Page:Seven Years in South Africa v1.djvu/53

 edentata already mentioned, duykerbock and steinbock gazelles are met with in those districts where the trees are in detached clumps. The tracts of low bushwood, often very extensive, afford shelter to the striped and spotted hymna, as well as to the strand-wolf (Hyæna brunnea); and there, too, amongst many other rodentia is found a gigantic field-mouse; also two other gazelles, one of them being the lovely little bushbock. The bushes on the slopes and the underwood are the resort of baboons, monkeys, grey wild-cats, foxes, leopards, koodoo-antelopes, bushvarks, blackvarks, buffaloes, and elephants, the elephants being the largest of the three African varieties. A hyrax that is peculiar to the locality, and lives in the trees, ought not to be omitted from the catalogue.

Leopards are more dangerous here than in the uninhabited regions of the interior, where they are less accustomed to the sound of fire-arms, and so desperate do they become when wounded, that it is generally deemed more prudent to destroy them by poison or in traps.

The capture of elephants is forbidden by law; consequently several wild herds, numbering twenty or thirty head, still exist in Cape Colony; whilst in the Transvaal, the Orange Free State, and the Bechuana country the race has been totally annihilated.

Their immunity from pursuit gives them an overweening assurance that is in striking contrast with the behaviour of the animals of their kind in Central and Northern South Africa. There a shot, even if