Then abandoning his excited polyglot he gabbled off in pure Zulu and at incredible speed a long account of the big Crocodile: it had carried off four boys going to the goldfields that year; it had taken a woman and a baby from the kraal near by, but a white man had beaten it off with a bucket; it had taken all the dogs, and even calves and goats, at the drinking-place; and goodness knows how much more. How Jim got his news, and when he made his friends, were puzzles never solved.
Hunting stories, like travellers tales, are proverbially dangerous to reputations, however literally true they may be; and this is necessarily so, partly because only exceptional things are worth telling, and partly because the conditions of the country or the life referred to are unfamiliar and cannot be grasped. It is a depressing but accepted fact that the ideal, lurid—and, I suppose, convincing—pictures of wild life are done in London, where the author is unhampered by fact or experience.
“Stick to the impossible, and you will be believed: keep clear of fact and commonplace, and you cannot be checked.”
Such was the cynical advice given many years ago by one who had bought his experience in childhood and could not forget it. Sent home as a small boy from a mission station in Zululand to be educated by his grandparents, he found the demand for marvels among his simple country relatives so great that his small experience of snakes and wild animals was soon used up; but the eager suggestive questions of the good people, old and young, led him on, and he shyly crossed the border. The Fields of Fancy were fair and free; there were no fences there; and he stepped out gaily into the Little People’s country—The Land of Let’s Pretendia! He became very popular.
One day, however, whilst looking at the cows, he remarked that in Zululand a cow would not yield her milk unless the calf stood by.
The old farmer stopped in his walk, gave him one suspicious look, and asked coldly, “What do they do when a calf is killed or dies?”
“They never kill the calves there;” the boy answered, “but once when one died father stuffed the skin, with grass and showed it to the cow; because they said that would do.”
The old man, red with anger, took the boy to his room, saying that as long as he spoke of the lions, tigers and snakes that he knew about, they believed him; but when it came to farming! No! Downright lying he would not have; and there was nothing for it but larruping.
“It was the only piece of solid truth they had allowed me to tell for months,” he added thoughtfully, “and I got a first-class hiding for it.”
And was there no one who doubted Du Chaillu and Stanley and others? Did no one question Gordon Cumming’s story of the herd of elephants caught and killed in a little kloof? and did not we of Barberton many years later locate the spot by the enormous pile of bones, and name it “Elephants’ Kloof?”