From Veldt Camp Fires

Chapter Twelve.

A Transvaal Morning

They were sitting by a big camp fire, close to the junction of the 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.