Page:Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa.djvu/41

1 I OX SEIZEI) BY A CROCODILE I7 upon him, rushed away through the water at my approach, and disappeared. When the cattle had gone down to drink, by a steep path, one of them had been pushed into deep water, and had swum do\vn under the bank, unnoticed by the herd-boy. He had then tried to get out where the bank was muddy, and had stuck fast, and in this position had been attacked by the crocodile. \Ve soon got him out with the help of t\vo other oxen and a yoke and chain, which \vas attached to “ reims "1 made fast round his horns. The poor animal had been very badly bitten. There were deep wounds on the top of his back near the kidneys, and near the root of the tail, and other deep wounds in his flank, and it certainly looked as if a very large crocodile had taken the entire thickness of the ox’s body in his gape. However, as this was a large Transvaal ox weighing quite Iooo lbs. as he stood, I can hardly believe that it can have been so, and yet I do not know how otherwise to account for the depth of the wounds, as, had they been mere surface nibblings, they ought not to have been dangerous. Whilst I was attending to the ox, and syringing out the wounds with strong carbolic lotion, Mr. Arnot \vent down to the river and \vatched for the reappearance of the crocodile, and presently got a shot at the ugly-looking head of a very large one, and thought he hit it; but one does not often recover a crocodile shot in deep water, as they sink to the bottom, and do not rise for some days. Although the Limpopo or Crocodile river is by no means a large river above its junction with the Tuli, I think that Crocodiles are more numerous in it than in any other river that I have visited, with the exception of the Botlctlie. They are, too, dangerous at times, and every year kill a lot of calves, and sheep, and goats, belonging to Khama's people. Mr. \V. Rowles, an interior trader, told me that on one occasion whilst he was swimming a herd of goats through the river a few miles below the Notwani junction, three of them were seized and pulled under water by crocodiles. In 1876, too, a Boer hunter named Berns Niemand was killed by one of these reptiles lower do\vn the river, and as I have often heard the story from Solomon Vermaak and Pieter Swart, who were with him and witnessed the catastrophe, I will relate it :- ‘ Raw hide thongs. C