Page:Seven Years in South Africa v1.djvu/424

 In many districts the Masarwas are above middle height, and sometimes, in the country of the Bamangwatos and Bakuenas, are, like the dominant race, quite tall. After the repulsiveness of their features, there is nothing about them that strikes a traveller so much as the red, half-raw scars that they continually have on their shin-bones, and not unfrequently on their arms, feet, and ankles. Wearing only a small piece of hide round his loins, and carrying nothing more than a little shield of eland-hide, the Masarwa suffers a good deal from cold; but instead of putting his fireplace within an enclosure, like the Bechuana, or inside his hut, like the Koranna, he lights his fire in the open air, and squats down so close to it in order to feel its glow, that as he sleeps with his head on his knees, he is always getting frightfully scorched, and his skin becomes burnt to the colour of an ostrich’s legs.

The Colonial Bushman is known to cover himself with the skin of some wild animal, so as to get within bowshot of his prey; and in very much the same way the Masarwa uses a small bush, which he holds in his hands and drives before him, whilst he creeps up close to the game of which he is in pursuit. A friend of mine once told me how he was one evening sitting over his fire, smoking, on the plains of the Mababi Veldt, where the grass was quite young and scarcely a foot high, and dotted over with little bushes, when all at once his eye rested upon a bush about fifty yards in front of him, at a spot where he felt sure that there had not been one before. Having