Marico and Crocodile Rivers--on the Bechuanaland side, where the old
trade road to the interior runs--a motley and yet very interesting
gathering of hunters, transport riders, and traders, and as usual they
had been yarning. It was nearing Christmas, 1891; the weather was
waxing very hot, and the night was so warm that even the oldest man of
the party, "old John Blakeman," easily to be recognised by his white
head and grizzled beard, sat in his flannel shirt, without a coat, his
sleeves rolled up, his brawny, sunburnt arms folded across his chest.
The night was very still; scarcely an air of wind stirred; occasionally
a kiewitje plover uttered its mournful, chiding cry; the not unmusical
croak of frogs was heard, bubbling softly from a swamp a little way off;
these, with an occasional cough from the trek oxen, as they lay
peacefully at their yokes, were the only sounds that here broke the
outer silence of the veldt. Tales of adventure are a never failing
source of interest at these fireside gatherings, and a number of hunting
stories, more or less well-founded, had been trotted out. A somewhat
assertive up-country trader, lately returned from the Ngami region, had
just finished a highly-coloured narrative, in which a couple of lions
had been easily vanquished. According to his theory these great
carnivora are as readily bagged as wild duck at a vlei.
"That's all very well," rejoined old John Blakeman, taking his pipe from
his mouth and a pull at his beaker of whiskey and water. "You may have
had a stroke of luck, Heyford, and killed a brace of 'em without much
trouble or danger, but in my judgment lions are not to be played with.
A hungry lion, and more especially a starved, worn-out old `mannikie,'
who can't kill his natural food properly, is, on a dark, stormy night,
the most dangerous, cruel, and persistent beast in Africa--the very
devil incarnate. Guns and gunners have a good deal tamed the
extraordinary boldness of lions in the last thirty years. I can
remember the time when they killed cattle, ay, and even Kaffirs, in this
very country where you now sit, in open daylight. Why! Katrina Visser,
wife of a Marico Boer, lost her child, a lad of six years old, by a
lion, in broad daylight, killed at four o'clock in the afternoon, within
fifty yards of her door. That happened four and thirty years ago, in
1857, in the Marico country, within less than sixty miles of this very
outspan. I remember it but too well. The following morning, which
happened to be Easter Day, was one of the saddest and at the same time
the most exciting I ever experienced."
"Tell us the yarn, John," clamoured a number of voices together. "Yours
are always worth listening to."
"Well, lads," went on the stout old fellow, filling his pipe and
relighting it with much care and deliberation from a smouldering ember,
"it's a long story, but I'll cut it as short as possible. It happened
in this way. I began trading up here in the early fifties. In those
days, as you know, and a good deal later, it was a long and serious
business, and each trip always spoilt a year. We used to trek up
through Natal, climb the Drakensberg, then cross the Free State plains--
there was plenty of game there in those days--and, looking in at Mooi
River Dorp--Potchefstrom, as we call it now--pass on through Marico. I
hunted as well as traded in those days and knew very well all the Marico
Boers, with some of whom I sometimes joined forces. They were a rough
but very hospitable lot of fellows, and some of them--Jan Viljoen,
Marthinus Swartz, Frans Joubert, and others--some of the finest shots
and pluckiest hunters in the world. I hunted elephants towards the Lake
for two seasons with Gerrit Visser, husband of Katrina, the woman I'm
going to tell you about. They lived in a rough `hartebeest house' of
wattle and reeds in a magnificent kloof on a tributary of the Marico.
Well, in '57, Gerrit and I met, as we had arranged, at one of the
farmhouses near the Barolong border, prepared for a big trip towards the
Tamalakan River.
"I got on, as I say, very well with the Dutch frontier fanners; my
trading goods were very acceptable to the `vrouws' and `meisjes,' and
the owner of the farm where I was outspanned kept open house during the
week I was there. What with shooting gear and clothing for the men, and
sugar, coffee, groceries, and trinkets, stuffs, and prints for the
women, I offloaded a good part of my trading outfit while outspanned at
this place, and did, as usual, a rattling good business. We had no end
of junketing. Dances, dust, and liquor at night, and horse-racing and
target-shooting in the day time. The bottles seemed always on the
table, but these Dutchmen are pretty hard headed, and there was some
tall shooting in spite of the festivities. Jan Viljoen, who had trekked
with his wife from the Knysna, in Cape Colony, towards the end of the
thirties, and had fought against Sir Harry Smith at Boomplaats in 1848,
was, with Marthinus Swartz, about the best of a rare good lot of rifle
shots. We shot usually at a yokeskey or a bottle at one hundred and one
hundred and fifty yards, and then Viljoen would call for an Eau de
Cologne flask, standing little higher than a wine-glass, and we blazed
at that I was pretty good with the gun in those days, but two or three
of the Marico Boers usually got the best of me.
"Well, after a week of this kind of thing, the trading was finished and
I had had enough of Dutch festivities, and so Genit Visser and I trekked
for the Bamangwato stadt, where Machen, Khama's uncle, was then chief.
Here I traded for another week, and then Gerrit and I set our faces for
the north-west, crossed the Thirstland, and trekked along the north bank
of the Lake River. We got plenty of giraffe, gemsbuck, eland,
hartebeest, blue wildebeest, springbok, zebra, and so on, for the first
month; and along the Botletli we killed some sea-cows and buffaloes,
which swarmed in those days. But we had no luck with elephants till we
struck the Tamalakan River. Here and along the Mababi, and from there
towards the Chobi River, we did very well, bagging in four months'
hunting between sixty and seventy elephants, many of them carrying
immense teeth. Towards the Chobi, where very few guns had at that time
been heard, we had remarkable sport. We shot also a number of
rhinoceros, some of them, the `wit rhenosters' [white rhinoceros], with
magnificent forehorns. Altogether we had a fine season, one of the very
best I ever remember. But it was desperately hard work; the bush was
awful; water was often very scarce; and every tusk we got was, I can
tell you, hardly earned. Lions were sometimes very troublesome. We
lost a horse and two oxen by them and had some nasty adventures
ourselves.
"When we reached the Chobi River, I never saw anything like the herds of
buffalo. There were thousands of them. Sometimes you might see a troop
as thick as goats in a kraal. We shot eighty buffaloes on this trip,
and might have got any quantity more. I had my best hunting nag killed
under me by an old wounded bull, and should have been done for myself
but for Visser, who came up in the very nick of time, and shot the brute
as I lay on the ground almost under his horns. I was so bitten with the
life of the veldt and the wandering fever in those days that I should
have liked to have stayed out another year and pushed far up the Chobi,
which was then as now little explored. After the parched Thirstlands we
had come through, the river with its broad blue waters, its refreshing
breezes, its palm islands, and the astounding wealth, not only of heavy
game, but of bird life, that crowded its banks and islets, seemed a very
paradise on earth. Even Gerrit Visser, as stolid, matter-of-fact a
Dutchman as you should meet in South Africa, was struck by the
marvellous beauty of the river scenery.
"But Gerrit hated punting about in the wobbly, crank, dug-out canoes, in
which the natives took us from one island to another; and, for him, half
the fun of the hunting was spoiled by the navigation necessary to obtain
it. And so, very reluctantly on my part, we made our way back to the
waggons, which had been standing for weeks outspanned on the southern
bank of the river, in charge of our men. It was now December, the
weather had become very hot, and Gerrit was fretting and fuming all the
time to get back home--`huis-to' (to the house), as a Boer would say.
The worst of hunting with these married Dutchmen is that, after about
six months in the veldt, away from their wives and `kinder,' they are
always fidgetting to be off home again. There never were such uxorious
chaps in this world, I do believe. Get a Britisher, married though he
be, once away in the veldt, and the passion for travel and adventure
fairly lays hold of him--it's in the blood--and he'll stay out with you,
knocking about, for a couple of years if you like. Look at Livingstone!
Fond though he was of his wife and children, the wandering fever, the
`trek-geist,' as a Boer would call it, was too much for him, and he was
latterly away from wife and children and home for years at a time. And
so Gerrit Visser and I set our faces `huis-to,' and trekked for Marico
again.
"We had a long and hard spell of travel across the `thirst,' and reached
the Transvaal as lean as crows ourselves, and with our oxen, horses, and
dogs mere bags of bones. Nothing would content Gerrit but I should go
with him to his place, Water Kloof, and spend Easter there. Pushing our
jaded spans along as fast as possible, and travelling from Easter Eve
all through the night, Gerrit and I mounted our horses at daybreak and
cantered on ahead of the waggons to rouse the vrouw and have breakfast.
It was a most glorious sunrise as we entered the shallow valley, known
as Water Kloof. There had been recent rains; the valley was carpeted
with fresh grass and littered with wild flowers; the bush was green and
fragrant; and the little clear stream that ran to join the Marico River,
rippled merrily along at our feet. The mealie gardens were thriving
magnificently, and the whole place looked as fair and prosperous as a
man could wish to see. Gerrit was in the highest spirits. `Man,' he
said to me, as we rode up to the rough wattle and daub house, thatched
with reeds, `it is a good farm this, and I shall give up
elephant-hunting, build a good stone house here, and settle down. Look
at the fruit trees,'--pointing to a charming green grove below the
house--`in two years' time the oranges will be in full bearing.
Allemaghte! It is too good a "plaats" (farm) to leave so long, this.'
"We rode up to the house very quietly. Gerrit wanted to surprise his
wife. Not a soul stirred. It was now `sun-up.' I was astonished that
no one was moving. We dismounted, threw our bridles over the nags'
heads, and approached the house. `Katrina!' shouted Gerrit in a cheery
voice, `Katrina! Beter laat dan nooit. Hier is ekke en Jan Blakeman.'
(Katrina! Better late than never. Here am I and John Blakeman.) As we
approached the door we heard at last some one stirring inside. The
latch clicked, the door opened back, and Katrina Visser appeared, not
cheerful and full of joy, and with little Hendrik, the child, by her
side, as we had expected, but with hair dishevelled, cheeks soddened
with tears, black shadows beneath her eyes, and the eyes themselves red
and bloodshot with long weeping. She threw herself with a sob on
Gerrit's breast, and burst afresh into an agony of tears. `You are too
late, Gerrit, too late,' she sobbed forth at last. `The lion killed
little Hendrik yesterday afternoon, and he lies there dead in the
house.' I could not help looking at Visser's face at this moment. He
had turned deadly white. He swayed. I thought for the moment he must
have fallen. `Oh, God!' he cried, `it cannot be true, wife.' The woman
felt instinctively that the blow was almost too grievous and too sudden
for her husband. Her own grief was put aside for the moment. She
released herself, kissed her man tenderly, and took his hand. `Come
inside, Gerrit,' she said softly, through her tears, `and see all that
remains of our poor little Hendrik.' She turned to me. `Come you, too,
Jan Blakeman,'--as she always called me--`You were always a favourite of
the child.' It was true. I was very fond of the merry, little
yellow-headed chap; and had always some sweetstuff and other treasure at
my waggon for him. He and I were the best of friends.
"I followed them softly into the rude dwelling, now a chamber of death.
Katrina led her husband to the wooden couch in the corner. There lay
the poor little chap, his once warm face, so fresh and ruddy, now cold,
and marble white, his prattling mouth for ever hushed. A blanket
covered the body, but the little hands had been laid outside. One of
them, I noticed, had been terribly clawed by the lion. The poor mother
had washed it, and the deep crimson gashes and scorings of the cruel
claws showed very plainly. I suppose the poor little six-year-old child
had made some effort for his life, and the fierce brute had resented it.
The mother began to draw aside the blanket and show her husband the
deadly wounds. Gerrit's great frame was now racked with irrepressible
sobs. I could witness their mutual agony no longer, and crept out. At
the back of the house I came upon a Hottentot servant, who told me the
story of the tragedy. The Marico country had by this time (1857) been
fairly well cleared of lions, but stragglers occasionally wandered in
from the wilder parts of the Transvaal, and a pair--lion and lioness--
had been spoored up the Marico River quite lately.
"No danger, except to the cattle and goats, was, however, anticipated;
the kraals had been duly strengthened, and two or three neighbouring
Boers were shortly coming down to shoot the marauders. On the afternoon
of the previous day little Hendrik had been playing by the stream not
fifty yards from the house. Suddenly screams were heard; the Hottentot,
his mistress, and a Kaffir rushed forth, and a big yellow-maned lion was
seen dragging the poor little fellow by the middle into some jungle
which grew alongside the water. The shouts and cries of the three as
they rushed down towards the brute, and probably the report of the gun
which Cobus, the Hottentot, had picked up from the house and loosed off
as he ran, had driven off the brute, but too late. The child had been
terribly bitten, right through the loins, and died in his mother's arms
almost before they reached the house again.
"Well, the long and short of the story was this. Nothing would satisfy
Katrina but that her husband and I should follow up the lion and lake
revenge for the murder of the poor child. Gerrit and I were nothing
loth, and after a mouthful of bread and some coffee we went down to the
stream and took up the spoor. Gerrit and I each carried our rides,
Cobus, the Hottentot, had a smooth-bore `roer,' and Katrina, who
insisted on coming with us, brought an old flint and steel horse pistol,
which she had loaded up. We spoored the lion for half a mile down the
river to a piece of dense jungle, where it had lain up over the remains
of a small buck, which it had killed, probably on the previous evening.
It was a nasty place, but we had dogs, and presently the brute was
roused. He showed himself once and Gerrit got a snapshot, which, as we
subsequently discovered, wounded him only slightly--just sufficiently to
render him really savage. Again the dogs went in and bayed the brute.
This time the bush was more open. As a rule the Boers, good shots as
they are, are extremely cautious about tackling a lion in covert. But
Gerrit's blood was up. He meant to avenge his child, and he went at
once towards the sound. I was running round to assist, when I heard a
report, a dull thud, and then renewed barking and fierce deep growls. I
ran through the open jungle. Katrina Visser, her pistol at full cock,
was close behind. We turned an angle of the bush, and there in an open
glade lay Gerrit, motionless beneath the paws of the lion, which half
squatted, half stood over him. At a respectable distance beyond, half a
dozen big dogs dashed hither and thither, yelping furiously. The lion's
teeth were bared, and, as he caught sight of us, his tail, which had
been waving from flank to flank, suddenly stiffened up behind him. I
knew that signal too well, and, as Katrina cried `schiet! schiet!'
(shoot! shoot!), I fired. The bullet entered the fierce brute's chest,
raked his heart and lungs, and he sank quietly upon the instant, dead
upon the body of Visser. Calling up the Hottentot, we dragged the
lion's body from off the Boer. The instant I saw Gerrit's face I knew
all was over. It was very clear what had happened. The lion had sprung
upon him unawares. He had missed his shot, and with one blow of its
fore-paw the brute had slain the big strong Dutchman. The right part of
the skull was literally smashed in. Well, strangely enough, Katrina
Visser was not so overcome by this horrible event as I had expected. I
think the doubling of the horror of the previous evening had been too
much for her, and had numbed something of her feelings. She was
extraordinarily calm, and throughout the next four and twenty dreadful
hours bore herself wonderfully. We buried poor Gerrit and his little
lad next day under a thorn tree a trifle to the west of the farmstead
and fenced the place in strongly. Few Dutchmen, as you know, are ever
buried in consecrated ground in South Africa. It is seldom possible
up-country.
"That's practically the whole of the melancholy yarn. Katrina married
again a few years later. Dutch women seldom remain widows very long.
But she was never quite the same woman again, after that terrible Easter
time. She still lives at Water Kloof. I saw her only last year. Her
hair, like mine, is very grey, and she has a second family growing
around her. She likes me to look round for a chat if I am ever in
Marico, and so, for old acquaintance sake, I usually outspan for a day
if I am anywhere near Water Kloof.
"Well, you fellows," concluded the old trader, "that's the true story of
the saddest Easter morning I ever remember to have experienced or even
heard of. Englishmen who come into this country scarcely, I think, make
sufficient allowance for what the Transvaal Dutch have gone through in
the conquest and settlement of their territory. Few families there are
among the Boers but can tell you of some such experience as I have given
you to-night. To my mind, it is scarcely wonderful that these people
cling so tightly to the soil on which so much of their best blood has
been spilt. Good-night, all. It's late and I must turn in." And the
old fellow rose from the fire, knocked the ashes out of his pipe,
stretched himself, and climbed into his waggon.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
THE MYSTERY OF HARTEBEEST FONTEIN.
Upon a morning of early December in the year 1880, Arend Van Driel, the
Trek Boer, stood upon his waggon-box anxiously scanning the plains for
any sight of game. Leaning upon the tilt and shading his eyes from the
already powerful sun, his feverish glance swept the great grass plains
for the faintest token of animal life. Alas, it appeared that here the
veldt was deserted. The big Dutchman's eyes ran fruitlessly over the
waste again and again, until they rested upon a little chain of brown
hills, just now rose-tinted by the flush of the early morning sun, but
nothing in the shape of a herd of game was to be seen. With a deep sigh
the Boer climbed slowly down from the waggon and joined his family at
their miserable breakfast, by the remains of the overnight camp fire.
And, indeed, Arend Van Driel had good cause for dejection.
Two years before, he and his family had quitted the Transvaal with a
great body of Trek Boers, who had made up their minds to leave a country
upon which misrule and misfortune had long rested, and which now lay
beneath the hands of the hated British Government. The misfortunes of
that ill-fated Trek have long since become historical in the annals of
the Transvaal Dutch. Thirst, famine, fever and dysentery were soon busy
among the members of one of the most disastrous and ill-managed
expeditions ever known in South Africa. The trek cattle perished by
hundreds in the Thirstlands of the Northern Kalahari, the flocks and
herds, left masterless, wandered and strayed, and disappeared by
thousands. Along the rivers and swamps of Ngamiland and the Okavango,
sickness and suffering destroyed whole families. The trek had set forth
with the highest and most exaggerated hopes, chiefly based upon the
gross ignorance of these misguided and fanatical farmers. They moved
north-westward towards some unknown Land of Canaan, where, as they
fondly imagined, great snow mountains stood, where the veldt was always
rich and flourishing, where clear waters ran abundantly, and where the
wild game wandered as thick as sheep in a fold. Some even believed, as
their fathers had believed, when they moved into the Transvaal country,
that somewhere in this new and unknown land, the great Nile river itself
would be found. After more than two years of disastrous trekking, most
of these vain imaginings had been rudely dispelled, but still, their
faces set ever doggedly westward, these stubborn people toiled on.
During the expedition, the trekkers had necessarily become much
scattered; thus Arend Van Driel and his family stood alone this December
day of 1880 by a small pan of muddy water, where they had halted to
recruit their exhausted trek oxen and the two horses that remained to
them. They had quitted the Transvaal with two hundred head of cattle
and six hundred sheep and goats. These once thriving flocks and herds
were now represented by some two score of miserable sheep and goats,
mere bags of bones, which could scarcely drag one limb after another.
It was absolutely necessary to husband even these slender resources, and
Van Driel had therefore been anxiously surveying the surrounding veldt
for some herd of game from which he could secure a meal or two for his
starving family. He now moved up to the camp fire with disappointment
written plainly upon his gaunt, sun-tanned and bearded face. His wife
knelt in a ragged old stuff dress stirring some thin porridge of Kaffir
corn--their only present sustenance--in an iron pot. She looked up from
underneath her sun-bonnet, and, catching the gloom upon her husband's
face, ejaculated, "Nie wilde, Arend?" ("No game, Arend?") "Nie wilde,
nie," returned Arend disconsolately. "I think the Lord means us to die
after all in this desert. Cursed was the day we ever left the
Transvaal." He sat himself down in the red sand by his children, after
they had been helped to a small plateful of porridge each, and took and
ate his own portion. There were four children left to the Van Driels.
There had been seven when they quitted the Transvaal. Three had died of
fever at Vogel Pan, a little to the south of the Okavango. Of those
remaining, Hermannus, a big lad of fifteen, seemed fairly strong; the
other three, a boy and two girls, ranging from five to twelve, looked,
poor things, pale, weak and dispirited from fever, misery and
semi-starvation. The clothes of all were tattered and ragged and hung
loosely about them.
The interior of the big waggon hard by looked very bare for a
Dutchman's. But, as a matter of fact, almost all the little stock of
furniture and house gear had been perforce abandoned. Ploughs, farming
implements, tables and chairs, and other impedimenta, all now lay in the
middle of that dire Thirstland between Khama's and the Botletli River,
where they had long since been cast away to lighten the load. Even the
very waggon chairs--dear to every Boer--had been thrown away.
Hermannus, the eldest lad, was the first to finish that meagre breakfast
of ground millet, boiled in water. He now rose and in his turn climbed
to the waggon and took a survey over the country. Suddenly an
exclamation broke from his lips. "Father, there's game half a mile
away, just moving from behind that patch of bush. I think they are
hartebeest."