The Land of the Buffalo and Lion.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLIV, Issue 13, 30 March 1910, Page 33

The Land of the Buffalo and Lion.

By

STANLEY P. HYATT.

the white races spread over the globe, colonising, civilising, reduring everything to the same dead level of dullness, preaching the gospel of the commonplace, gradually, though surely, destroying the last traces of romance which yet survive in a weary and prosaic world —so the field, still open to the big game hunter, becomes smaller and smaller. In turn, each of the waste spaces of the earth is being invaded by the ever-encroaching army of civilisation; and, in the same measure, the wild animals which once inhabited those countries are disappearing. Whole species have thus been annihilated—sometimes before the destroyers themselves have suspected the completeness with which they have done their deadly work. The stately bison in North America was virtually extinct before the majority of the nation was aware that he was even threatened with extermination; and when, at last, the law did intervene on his behalf, the total numbers remaining could be counted by units, instead of, as formerly, by tens of thousands. In South Africa, the quagga, most beautiful of all the equine tribe, was completely wiped out of existence by the Boer hunters, who destroyed thousands in mere wantonness, simply for the pleasure of killing. The same fate befell that ungainly creature, the swart wildebeeste, the white-tailed gnu of the naturalists, at the hands of the same race, which, with the unthinking improvidence that characterises so many of its acts, thus deprived itself of an Important source of food supply. The. swart wildebeestes were shot down solely for the sake of their livers and their long white tails, the latter being highly prized as flywhisks by the Boers. The enormous herds which once inhabited the high plateau of the Transvaal disappeared as completely as the quagga had done; and to-day, with the exception of one or two in parks or zoological gardens, there is not a single specimen left. The Dark Continent, as a whole, has always been justly regarded as the finest shooting-ground in the world. The home of the elephant, the giraffe, the rhinoceros, the Cape buffalo, the lion, and the hippopotamus, it can furnish a larger variety of great game than all the other continents together. Its antelopes alone were once enough to place it in the front rank; and though these were terribly reduced in numbers by that awful cattle scourge, the rinderpest, which, ten years ago, swept like a cyclone through the continent, those which remain are still sufficient in themselves to justify many a district being described as a sportsman’s paradise. The great territory which Cecil Rhodes added to the British Empire, and which now bears his name, has always been famous for the shooting to be obtained within its borders. True, the total amount of game in it to-day is small compared with that of 15 years ago. prior to the coming of the Chartered Company. Tile advance of the white man —the building of railroads, the development of mines and agriculture—has. naturally, driven the wild animals out of many

districts, while the rinderpest played havoc among the buffalo and antelope; but in its vast area there are still great tracts of veldt where the game is almost as plentiful as it was in the days of Livingstone or Gordon Cumming.

Of the great game, as distinguished from the “big game,” the elephant takes first rank by reason of his size. Although practically unknown now on the high plateaux of Southern Rhodesia, there are still large herds running in the low bush-veldt on the border of

Portuguese East Africa. No one ever interferes with them. In the winter they retreat to the densest jungle, where it is impossible to approach them unheard; and in summer they go down to the great mudflats which border the

Sabi River, where they are almost as safe as in the jungle; for no white man would venture into that deadly valley at that season of the year, when the ground is a vast marsh in which breed millions of mosquitoes, the air quivering with the stilling, exhausting heat and heavy with

the reek of putrid vegetation, while th'* constant torrential rains are in them selves enough to render life a veritable misery. The local natives, on their part, never try to hunt the elephant. They regard him. not as game, but as a M’Tagati. the incarnation of an evil spirit, and consequently do their utmost to avoid him. In Northern Rhodesia, on tin* other hand, there are yet plenty of elephants to be found, living in more reasonably situated district*. The immense size of the «reat pachyderm. his acute sense of smell and hearing, coupled with the smallness of his brain, tin* only really vulnerable spot, combine to render him one of the most dangerous of game; but none the less, the hunter who wishes to put his own nerves to the most severe test possible had better leave the elephant and go in search of the Capp buffalo. The latter is the real king of the forest ; the much-vaunted lion is a fool beside him. a low coward. A man may have shot lions without feeling a tremor, and yet lose his coolness when he sees a buffalo preparing for i charge. The bulk of the creature, the enormous mass of frontal bone which protects his head, even rfrom nickel - plated bullets, his ferocity, cunning, and agility. place him in a class by himself; for no other beast possesses such a combination of offensive an I defensive qualities. An unwounded buffalo will often attack a man on sight ; while one which has been hit. but not disabled, becomes a veritable incarnation of vindictiveness. Sometimes he will conn* thundering down immediately after being touched by the bullet; but more often ho will pretend to run away, then double round, pick up the track of the hunter who is following him, and charge him from behind; or, hidden in some clump of a bush, he may await his pursuer, and rush out on him as he The buffalo, however, is doomed. The nation-, have proclaimed him a nuisance, and ere many years are past he will bp found only in reservations, where small in rds w ill be preserved as specimens. No animal suffered more heavily than he from the rinderpest. Whole tracks, once the feeding-grounds of tens of thousands, were denuded by the scourge. Those districts had formerly been infested with the tsetse-fly, the deadly little insect which destroys all domesticated .anima’s; but when tin* buffalo had gone, the fly disappeared also; and further investigation showed that there was some intimate connection between tin* tw'o. So the great beasts were sentenced to extinction; their name was removed from the list of game animals for whom a dose season is provided; and they are now classed among the vermin which may bo destroyed wherever ami whenever found But it is often easier to pronoun o a sentence than to carry it into effect. The buffalo loves tin* thickly-wooded, lowlying, swampy country, where few white men ever go; and it will he some years before the king of the African forests meets the fate of his distant cousin, the American bison.

The natives place the lion next in rank to the buffalo; but hate him more bitterly, because he is more often in evidence. The buffalo has his own haunts; and, if undisturbed, he leaves others alone. The lion is übiquitous; his domain is the entire country. The attitude of the white man is somewhat similar to that of the native. The king of beasts as described in books is a tine animal —ferocious, certainly, but none the less noble. The king of beasts as he exists in fact is an unmitigated nuisance. The stock owner loathes him for the havoc lie causes among the herds, and even more for the endless anxiety his very presence in the country entails. There is no security against him. He is always travelling; and though there are certain districts which ean truthfully be described as lion-infested, the lion’s lair itself is a fiction of the story books. A pair of lions may find a spot where game is easily obtainable, and make a considerable stay there: but their real home is the whole veldt. They may kill a donkey in one village to-night, and tomorrow catch a water-buck forty miles away. If the lion only slew as much as he can eat, he would be less hateful; but lie will often kill four or five oxen, and content himself with devouring the entrails of one. He is a low, crafty brute, one that takes no risks; for, unlike the leopard, he will never leap a wall unless he ean see what is on the other side. A paper fence would keep him away from a herd of oxen, provided the latter themselves did not break out, through terror of his growling and his smell. The lion’s roar is the subject of another fiction; not that he is incapable of mak-

ing the most terrible, awe-inspiring sound emitted by any living thing, but because when he is roaring he is harmless. It is the lion which keeps quiet that is to be feared; for, as a rule, the male and female work in couples, and the one that makes the noise is merely driving the game down the wind to the silent partner. The lion's method of killing, too, is misunderstood. The strength of his jaw, terrible though it is, is as nothing compared to the force of his blows. With one stroke of his paw he ean break the back of a bullock as he springs over it; and the writer has seen a native with his head and neck literally telescoped by one of these awful downward pats. Generally speaking, the Rhodesian lion is not a man-eater. A small variety, found in the Zambesi valley, sometimes combines into packs from eight to twelve in number, and raids the native villages; ‘but the ordinary species, the great tawny lion, never eats human flesh, save under compulsion, when he lias become too old and stiff t'o catch wild game. Then he begins to haunt the water holes and mealie lands round the villages, and snaps up unprotected women ami children: but his career as a devourer of human flesh is generally short; for the fact of his having acquired the habit proves that he has lost his agility, and he is therefore easily killed. The hunter who goes out with the

intention of shooting lions will probably return a disappointed man. No animal is more difficult to find than the pseudo king of beasts. The natives say that the man who would kill lions must be con-

tinually glancing behind him; that when he sees a man approaching, the lion lies flat on the ground with his face down between his fore-paws, and not until the intruder is well past does he raise his head and look at the retreating figure. An able-bodied Rhodesian lion will always avoid a man, if possible; and only when he is wounded will lie turn on his pursuer. Probably, if statistics were available, it would be found that ninetyfive per cent of the white men killed by these brutes met their fat'e while foolishly following up one which they had hit. In a single respect only does the lion deserve his name of “king of beasts”— on the score of strength he is certainly first. He can drag a large bullock over rough country with the greatest' ease, while he can carry a mule on his back after hoisting it there by some strange sideways jerk of his head. He can leap a five-foot fence with a full-sized donkey gripped in his mouth. Otherwise, speaking from a seven years’ experience in lion country, the writer has no hesitation in describing the king of beasts as a fraud — at least so far as his alleged nobility is concerned. His regal attitudes lose some of their glamour when one learns that the so-called monarch frequently lives for days at a time on such plebeian food as field rats; and the vision of the kingly- creature sitting patiently on a flat rock, waiting for the rodents

to come out from underneath, is a rather unheroic one. But then the lion of the books and the lions of fact are two verydifferent beasts. Besides the lion, Rhodesia also pos-

sesses an unpleasantly varied selection of minor beasts of prey. The hyena—the foul-smelling creature with the harsh, rasping voice—which the natives not unnaturally imagine to 'be the horse of the Evil Spirit, is omni-present. There is no getting rid of him. You may shoot

one, and three more immediately come to eat the carcase. He is, in a sense, the satellite of the lion; for he follows up the latter, and, with his mill-like jaws crunches up the bones which the larger animal is unable to crack. He is a slinking, cowardly, treacherous pest, with not one redeeming quality; for, even when he is killed, his skin is valueless. .1 he jaekel is harmless, except among the hen-roosts; and though his mournful, wailing note is apt to be annoying, no man in his senses would dream of wasting ammunition on this unhappy-looking scavenger. The wild-cats, of whom there is a seemingly endless variety, are more troublesome; and though they are but seldom shot, the natives manage to trap a considerable number. The leopard is common throughout Rhodesia, and, like the lion, is a source of continual worry flo -stock-owners. He is, however, an easy -beast to kill, for he lacks both the cunning and the -swiftness of his bigger relative; although, perhaps, he has more courage than the latter, while his ability to climb enables him to enter places which are safe against the other. The buffalo, elephant, and lion do not complete the list of the great game of Rhodesia, for within its borders can also be found the giraffe, the rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus. The two former are growing very- rare now, which, in the case of_ the rhinoceros, is a rather fortunate thing, for this ungainly, pur-blind creature—which can only- see clearly- some 30 yards, yet has keener organs of scent and hearing than any other animal—is always a danger to the hunter, if only from its cheerful habit of charging blindly- through the camp at night. The hippopotamus, that other weird survival from the antediluvian age, is still to be found in all the large rivers and marshes. But regarded from a sportsman’s point of view, as a game animal, the hippo is a failure; for, though his great bulk and thick hide make him difficult to kill, unless hit in his one vulnerable point—■ behind the ear, —there is little danger or excitement attendant on the chase.

From a commercial standpoint, however, he is worth slaying, his skin being valuable for whips and waiKing-stieks, the famous "sjamboks” of the Boers, while the thick layer of fat with which he is coated is much prized for cooking purposes; his feet, too, make a dish which, for delicacy of flavour and nutritious qualities, is probably unequalled. The term "big game,” as distinct from great game, includes all the larger buck or antelope. Of these Rhodesia possesses an unequalled collection. First in rank eonies the eland, a beautiful creature, which often scales more than a large ox, and one that is easily killed on account of its slow, lumbering gait. On some of the large open flats in the neighbourhood of the Limpopo the old Boer hunters used to chase the eland on horseback, and, as they drew alongside the exhausted animal, stab him behind the shoulder with a native spear. The koodoo, once the most common of all the large buck, were nearly exterminated by the rinderpest, and in 1897 thousands of their beautiful horns could be picked up on tlie veldt, but since then their numbers have increased again, and to-day they can be found wherever there are steep, wooded kopjes with sheltered, grassy valleys in between. The stately roan antelope is seldom seen far away fram the grey, dreary mopani veldt; but his close relative, the ferocious-looking sable, is common all over the country, and one can seldom tramp many miles in a game district without having a vision of the great black and white bodies thundering through the bush, and finally disappearing in a thick cloud of dust. The sable are usually found in troops, varying from ten to fifty in number; but those with the finest heads always run singly, owing to the fact that, after they reach a certain length, the backward curve of the horns is so great that they become useless for fighting purposes, and consequently the owner is ejected from the herd by the younger bulls.

The water-buck loves the dry, leafless bush on the banks of the great sandrivers. The colouring of his body blends with that of his surroundings in an extraordinary manner, and it is no uncommon thing for even an expert native

shooting-boy to pass within a few score yards of a troop, and not see it until the animals break away. A curious peculiarity of the water-buck is that the cows, which have no horns, only keep company with the bulls for a month or two during the year; and it is probably for this reason that the lions succeed

in killing more of them than of any othei species of big game. On the high veldt one finds the tsesebe, swiftest and most ungainly of all buck. They ean usually be seen in the neighbourhood of the innumerable huge anthills, on the top of which a bull is always stationed as a sentinel; consequently it

is a difficult matter to secure a specimen, except with a running shot. Their cousins, the Lichtenstein hartebeeste, are. on the othei' hand, extremely easy to shoot, on account of the insane curiosity they exhibit with regard to the hunter. It was a similar inquisitiveness on the part of the swart wndebeeste

which enabled the Boers to exterminate the whole species in the course of a few years. The other gnu. the blue wilde beeste, is still very plentiful in eertvin districts of Rhodesia, being generally found in company with the zebra, who also shows a great partiality for the society of the roan antelope. The true

sportsman leaves the zebra alone, for when dead he is quite valueless, except as meat for natives. It might be thought that these strongly-marked creatures would be very noticeable on the veldt; but, as a matter of fact, the reverse is the ease. A few hundred yards oft' the black and white stripes seem to coalesce

into a grey blurr which is almost indistinguishable; ami. even when close, standing among the bush he loves, the zebra is extraordinarily hard to make out. Nature has provided for the safety of the denizens of the veldt to the best of her ability. The roan antelope loves

the grey bush with the general colouring of which his coat blends perfectly; the tsesebe finds no cover on the high veldt on which he lives, but has a wonderful lleetness to make up for this disadvantage; the impala, a bright reddish brown buck, runs only on the red sandy ground; the yellow reedbuck has his home among the tall, dry grass; the little klipspringer changes in colouring from greenish-brown to yellow as the leaves on the kopjes undergo a similar change; and so on. Only the cable antelope seems unprovided for. his great black body ami white undersides being visible anywhere; but the hunter soon learns that this magnificent creature is compensated for his appearance by a keenness of hearing and scent which render him more dillicult of approach than any other game, excepting, of course, that curious monstrosity, the rhinoceros. The list of the smaller buck in the Chartered territory is a long one. The impala, the rooibok of the Dutch, abound in the bush veldt. The reed-buck, duiker, stein-buck, bush-buck, grysbok, can be 'found everywhere: while among the granite kopjes are thousands of the dainty little klipspringers, the chamois of South Africa. In addition to these, wild pigs, warthogs—most hideous of created things—-ant-beans, and various weird varietieof the badger tribe, can be found by those who care to search for them. In the native fields are thousands of guineafowl: while partridges and quail can be heard, if not seen, in everv part of the veldt. There is a peculiar fascination about hunting on the frontiers of civilisation

in Africa, a joyous sense of freedom which one never seems to feel so strongly elsewhere. The uneonventionai-

ity of the life, the knowledge that beyond you there is nothing but savagery, that you are far away from the lies

and shams of civilisation, face to face with the crude realities of life, a primitive man amid primitive conditions, hold-

ing your position among the natives by the force of your own character, not by the support of a distant and little-heeded

government. There are things on the veldt one never forgets, memories which remain, clamorous and insistent, even after the lapse of years. The creaking of the wagon as it jolts over the rough track, the swaying forms of the patient tired oxen seen dimly in the moonlight during the long evening trek; the sharp purposeful crack of the giraffe-hide whips; the hoarse cries of the Kaffir drivers; the vicious note of the rifle; the dull thud of the bullet striking flesh; the savage shout of exultation from the natives as the buck falls; the smell of the fresh blood; the long rides through the silent bush; the nights by the blazing camp fire; the growling of a lion in the next valley mingling fitfully with the snarl of a hyena just outside the circle of firelight; the picturesque squalor of the native villages, the drums, the rattles, the danee, the shrill tones of the women rising above the deep gutturals of the men; the voice of the guinea-fowl saluting the dawn with harsh, grating persistence; the anxious note of the wildgoose calling to an absent mate; the acrid smoke of the cow-dung fire on the high veldt where the wood is scarce; the sickening delays on the banks of the flooded rivers; the glad freshness of the morning air; the days when you went wet and hungry, and the days of plenty —what man who has known all these can ever forget them, or even think of them without wishing himself back once more among the old familiar scenes? Those who have really heard the veldt calling will hear it always. Other recollections may grow dim, or fade away entirely,

new ideals and ambitions take the place of those of earlier days, but he who has

once come to know the veldt, as the hunter must know it, can never be quite the same man again. He may leave it forever, shake its dust from his feet; but, every now and then, even among the most prosaic surroundings, all the old memories will surge up anew, and he will—if he be a true man—think gratefully and longingly of the days he spent in that distant southern land.