Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/74

50 quantities of meat without any ill effects. They were careless of the future, and were happy if the wants of the moment were supplied. Thus, when a large animal was killed, no trouble was taken to preserve a portion of its flesh, but the time was spent in alternate gorging, sleeping, and dancing, until not a particle of carrion was left. When a drove of domestic cattle was stolen, several were slaughtered at once and their carcases shared with birds of prey, while if their recapture was considered possible, every animal was hamstrung or killed.

Such wanton destruction, more than any other circumstance, caused the wild people to be detested by the Hottentots and the Bantu, as well as by the European colonists at a later date. From their point of view, however, they regarded any injury they could inflict upon members of other races as justifiable. Those races were intruders into the land that had been solely possessed by their ancestors from the earliest times, the game, which was their cattle, was killed without scruple by the invaders of their domains, their fountains and streams were appropriated without their consent, only the deserts were left to them; why then should they not retaliate, and do as much harm as they possibly could to those who had done such grievous wrong to them?

In some parts of the country the Bushmen made long walls by piling up stones, for the purpose of capturing game. These walls were constructed in the form of the sides of an isosceles triangle, with a narrow open space at the apex. Just beyond this was a deep pit carefully covered over, into which the animals that were driven forward fell without chance of escape. The construction of these walls required much labour, but the hunters were not deficient in energy when the capture of game was the end in view, and the embankments were probably only gradually lengthened and increased in height as the utility of the device became more apparent. They made pits for entrapping the elephant and the hippopotamus at the approaches to rivers, and poisoned pools of water, so that any animal which drank perished, Those who lived in the vicinity of streams containing fish used long baskets shaped like scoop nets made of reeds for the purpose