He was too mad to be wary, and my heart stood still as the long horns went round with a swish; one black point seemed to pierce him through and through, showing a foot out the other side, and a jerky twist of the great head sent him twirling like a tip-cat eight or ten feet up in the air. As for walking in circles, it is my belief that most people, just like most horses, have a natural leaning or tendency towards one side or the other, and unless checked unconsciously indulge it. Finish it!” Tom muttered grimly; “I’ll have you this time if I wait till morning!”. He had the leaded hunting-crop in his hand; and that’s the horse he was riding. KOODOO, properly KUDU (n) (Strepsiceros capensis). When the rain ceased the air was full of the roar of waters, growing louder and nearer all the time. Then the Boy, turning in his anger, bade him come on; and, dragging him out upon the further bank, had found—unknowing—some little of the fortune he had come to seek. Once, when he had broken bounds and left the waggons, I threatened that if he did it again I would tie him up, since he was like a dog that could not be trusted; and I did it. It was simply a choice of evils, and it seemed to me better to let him go, clearly understanding the conditions, than drive him into breaking away with the bad results to him and the bad effects on the others of disobeying orders. They evidently took me for the advance guard in a fresh attack, and from the way they ran seemed to suspect that Jim and Jock might be doing separate flanking movements to cut them off. They were widely scattered more than half a mile away when Sam came in sight; a brief pause followed in which they looked anxiously around, and then, after some aimless dashes about like a startled troop of buck, they seemed to find the line of flight and headed off in a long string down the valley towards the river. Water, never too plentiful in certain parts, was sadly diminished by the drought, and it sometimes took us three or even four treks to get from water to water. It was a Sunday morning, and I was lying on my back on a sack-stretcher taking it easy, when Jock gave a growl and trotted out. His whole manner had plainly said: “Never mind old man! Ef you don’t pay for a thing you don’t know what it’s worth; and mistakes is part o’ the price o’ knowledge—the other part is work! To do this, without violating his principles, he invented words and phrases, meaningless in themselves but in general outline, so to say, resembling the worst in vogue; and the effect produced by them upon the sensitive was simply horrifying. You arst so nice and wanted him so bad!”, “But how could you bear to part with him, Joey? Jock had learned one very clever trick in pulling down wounded animals. I fired again as the koodoo recovered himself, but he was then seventy or eighty yards away and partly hidden at times by trees and scrub. They made fun of him, and he did not mind; but it was making fun of me too, and I could not help knowing why; it was only necessary to put the puppies together to see the reason. For there, with Africa’s contrariness, the highest parts banked up and buttressed by gigantic spurs are most accessible from below, while the lower edges of the plateau are cut off sheer like the walls of some great fortress. The place was a whirlpool of racing and plunging impala; they came from every side and went in every direction as though caught suddenly in an enclosure and, mad with fear and bewilderment, were trying to find a way out. He called it “The Great Battle between the Things of the Earth and the Things of the Air.”. I jumped up and looked about me with a fresh light; and it was all clear as noonday then. In front of us there was a dry vlei quite free of bush, some two hundred yards across and four hundred yards long, and the wildebeeste had gone away to the right and were skirting the vlei, apparently meaning to get round to the opposite side, avoiding the direct cut across the vlei for reasons of their own. There was Rooiland, the light red, with yellow eyeballs and topped horns, a fierce, wild, unapproachable, unappeasable creature, restless and impatient, always straining to start, always moaning fretfully when delayed, nervous as a young thoroughbred, aloof and unfriendly to man and beast, ever ready to stab or kick even those who handled him daily, wild as a buck, but untouched by whip and uncalled by name; who would work with a straining, tearing impatience that there was no checking, ever ready to outpace the rest, and at the outspan standing out alone, hollow-flanked and panting, eyes and nostrils wide with fierceness and distress, yet always ready to start again—a miracle of intense vitality! To drop from the branch, pick up the rifle, and start running were all parts of one movement. Only one thing to show the spirit: twice during the flogging Seedling stopped to go into the store for a drink. The koodoo had been shot through the body, and even without being run to death by Jock must have died in the night, or have lain down and become too cold and stiff to move. Pezulu the Great—who was Pezulu the Second—was not like that: he was a game cock, all muscle and no frills, with a very resolute manner and a real love of his profession; he was a bit like Jock in some things; and that is why I fancy perhaps Jock and he were friends in a kind of way. Go out among them, ever moving on, whose white bones mark the way for others’ feet—who shun the cities, living in the wilds, and move in silence, self-contained. He appeared to be shot through the lungs; at any rate the kaffirs on the other bank, who were then quite close enough to see, said that it was so. Jock was with me, as usual; I always took him out even then—not for hunting, because he was too young, but in order to train him. The same supple balancing movement that one notes in the native girls bearing their calabashes of water upon their heads is seen in the neck of the koodoo, and for the same reason: the movements of the body are softened into mere undulations, and the head with its immense spiral horns seems to sail along in voluntary company—indeed almost as though it were bearing the body below. He had been standing very close to the leg of the table, but not quite touching it, when he finished feeding; and even after he had done washing his face and cleaning up generally, he stood there stock-still for several minutes, as though it was altogether too much trouble to move. Jock of the Bushveld (abridged edition) (English Edition) eBook: FitzPatrick, J Percy: Amazon.de: Kindle-Shop A few minutes later I again caught sight of the sunset glow—it was on my direct right: it meant that the trail had taken another turn, while I could have sworn we were holding a course straight as an arrow. What we could not use in the coffee that day we were going to spread on our ‘dough-boys’ instead of butter and jam. It was to be a real feast that day, so he cut the top off the tin instead of punching two holes and blowing the milk out, as we usually did in order to economise and keep out the dust and insects. I then loosened Tsetse’s girths from my seat on Snowball, and handed up the packed saddle—Hall lying down on the bank to take it from me; and we did the same with Snowball’s load, including my own clothes, for, as it was already sundown, a ducking was not desirable, I loosened one side of Tsetse’s reins, and after attaching one of mine in order to give the necessary length to them threw the end up to Hall, and he cut and handed me a long supple rod for a whip to stir Tsetse to his best endeavours. A bit idealised? Some have been lost for many days until they blundered on to a track by accident or were found by a search-party; others have been lost and, finding no water or food, have died; others have been killed by lions, and only a boot or a coat—or, as it happened in one case that I know of, a ring found inside a lion—told what had occurred; others have been lost and nothing more ever heard of them. In the end he learned to tumble them over and scare their wits out without hurting them; and they learned to give him a very wide berth. You missed the whole lot of them.” He would come up to me with his mouth wide-open and tongue out, a bit blown, and stand still with his front legs wide apart, looking up at me with that nothing-in-it sort of look in his eyes and not a movement in his ears or tail and never a turn of his head to show the least interest in anything else. I took a piece of sail twine, tied it to one wrist, and, fastening the other end to the waggon-wheel, left him. Hall was ‘bad to beat’ when he started on anything—he did not know how to give in; but when he looked at the bank and said, “We’ll have a shot at this,” I thought at first he was joking. The dense packed column swept along, ruthless, raging, and unheeding, overwhelming all... A sudden failing of its strength, a little straggling tail, and then—the silence! This took over an hour, for we spoored him then with the utmost caution, being convinced that the buffalo, if not dead, was badly wounded and lying in wait for us. We were both tired out, hot, dusty, and very very thirsty; but it was too late to hunt for water then. Paradise Camp perched on the very edge of the Berg. His bright brown eyes were everlastingly on the watch and on the move: from me to the bush, from the bush back to me. Apart from Berg-en-Dal and Mopani, these new camps were relatively small. Jock of the Bushveld is a true story by South African author Sir James Percy FitzPatrick. You can make what you like of it. He made one rude remark, and went on; but every one he met that day made some allusion to beans, and he took the Durban steamer next morning. The birds and beasts, the things that creep and fly, all know the portents, and all flee before it, or aside. We had been out perhaps an hour, and by unceasing watchfulness I had learnt many things: they were about as well learnt and as useful as a sentence in a foreign tongue got off by heart; but to me they seemed the essentials and the fundamentals of hunting. The little cuss just gave a grunt and turned round as if he wanted to eat me. The boy let out a yell that made the whole gang jump and clutch wildly at their toppling bundles, and Jock raced along the footpath, leaping, gurgling and snapping behind each one he came near, scattering them this way and that, in a romp of wild enjoyment. At the outspans the grub-box is put on the ground, open for each man to help himself; if you make a stew, or roast the leg of a buck, the big three-legged pot is put down handy and left there; if you are lucky enough to have some tinned butter or condensed milk, the tins are opened and stood on the ground; and if you have a dog thief in the camp, nothing is safe. As I sat in the shade of the thorns with the loaded rifle across my knees there was the faint sound of a buck cantering along in the sand; I looked up; and only about twenty yards from me a duiker came to a stop, half fronting me. Het Jock of the Bushveld standbeeld ligt op 14 km van het resort en het Barberton Museum ligt op 15 km van de accommodatie. He stooped to touch it, but drew back: the dainty little thing was pulp. The first swing to get rid of Jock had literally slogged him against the tree; the second swing swept him under it where a bend in the trunk raised it: about a foot from the ground, and gaining his foothold there Jock stood fast—there, there, with his feet planted firmly and his shoulder humped against the dead tree, he stood this tug-of-war. There was something wrong; so I rode past without stopping—one learns from them to find out how the land lies before doing anything. Then one or two questions, briefly answered in the same tone of detached philosophic indifference, brought their talk to a close. In a single bound he was lost among the trees, and the clattering of loose stones and the crackle of sticks in his path had ceased before the cold shiver-down-the-back, which my spell-breaking shout provoked, had passed away. Then a wave in the top of a small tree some distance off betrayed them and we gave chase—a useless romping schoolboy chase. Any one else would have waited: he pulled out into the rough sideling track on the slope below, to pass us. Joey grinned openly at the boy; but he was thinking of Snowball. It is a Zulu word meaning ‘up’ or ‘on top,’ and when the fowls first joined the waggons and were allowed to wander about at the outspan places, the boys would drive them up when it was time to trek again by cracking their big whips and shouting “Pezulu.” In a few days no driving or whip-cracking was necessary; one of the boys would shout “Pezulu” three or four times, and they would all come in and one by one fly and scramble up to the coop. He walked slowly up past us, to “take a squint at things,” as he put it, and see if it was possible to get past the stuck waggons; and a little later he started, making three loads of his two and going up with single spans of eighteen oxen each, because the other waggons, stuck in various places on the road, did not give him room to work double-spans. It was much slower work then; as far as I was concerned, there was nothing to guide me, and it was impossible to know what he was after. “Not till you fired. As I watched unblinkingly it seemed to grow bigger and again contract with regular swing, as if it swelled and shrank with breathing; and knowing that this must be merely an optical delusion caused by staring too long, I shut my eyes for a minute. I picked out several ‘rocks,’ so suspicious looking that I would have had a shot at them had there been a clear chance, and twice, while I was trying to make them out, they slid silently into the water before there was time to fire. “Come on, man, before they get their dogs, or we’ll never see him again.”. No, they were not forgotten; and the memory of the last trek was one long mute reproach on their behalf: they had paved the roadway for the Juggernaut man. The koodoo had gone along the right bank of the donga which, commencing just below the pool, extended half a mile or more down the flat valley. There was something the matter with the dog, he said; he thought she was mad. Animated-family adventure based on a true story that tells the heart-warming, coming-of-age story of a man and his best-friend, a lovable and fearless dog named, Jock. At the end of a week of failures and disappointments all I knew was that I knew nothing—a very notable advance it is true, but one quite difficult to appreciate! It looked slowly round, giving one long full gaze back at us which seemed to be “Good-bye, and—thank you!” and cantered out into the dark. Then he got up and trotted briskly off some ten or fifteen yards, and stood—a bright spot picked out by the glare of the camp fire—with his back towards me and his uneven ears topping him off. You’ll git ter learn bymbye; you ain’t always yappin’!”, It was not an extravagant compliment; but failure and helplessness act on conceit like water on a starched collar: mine was limp by that time, and I was grateful for little things—most grateful when next morning, as we were discussing our several ways, he turned to me and asked gently, “Comin’ along, Boy?”, Surprise and gratitude must have produced a touch of effusiveness which jarred on him; for, to the eager exclamation and thanks, he made no answer—just moved on, leaving me to follow. It is not that there was anything really wrong; only there was no rest, no peace. There was always something to learn, something to admire, something to be grateful for, and very often something to laugh at—in the way in which we laugh only at those whom we are fond of. This wi. The temptation was, I suppose, irresistible: he scrambled to his knees with a pretence of starting afresh and let out one ferocious yell that made my hair stand up; and in that second every head bobbed down and the field was deserted once more. It was a long time since mother and son had been together, and if the difference between them was remarkable, the likeness seemed to me more striking still. A few yards away Billy’s pup was having a glorious time, struggling with a big bone and growling all the while as if he wanted to let the world know that it was as much as any one’s life was worth to come near him. ‘Wanting a wash’ did not on such occasions mean a mild inclination for a luxury: it meant that washing was badly needed. When his detailed indictment of Sam was completed he would wind up with, “My catchum lion ’live. On his way he prevents the weakly puppy Jock from being drowned and adopts him. On the morning of the second day Jim Makokel’ came up with his hostile-looking swagger and a cross worried look on his face, and in a half-angry and wholly disgusted tone jerked out at me, “The dog is deaf. This will allow the students to explore written literature as well as digital media. The cane-rat, living and dead, I was one of the stock surprises, and the subject of jokes and tricks upon the unsuspecting: there seems to be no sort of ground for associating the extraordinary fat thing, gliding among the reeds or swimming silently under the banks, with either its live capacity of rat or its more attractive dead rôle of roast sucking-pig. I followed quietly, knowing that as he was on the feed and not scared he would not go far. Jim was no diplomatist: he had tiger on the brain, and showed it; so when I asked him bluntly what the old man had been talking about, the whole story came out. Give me work!” But that they could not do, for there was no work they could not do themselves. Fair warning: This book may be about a dog, but it's more about hunting with him than anything else. Kill him, Jock! SALTED HORSE, one which has had horse-sickness, and is thus considered immune (as in small-pox); hence ‘salted’ is freely used colloquially as meaning acclimatised, tough, hardened, etc. It must have seemed as if Fate had kindly provided an outlet for the rebellious rage and the craving for a fight that were consuming him. “Go on! I think he loved them too; at any rate, it was his care for them that day—handling them himself instead of leaving it to his boys—that killed him. So the last hard struggle began. It was so funny that not only the boys at the waggons noticed it and laughed; the unsuspecting Shangaans themselves shared the joke. 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Old tracks Bushveld part 15 online at NovelOnlineFull.com not even look at it and! “ Velapi, Umganaam? ” ever through following wounded game me heart-sick to see your! All sorts of feelings and reflections that day we changed, trying to get buck can do which does seem... Camp, we believe, in Fitzpatrick 's rendering, Jock let go hold. Risk ’ for those who value a reputation for truthfulness told stories of Jock ’ s with resounding...