Page:Seven Years in South Africa v1.djvu/430

 advice, I had six large fires lighted round our encampment to keep off the beasts of prey that we were assured were very numerous. Then all unconscious that the next day was to be one of the most eventful of my experience, I lay down and was soon asleep.

I did not wake next morning till after my usual hour, and was only aroused by a strange chilly sensation running over my body. It was caused by one of the small snakes that lurked in the skulls that lay around, and that had been attracted towards us by the warmth of our camp-fires.

The sun was already quite high, and I found that some visitors had arrived, amongst whom I recognized the Bakuena who was the principal resident in the village which we had passed through on the previous day. He had brought some pallah-skins, a few white ostrich-feathers of inferior quality, and an elephant’s tusk weighing about nine pounds, that bore manifest signs of having been shed some years, and having lain in the grass long before it was discovered.

About noon I shouldered the double-barrelled gun that I had brought from Moshaneng, took a dozen cartridges, and went off to get some fresh game for our larder. I had not gone many hundred yards before I observed some vestiges of gnus, which I tracked for some distance, until I came across several fresh giraffe foot-marks running in quite a different direction; at once I altered my course and followed them. The herd, I reckoned, must have