Hreikie was a small Hottentot girl, as lightly clad as was compatible with propriety. Her face was dirty brown, her mouth large, her nose a shapeless elevation with two holes in the front of it. Her head was not covered, but merely sprinkled with tight woolly knobs or curls the size of peas. Each knob grew apart from its neighbour knob, and was surrounded, so to speak, by bald or desert land. This style of hair was not peculiar to Hreikie alone, but to the whole Hottentot race. Hreikie’s family consisted of thirty-three young ostriches, which, though only a few weeks of age, stood, I think, upwards of two feet high. Some of them had been brought out by artificial incubation—had been heated, as it were, into existence without maternal aid. These birds, Bonny said, had been already purchased for 15 pounds sterling apiece, and were deliverable to the purchaser in six months. They were fed and guarded all day and housed each evening with tender solicitude by their Hottentot stepmother, whom the birds evidently regarded as their own natural parent.
We swept on past the garden, where, on a previous morning, Bonny and I had killed a deadly green-tree snake upwards of five feet long, and where, on many other mornings, he and I, with sometimes other members of the family entered into strong temptation among the magnificent fruit. We used to overcome the temptation by giving way to it! There were plums, peaches, figs, apples, apricots, grapes, nectarines, and other fruits, with which the trees were so laden that some of the branches had given way and their luscious loads were lying on the ground. Cartloads of these were given away to friends, and to any one, as there was no market for their disposal.
Many splendid gardens like this exist on what is sometimes styled the barren Karroo; but the land is anything but barren. All it requires is a copious supply of water, and wherever farmers have taken the trouble to form dams and store the heavy though infrequent rains, gardens of the most prolific kind have been the result. The Karroo-bush itself, which gives name to these plains, is a succulent plant, which thrives in the almost waterless soil, and forms a rich pasturage for sheep and cattle. Hobson’s garden—copiously watered by streams led out from his large dams—was a beautiful shady oasis of green and gold, in the midst of what, to some eyes, might have appeared a desert, but which, if irrigated properly, would become a perfect paradise of fertility.
We cantered on over the plain, till the garden and the farm looked in the distance like ships at sea, and rode among the bushes that crowned a rising ground. We set up some guinea-fowl and other birds, and startled a hare, but let them go, as our aim was steenboks. The little boks, however, were not on the knoll that day, so away we went again at a gallop until the garden and the farm went down on the horizon.
Sometimes we kept together and chatted, at other times we diverged and skirted small clumps of underwood on opposite sides. At one time, while separated from Bonny, I saw a large stone lying on the ground. As I looked, the stone began to crawl! It was a tortoise, fully as large as a soup-tureen. The sight of an animal in its “native wilds,” which you have all your life been accustomed to see in zoological gardens, has something peculiar, almost absurd, in it. As it is with animals, so it is with other objects. I remember being impressed with this idea, for the first time, in the south of France, when I beheld a tree covered with lemons—a fruit which, up to that period, had been connected in my mind with grocers’ windows and brown sugar!
I turned aside and dismounted. The sluggish tortoise stopped, recognised in me an enemy, and drew in its head and feet. After lifting and looking at him I set him down. Then it occurred to me that some one had said a tortoise could carry a man. I stepped upon this one’s back forthwith. He lay perfectly still for some time. At last with great caution the head and feet were protruded. Another pause, as if of meditation, then the feet were applied to the ground; they pushed and strained, until finally the creature advanced about two inches, and then stopped! This was not much, but it was sufficient to prove his great strength, and to convince me that a large tortoise could easily have walked off with a little boy.
I found Bonny dismounted and waiting.
“No steenboks to-day, I fear,” he said.
“We must have a shot at something, Bonny,” said I, dismounting, and sitting down on an anthill. Having been a fair average shot in a rifle corps in Scotland I took careful aim at a small bush, bent on doing credit to the British Volunteers. The result was a “bull’s-eye.”
“Capital!” exclaimed Bonny; “if you shoot like that you’ll kill plenty of boks.”