Lodges in the Wilderness

by W. C. Scully

When he reached the threshold of his refuge the jackal did exactly what a long experience of the habits of his obnoxious tribe had led me to expect,—that is to say he sank his hindquarters into the burrow and then turned to look back, as though in derision,—his head, chest and forelegs being exposed. Crack,—and he fell back and disappeared. But I knew well enough that the bullet had fetched him; I heard its “klop” distinctly.

Hendrick hurried to the jackal’s burrow; I returned to the nest. The broken shells had to be removed and the spilt yolks sanded over; otherwise the birds would most probably have abandoned the clutch. There were three and twenty undamaged eggs remaining. Having put things as straight as possible, I rejoined Hendrick.

The jackal had disappeared into his burrow, but a big gout of blood just inside the entrance told an unambiguous tale. Hendrick wormed his way into the strait and narrow cavern as far as he thought he safely could; he emerged empty-handed, but with traces of blood on his clothing. However, Hendrick was not the Hottentot to forego a feast of jackal-flesh without a further effort, so he uncoiled a reim from the head-stall of Bucephalus, tied one end of it round his feet and gave me the other to hold; then he re-entered the dark portal and passed out of sight. Just afterwards I heard, as though from the bowels of the earth, a muffled shout. I hauled strenuously at the reim and Hendrick emerged, the dead jackal in his arms. In that cobra-haunted country I would not have attempted Hendrick’s feat for a jackal-skinful of gold.

After this useful piece of police-work we rode back to camp at an easy pace. Bucephalus always grew cantankerous at the smell of blood, so the mortal remnants of Autolycus had to be tied behind my saddle,—a circumstance which occasioned a good deal of chaff on the part of Andries.

That night I spread out my large-scale map of South Africa on boards which I had brought for the purpose. It was my wont to fill in roughly any physical data which I was able to determine. The air was so still that the flame of a lit match hardly flickered. The vicinity of the wagon was as bright as day, for we had built an enormous fire. The flame of the candle-bush shone as clear as the electric arc, and arose in a tall pyramid. Our shooting was at an end, so we did not mind our presence being advertised throughout the desert. The oxen had returned from Gamoep. All preparations for a start before dawn on the morrow had been made.

After finishing my amateur map-making, I roughly measured with a pair of compasses the distance we had travelled from the vicinity of the Copper Mines. Thus I found that if we were to travel only four times as far, altering our course a little to the northward, we would reach Johannesburg. A change, indeed. How great would have been the contrast between Bushmanland, the abode of immemorial silence and solitude, and what was probably the most intensely active (in a mechanical sense) environment on earth. And yet, but a few short years before, when I first crossed it, the Rand lay as lonely as Bantom Berg. But now I could almost hear the ten-thousand-fold thudding of the stamps,—the thunderous explosions vexing the bowels of the earth—the din of the strenuous, diversified throng in the streets.

They say that men soon wear themselves out in the city of gold and sin; that the gravestones there are mostly those of the young. What is to be the effect of this burning fever-spot on our body-politic, of this—to change the metaphor—roaring maelstrom-mill into the hopper of which so large a proportion of the youth of our country is flung?

But in the nights that are coming,—when the rock-python pursues the coney along the shattered pediments of the “Corner House,” the unchanging desert will lie, still void under the abiding scrutiny of the stars. Bushmanland can never alter.

The fire dimmed and died. One by one my companions sank into slumber. The horses were resting,—except unquiet Bucephalus, who stamped and whinnied at intervals. The oxen lay tethered to their yokes. Ever and anon one of them uttered the deep, pathetic bovine sigh,—that suspiration which seems to express perplexed resignation to the selfish dominance of man,—to that hopeless slavery which is the doom of the once-lordly bovine race.

I seized my kaross and climbed the steep side of the nearest dune-tentacle. Then I laboured along its soft, sinuous surface towards the gross, inert body of Typhon, until far beyond the reach of camp-sounds. In the yielding sand I made a lair. In this I laid me down—apparently the only waking thing in Bushmanland, for most utter silence reigned. Probably the soaring flames of our camp fire had frightened away even the jackals and the night-jars from a wide surrounding area. The stars seemed to sink earthward; so brightly did they glow in the vault of liquid purple that the face of the desert was masked in impenetrable gloom. That night the lips of the wilderness had no message audible to human sense.