When The Nervous Force Is Entire, Terrible Wounds May Be Inflicted
Without Killing; A Tsessebe Having Been Shot Through The Neck While
Quietly Feeding, We Went To Him, And One Of The Men Cut His Throat Deep Enough
To Bleed Him Largely.
He started up after this and ran more than a mile,
and would have got clear off had not a dog brought him to bay under a tree,
where we found him standing.
My men, having never had fire-arms in their hands before,
found it so difficult to hold the musket steady at the flash of fire
in the pan, that they naturally expected me to furnish them
with "gun medicine", without which, it is almost universally believed,
no one can shoot straight. Great expectations had been formed
when I arrived among the Makololo on this subject; but, having invariably
declined to deceive them, as some for their own profit have done,
my men now supposed that I would at last consent, and thereby relieve myself
from the hard work of hunting by employing them after due medication.
This I was most willing to do, if I could have done it honestly;
for, having but little of the hunting `furore' in my composition,
I always preferred eating the game to killing it. Sulphur is the remedy
most admired, and I remember Sechele giving a large price
for a very small bit. He also gave some elephants' tusks, worth 30 Pounds,
for another medicine which was to make him invulnerable to musket balls.
As I uniformly recommended that these things should be tested by experiment,
a calf was anointed with the charm and tied to a tree.
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