This Caused Some Delay; But As We Were Loaded
With Presents Of Food From The Makololo, And The Wild Animals
Were In Enormous Herds, We Fared Sumptuously.
It was grievous, however,
to shoot the lovely creatures, they were so tame.
With but little skill
in stalking, one could easily get within fifty or sixty yards of them.
There I lay, looking at the graceful forms and motions of beautiful pokus,*
leches, and other antelopes, often till my men, wondering what was the matter,
came up to see, and frightened them away. If we had been starving,
I could have slaughtered them with as little hesitation as I should cut off
a patient's leg; but I felt a doubt, and the antelopes got the benefit of it.
Have they a guardian spirit over them? I have repeatedly observed,
when I approached a herd lying beyond an ant-hill with a tree on it,
and viewed them with the greatest caution, they very soon showed
symptoms of uneasiness. They did not sniff danger in the wind,
for I was to leeward of them; but the almost invariable apprehension of danger
which arose, while unconscious of the direction in which it lay,
made me wonder whether each had what the ancient physicians thought
we all possessed, an archon, or presiding spirit.
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* I propose to name this new species `Antilope Vardonii',
after the African traveler, Major Vardon.
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If we could ascertain the most fatal spot in an animal, we could dispatch it
with the least possible amount of suffering; but as that is probably
the part to which the greatest amount of nervous influence is directed
at the moment of receiving the shot, if we can not be sure
of the heart or brain, we are never certain of speedy death.
Antelopes, formed for a partially amphibious existence,
and other animals of that class, are much more tenacious of life
than those which are purely terrestrial. Most antelopes,
when in distress or pursued, make for the water. If hunted, they always do.
A leche shot right through the body, and no limb-bone broken, is almost sure
to get away, while a zebra, with a wound of no greater severity,
will probably drop down dead. I have seen a rhinoceros, while standing
apparently chewing the cud, drop down dead from a shot in the stomach,
while others shot through one lung and the stomach go off as if little hurt.
But if one should crawl up silently to within twenty yards
either of the white or black rhinoceros, throwing up a pinch of dust
every now and then, to find out that the anxiety to keep the body
concealed by the bushes has not led him to the windward side,
then sit down, rest the elbow on the knees, and aim, slanting a little upward,
at a dark spot behind the shoulders, it falls stone dead.
To show that a shock on the part of the system to which much nervous force
is at the time directed will destroy life, it may be mentioned that an eland,
when hunted, can be dispatched by a wound which does little more
than injure the muscular system; its whole nervous force is then imbuing
the organs of motion; and a giraffe, when pressed hard by a good horse
only two or three hundred yards, has been known to drop down dead,
without any wound being inflicted at all.
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