by their vindictive elders. On a neighbouring farm, however, dwelt the usual exception to the rule, in the shape of an old hen, which—although herself not a mother—showed such a strong affection for chicks, and took such devoted care of them, that at last, much to her delight, she was appointed to the post of herd, vice the small boy, dismissed as incorrigible. She filled the place of the latter far better than he had ever done; leading the little creatures, with the greatest care, wherever the tenderest veldt was to be found; never losing her temper with them, or failing to bring the full number home to bed at sundown; and altogether acquitting herself in a wonderfully sedate and business-like manner for so scatter-brained a creature as an ostrich.
Her history ought of course to have ended here; but truth compels me to state that at last, after she had successfully brought up many families of chicks, and had come to be respected and trusted as the steadiest and most useful of farm-servants, one day the idiotic ostrich-nature asserted itself; she took a sudden and senseless fright—probably at nothing—lost her wits, bolted right away, leaving the chicks to get dispersed about the veldt, where only a few were found; and was herself never heard of again.