London in the Sixties (with a few digressions)

by Unknown

This magnificent lake is the resort of every kind of wild beast and bird. Strings of flamingoes wade leisurely about it, whilst wild geese and swans of enormous proportions float lazily over one’s head; antelopes and buck of every description come down to water, and the Cape leopard—the most treacherous and cowardly of four-footed creatures—is to be met with in considerable numbers as day begins to break. The procedure that obtains is similar to that in all ordinary mountain loch shooting, with the solitary exception that it necessitates a start about 3 a.m., so that every one is posted amongst the rushes at two hundred yards’ intervals an hour before daybreak. The excitement, the delight, the profound silence of that hour when Nature seems to rouse itself for its daily routine of activity, requires an abler pen than mine to describe.

With a rifle in hand and a shot gun at one’s side, there is, however, nothing for it but to wait for daybreak, wondering whether buck or antelope, cheetah or wild fowl will be the first to come within range.

“Trekking” with our span of oxen to a farmhouse, where only two cots were available, it was our nightly custom to play “nap” as to who should occupy the beds and who the kitchen table and dresser, and the excitement ran just as high as it did in the days when fifties and hundreds were at stake in the card room of the old Raleigh.

But the losers did not lose much, for almost before one was asleep it was time to be up for our usual 3 a.m. start.

With me was placed dear old Arthur Barkly, the worst shot and most passionate of good fellows, last Governor of Heligoland, and long since gone over to the majority, and it evokes a smile when even now I think of how, having missed with both barrels two huge wild geese that leisurely floated twenty yards over his head, he threw a cartridge box and then a ramrod in his passion at the unoffending birds.

But the shot had scared other denizens of the plain, and bang, bang in every direction indicated that all our guns were in action as cheetahs and antelopes might be seen scuttling on all sides. Nothing further being left for us, we proceeded to count our bag and return to the farmstead.

After a few days devoted to “braying” the skins and “curing” the antelope meat for future consumption, we resumed our dreary bumping “trek” into the interior in the hope of meeting with big game.

Lions are occasionally, but rarely, met with in these parts, and it is with reference to a dramatic incident that might have ended fatally that I will confine my present remarks. Returning one evening to our location, with literally only three ball cartridges amongst us, one of the Kaffir boys descried in the distance a lion and lioness and three cubs. With bated breath and excitement running high, a council of war was hastily convened, and the pros and cons., the direction of the wind, and the dearth of ammunition having been variously discussed, it was decided that to attack them would be unwise, if not absolutely foolhardy. A wounded lion or lioness with its cubs is probably as dangerous as a man-eating tiger; yet, despite all our entreaties to the contrary, one daring spirit determined to attempt to stalk them.

Loading both barrels of his rifle with ball, with the other solitary cartridge placed handily in his pocket, and divested of all other impediments, he hastily retired to make a circuit and so get within shot against the wind.

Suddenly we heard the sharp report of his rifle, and then, after a second, we saw the lion make for the spot whence the smoke had come, whilst the lioness and the cubs scampered off in the opposite direction.