The depression beyond this fountain is celebrated as the resort of game, and yesterday a French gentleman of my acquaintance went there, provided with all the accoutrements of sport, not omitting a copious luncheon-basket—there might be snipe or partridges, or perhaps a hare, a gazelle, a leopard—who knows?
He returned in good time for dinner.
"Voilà ma chasse!" he said, opening his bag. It contained a bundle of wild asparagus, for salad, and fourteen frogs, which he had killed with a rifle.
"You can't get frogs as easily in my part of France," he told me. "If the sport were not forbidden for seven months out of the twelve, the species would long ago have become extinct."
I enquired whether the close-season for frogs was officially set down, like that of hares or wildfowl.
"Frogs," he explained, "are not considered game in the governmental sense of that word; they fall into the category of fisheries which, as you know, comes under the jurisdiction of the respective prefects. Hence the close-time, though officially fixed, varies according to the different provinces. In my department, for example, it begins on the 15th of January. At Gafsa, if I may judge by certain indications, it would probably be arranged to commence still earlier."
Far be it from me to decry the succulent hams of Rana esculenta (or rather ridibunda). I have been offered far more fearful wild-fowl nearer home—certain ornithological wrecks, I mean, that have been kept beyond the feather-adhering stage, and then reverently held before a fire, for two minutes, wrapped in a bag, lest the limbs should drop off.
There is considerable talk at Gafsa of the wild mountain sheep, the Barbary mouflon. They say that as late as the early nineties it was no uncommon thing to meet with flocks of over thirty grazing in the mountains. Although a special permit must now be obtained to be allowed to shoot them, their numbers have much diminished. But the accounts vary so wonderfully that one cannot form any idea of their frequency. Some talk of seventeen being shot in the course of two weeks' camping, others of three in a whole season. As a rule, they are not stalked, but driven, by an army of Arabs which the sheikh organizes for that purpose, towards certain openings in the hills where the sportsman takes up his stand. The desert lynx is sometimes met with, and hyenas, they say, occur as near to Gafsa as the Jebel Assalah. Arabs have told me that the fat of the hyena is used by native thieves and burglars to smear on their bodies when they go marauding. The dogs, they say, are so terrorized by the smell of it, so numbed with fear and loathing, that they have not the heart to bark. (Pliny records an ancient notion to the effect that dogs, on coming in contact with the hyena's shadow, lose their voice.)
Here, at the Jebel Assalah, I encountered a jackal—a common beast, but far oftener heard than seen. While resting in a sunny hollow of rock, I heard a wild cry which came from a shepherd who was driving the jackal away from his goats. The discomfited brute trotted in my direction, and only caught sight of me at a few yards' distance. I never saw a jackal more surprised in my life. When a camel expires in the plain near some nomads' tents, they sometimes set a spring-trap for jackals near the carcase—they eat these beasts and sell their skin for a few francs; the traps are craftily concealed underground, with a little brushwood thrown over them to aid the deception. It is impossible to be aware of their existence. But woe betide the wanderer who steps on them!
For the machine closes with the shock of an earthquake, a perfect volcano of dust and iron teeth leaping into the air. Its force is such that the jackal's leg is often cut clean off, and he hops away on the remaining three. For this and other reasons, therefore, it is advisable not to approach too near a dead camel.