“Both in grain and color it resembles beef, but is far better tasted and more delicate, possessing a pure game flavor, and exhibiting the most tempting looking layers of fat and lean—the surprising quantity of the former ingredient with which it is interlarded exceeding that of any other game-quadruped with which I am acquainted. The venison fairly melts in the mouth; and as for the brisket, that is absolutely a cut for a monarch.”
It is right, however, to mention that other experienced authorities do not altogether agree with Harris’s pronouncement on this subject. Mr. Selous, for example, states his opinion that the flesh of the Eland has been “very much over-estimated,” and is “not to be compared in flavour with that of the Buffalo, Giraffe, Hippopotamus, and White Rhinoceros.” (De gustibus non est disputandum!)
Harris describes the favourite haunts of the Eland on the Vaal River in his days as follows:—
“The Eland frequents the open prairies and low rocky hills interspersed with clumps of wood, but is never to be met with in a continuously wooded country. Rejoicing especially in low belts of shaded hillocks, and in the isolated groves of Acacia capensis which, like islands in the ocean, are scattered over many of the stony and gravelly plains of the interior, large herds of them are also to be seen grazing like droves of oxen on the more verdant meadows, through which some silver rivulet winds in rainbow brightness betwixt fringes of sighing bulrushes. Fat and lethargic groups may be seen scattered up and down the gentle acclivities, some grazing on the hill side, and others lazily basking in the morning sunbeam. Advancing they appear to move like a regiment of cavalry in single files, the goodliest bulls leading the van; whereas during a retreat these it is that uniformly bring up the rear. As the day dawned over the boundless meads of the Vaal River spread with a rich carpet of luxuriant herbage, and enamelled with pastures of brilliant flowers, vast droves of these lordly animals were constantly to be seen moving in solemn procession across the profile of the silent and treeless landscape, portions of which were often covered with long coarse grass, which when dry and waving its white hay-like stalks to the breeze, imparted to the plain the delusive and alluring appearance of ripe cornfields.”
Since Harris issued his work in 1840 all the writers on the game-animals of Southern Africa have devoted more or less space to the Eland. Delagorgue, who published his travels in 1847, found this Antelope in plenty in Zululand. Methuen, in his ‘Life in the Wilderness’ (1848), describes its habits in the Kalahari Desert, and Livingstone (1857) alludes to the Eland as being able to exist without water, and states that one may see hundreds of them in places thirty or forty miles distant from that element. The Hon. W. H. Drummond, in his ‘Rough Notes on the Large Game of South Africa,’ has devoted a whole chapter to the pursuit of the Eland, which he met with on the Black and White Umvalosi Rivers, and in other districts, but not within the Colony itself, in which, according to Bryden, it became extinct between 1840 and 1850, having probably lingered longer in the waterless deserts of Bushman’s Land than in any other locality.
Finally, Mr. H. A. Bryden, writing in 1897, in his ‘Nature and Sport in South Africa,’ on the rapidly disappearing forms of South-African game, laments the noblest of all the Antelopes of the world as taking the lead in this sad progress. At the present time, he says, one must go far north into the parched and pathless recesses of the Upper Kalahari before the “vanishing Eland” can be reached, and “even in these unexplored wilds these rare creatures can nowadays be scarcely considered safe.” Mr. Bryden proceeds to describe the progress of its extermination now going on as follows:—
“Directly the rain falls, hunters from among the Bakwèna, Bangwaketse, and Bamangwato tribes, well-mounted, and armed with breech-loading rifles, penetrate to the innermost recesses of the Kalahari, and, wandering from one pool of rain-water to another, deal destruction among the game, and especially among the Giraffes and Elands. That Elands are still plentiful in these regions of the Kalahari I can personally testify, having found them in numbers, and procured specimens in two or three days’ hunting from the desert road between Khama’s and the Botletli river (between Inkonanē and Kannē) within recent years. Coming down country, too, I saw at Sechele’s town—Molepolole—numbers of horns and heads of freshly slain Elands, some of them magnificent examples, which had been recently shot by Bakwèna hunters. But that, even in the North Kalahari, these and other game can long resist the incessant war of extermination waged against them, I am much more than doubtful.”
Thus we see that the typical brown unstriped Eland, which formerly pervaded the whole of the Cape Colony and the adjacent districts, and in 1652 (according to Van Riebeck) was found even on Table Mountain, is now, as nearly as possible, extinct; although its closely-allied white-striped brother, called Livingstone’s Eland, after the distinguished explorer and missionary, is still to be met with in the countries further north. As regards the points of difference between Livingstone’s Eland and the typical form, which we will now proceed to explain, we cannot do better than quote from Mr. Selous’s excellent article on the subject lately published in Mr. Rowland Ward’s ‘Great and Small Game of South Africa’:—
“The Eland of South-western Africa, as described by the earlier European travellers who visited the Cape Colony in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and more recently figured by Sir Cornwallis Harris from specimens obtained in 1837 in what is now British Bechuanaland and the Western Transvaal, was of a uniform pale fawn-colour from birth, though the coats of the older animals gradually became so thin that the dark colour of the underlying skin showed more and more through the scanty hair, giving them a general greyish appearance, the old bulls often looking a bluish-black in deep shade, and being described by the colonists as ‘blue bulls.’ On the other hand, all the Elands found throughout Rhodesia and Eastern South Africa, and wherever I have travelled to the north of the Zambesi, are striped. The calves are a rich reddish-fawn in ground-colour, with a dark mark down the back, black patches on the insides of the fore-legs, and eight or nine conspicuous white stripes on each side,”
As these striped Elands grow up, Mr. Selous continues, they differ considerably one from another. Both bull and cow become of a bluish grey as their coats become thinner with age, and at a little distance the white stripes are often indistinguishable, although as long as there is any hair left they can always be seen on close inspection. Also the dark patches on the inner sides of the front legs become more faint with age, and in very old animals disappear altogether.