He was the best of companions, and through the years that we hunted together I never tired of watching him. 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. It was the struggle between Jock’s intense keenness and his sense of duty that most often raised the laugh. He knew that his place was behind me; but probably he also knew that nine times out of ten he scented6 or saw the game long before I knew there was anything near, and naturally wanted to be in front or at least abreast8 of me to show me whatever there was to be seen.
He noticed, just as surely and as quickly as any human being could, any change in my manner: nothing escaped him, for his eyes and ears were on the move the whole time. It was impossible for me to look for more than a few seconds in any one direction, or to stop or even to turn my head to listen, without being caught by him. His bright brown eyes were everlastingly9 on the watch and on the move: from me to the bush, from the bush back to me. When we were after game, and he could scent7 or see it, he would keep a foot or two to the side of me so as to have a clear view; and when he knew by my manner that I thought there was game near, he kept so close up that he would often bump against my heels as I walked, or run right into my legs if I stopped suddenly. Often when stalking buck10 very quietly and cautiously, thinking only of what was in front, I would get quite a start by feeling something bump up against me behind. At these times it was impossible to say anything without risk of scaring the game, and I got into the habit of making signs with my hand which he understood quite as well.
Sometimes after having crawled up I would be in the act of aiming when he would press up against me. Nothing puts one off so much as a touch or the expectation of being jogged when in the act of firing, and I used to get angry with him then, but dared not breathe a word; I would lower my head slowly, turn round, and give him a look. He knew quite well what it meant. Down would go his ears instantly, and he would back away from me a couple of steps, drop his stump11 of a tail and wag it in a feeble deprecating way, and open his mouth into a sort of foolish laugh. That was his apology! “I beg your pardon: it was an accident! I won’t do it again.”
It was quite impossible to be angry with him, he was so keen and he meant so well; and when he saw me laughing softly at him, he would come up again close to me, cock his tail a few inches higher and wag it a bit faster.
There is a deal of expression in a dog’s tail: it will generally tell you what his feelings are. My friend maintained that that was how he knew his old dog was enjoying the joke against the cockerel; and that is certainly how I knew what Jock was thinking about once when lost in the veld; and it showed me the way back.
It is easy enough to lose oneself in the Bushveld. The Berg stands up some thousands of feet inland on the west, looking as if it had been put there to hold up the High veld; and between the foothills and the sea lies the Bushveld, stretching for hundreds of miles north and south. From the height and distance of the Berg it looks as flat as the floor, but in many parts it is very much cut up by deep rough dongas, sharp rises and depressions, and numbers of small kopjes. Still, it has a way of looking flat, because the hills are small, and very much alike; and because hill and hollow are covered and hidden mile after mile by small trees of a wonderful sameness, just near enough together to prevent you from seeing more than a few hundred yards at a time. Most people see no differences in sheep: many believe that all Chinamen are exactly alike; and so it is with the Bushveld: you have to know it first.
So far I had never lost my way out hunting. The experiences of other men and the warnings from the old hands had made me very careful. We were always hearing of men being lost through leaving the road and following up the game while they were excited, without noticing which way they went and how long they had been going. There were no beaten tracks and very few landmarks12, so that even experienced hunters went astray sometimes for a few hours or a day or two when the mists or heavy rains came on and nothing could be seen beyond fifty or a hundred yards.
Nearly every one who goes hunting in the Bushveld gets lost some time or other—generally in the beginning before he has learned to notice things. 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. There is no feeling quite like that of being lost—helplessness, terror, and despair! The horror of it is so great that every beginner has it before him; every one has heard of it, thought of it, and dreamed of it, and every one feels it holding him to the beaten track, as the fear of drowning keeps those who cannot swim to shallow water. That is just in the beginning. Presently, when little excursions, each bolder than the previous, have ended without accident, the fear grows less and confidence develops. Then it is, as a rule, that the accident comes and the lesson is learned, if you are lucky enough to pull through.
When the camp is away in the trackless bush, it needs a good man always to find the way home after a couple of hours’ chase with all its twists and turns and doublings; but when camp is made on a known road—a long main road that strikes a fair line between two points of the compass—it seems impossible for any one to be hopelessly lost. If the road runs east and west you, knowing on which side you left it, have only to walk north or south steadily and you must strike it again. The old hands told the beginners this, and we were glad to know that it was only a matter of walking for a few hours, more or less, and that in the end we were bound to find the road and strike some camp. “Yes,” said the old hands, “it is simple enough here where you have a road running east and west; there is only one rule to remember: When you have lost your way, don’t lose your head.” But indeed that is just the one rule that you are quite unable to observe.
Many stories have been told of men being lost: many volumes could be filled with them for the trouble of writing down what any hunter will tell you. But no one who has not seen it can realise how the thing may happen; no one would believe the effect that the terror of being lost, and the demoralisation which it causes, can have on a sane13 man’s senses. If you want to know what a man can persuade himself to believe against the evidence of his senses—even when his very life depends upon his holding to the absolute truth—then you should see a man who is lost in the bush. He knows that he left the road on the north side; she loses his bearings; he does not know how long how fat, or how far he has walked; yet if he keep his head he will make due south and must inevitably14 strike the road. After going for half an hour and seeing nothing familiar, he begins to feel that he is going in the wrong direction; something pulls at him to face right about. Only a few minutes more of this, and he feels sure that he must have crossed the road without noticing it, and therefore that he ought to be going north instead of south, if he hopes ever to strike it again. How, you will ask, can a man imagine impossible to cross a big dusty road twenty or thirty feet wide without seeing it? The idea seems absurd; yet they do really believe it. One of the first illusions that occurs to men when they lose their heads is that they have done this, and it is the cause of scores of cases of ‘lost in the bush.’ The idea that they may have done it is absurd enough; but stranger still is the fact that they actually do it.
If you cannot understand a man thinking he had done such a thing, what can you say of a man actually doing it? Impossible, quite impossible, you think. Ah! but it is a fact: many know it for a fact and I have witnessed it twice myself, once in Mashonaland and once on the Delagoa road. I saw men, tired, haggard and wild-eyed, staring far in front of them, never looking at the ground, pressing on, on, on, and actually cross well-worn waggon roads, coming from hard veld into a sandy wheel-worn track and kicking up a cloud of dust as they passed, and utterly15 blind to the fact that they were walking across the roads they had been searching for—in one case for ten hours, and in the other for three days. When we called to them they had already crossed and were disappearing again into the bush. In both cases the sound of the human voice and the relief of being ‘found,’ made them collapse16. The knees seemed to give way: they could not remain standing17. The man who loses his head is really lost. He cannot think, remember, reason, or understand; and the strangest thing of all is that he often cannot even see properly—he fails to see the very things that he most wants to see, even when they are as large as life before him. Crossing the road without seeing it is not the only or the most extraordinary example of this sort of thing. We were out hunting once in a mounted party, but to spare a tired horse I went on foot and took up my stand in a game run among some thorn-trees on the low spur of a hill, while the others made a big circuit to head off a troop of koodoo. Among our party there was one who was very nervous: he had been lost once for six or eight hours, and being haunted by the dread18 of being lost again, his nerve was all gone and he would not go fifty yards without a companion. In the excitement of shooting at and galloping20 after the koodoo probably this dread was forgotten for a moment: he himself could not tell how it happened that he became separated, and no one else had noticed him.
The strip of wood along the hills in which I was waiting was four or five miles long but only from one to three hundred yards wide, a mere21 fringe enclosing the little range of kopjes; and between the stems of the trees I could see our camp and waggons22 in the open a quarter of a mile away. Ten or twelve shots faintly heard in the distance told me that the others were on to the koodoo, and knowing the preference of those animals for the bush I took cover behind a big stump and waited. For over half an hour, however, nothing came towards me, and believing then that the game had broken off another way, I was about to return to camp when I heard the tapping of galloping feet a long way off. In a few minutes the hard thud and occasional ring on the ground told that it was not the koodoo; and soon afterwards I saw a man on horseback. He was leaning eagerly forward and thumping23 the exhausted24 horse with his rifle and his heels to keep up its staggering gallop19. I looked about quickly to see what it was he was chasing that could have slipped past me unnoticed, but there was nothing; then thinking there had been an accident and he was coming for help, I stepped out into the open and waited for him to come up. I stood quite still, and he galloped25 past within ten yards of me—so close that his muttered “Get on, you brute26; get on, get on!” as he thumped27 away at his poor tired horse, were perfectly28 audible.
“What’s up, sportsman?” I asked, no louder than you would say it across a tennis-court; but the words brought him up, white-faced and terrified, and he half slid, half tumbled, off the horse gasping29 out, “I was lost, I was lost!” How he had managed to keep within that strip of bush, without once getting into the open where he would have seen the line of kopjes to which I had told him to stick or could have seen the waggons and the smoke of the big camp fire, he could never explain. I turned him round where he stood, and through the trees showed him the white tents of the waggons and the cattle grazing near by, but he was too dazed to understand or explain anything.
There are many kinds of men. That particular kind is not the kind that will ever do for veld life: they are for other things and other work. You will laugh at them at times—when the absurdity30 is greatest and no harm has been done. But see it! See it—and realise the suspense31, the strain, and the terror; and then even the funniest incident has another side to it. See it once; and recall that the worst of endings have had just such beginnings. See it in the most absurd and farcical circumstances ever known; and laugh—laugh your fill; laugh at the victim and laugh with him, when it is over—and safe. But in the end will come the little chilling thought that the strongest, the bravest, and the best have known something of it too; and that even to those whose courage holds to the last breath there may come a moment when the pulse beats a little faster and the judgment32 is at fault.
Buggins who was with us in the first season was no hunter, but he was a good shot and not a bad fellow. In his case there was no tragedy; there was much laughter and—to me—a wonderful revelation. He showed us, as in a play, how you can be lost; how you can walk for ever in one little circle, as though drawn33 to a centre by magnetic force, and how you can miss seeing things in the bush if they do not move.
We had outspanned in a flat covered with close grass about two feet high and shady flat-topped thorn trees. The waggons, four in number, were drawn up a few yards off the road, two abreast. The grass was sweet and plentiful34; the day was hot and still; and as we had had a very long early morning trek35 there was not much inclination36 to move. The cattle soon filled themselves and lay down to sleep; the boys did the same; and we, when breakfast was over, got into the shade of the waggons, some to sleep and others to smoke.
Buggins—that was his pet name—was a passenger returning to “England, Home, and Beauty”—that is to say, literally37, to a comfortable home, admiring sisters and a rich indulgent father—after having sought his fortune unsuccessfully on the goldfields for fully38 four months. Buggins was good-natured, unselfish, and credulous39; but he had one fault—he ‘yapped’: he talked until our heads buzzed. He used to sleep contentedly40 in a rumpled41 tarpaulin42 all through the night treks43 and come up fresh as a daisy and full of accumulated chat at the morning outspan, just when we—unless work or sport called for us—were wanting to get some sleep.
We knew well enough what to expect, so after breakfast Jimmy, who understood Buggins well, told him pleasantly that he could “sleep, shoot, or shut up.” To shut up was impossible, and to sleep again—without a rest—difficult, even for Buggins; so with a good-natured laugh he took the shot gun, saying that he “would potter around a bit and give us a treat.” Well, he did!
We had outspanned on the edge of an open space in the thorn bush; there are plenty of them to be found in the Bushveld—spaces a few hundred yards in diameter, like open park land, where not a single tree breaks the expanse of wavy44 yellow grass. The waggons with their greyish tents and buck-sails and dusty wood-work stood in the fringe of the trees where this little arena45 touched the road, and into it sallied Buggins, gently drawn by the benevolent46 purpose of giving us a treat. What he hoped to find in the open on that sweltering day he only could tell; we knew that no living thing but lizards47 would be out of the shade just then, but we wanted to find him employment harmless to him and us.
He had been gone for more than half an hour when we heard a shot, and a few minutes later Jimmy’s voice roused us.
“What the dickens is Buggins doing?” he asked in a tone so puzzled and interested that we all turned to watch that sportsman. According to Jimmy, he had been walking about in an erratic48 way for some time on the far side of the open ground—going from the one end to the other and then back again; then disappearing for a few minutes in the bush and re-appearing to again manoeuvre49 in the open in loops and circles, angles and straight lines. Now he was walking about at a smart pace, looking from side to side apparently50 searching for something. We could see the whole of the arena as clearly as you can see a cricket-field from the railings—for our waggon formed part of the boundary—but we could see nothing to explain Buggins’s manoeuvres. Next we saw him face the thorns opposite, raise his gun very deliberately51, and fire into the top of the trees.
“Green pigeons,” said Jimmy firmly; and we all agreed that Buggins was after specimens52 for stuffing; but either our guess was wrong or his aim was bad, for after standing dead still for a minute he resumed his vigorous walk. By this time Buggins fairly fascinated us; even the kaffirs had roused each other and were watching him. Away he went at once off to our left, and there he repeated the performance, but, again made no attempt to pick up anything and showed no further interest in whatever it was he had fired at, but turned right about face and walked across the open ground in our direction until he was only a couple of hundred yards away. There he stopped and began to look about him and making off some few yards in another direction climbed on to a fair-sized ant-heap five or six feet high, and balancing himself cautiously on this he deliberately fired off both barrels in quick succession. Then the same idea struck us all together, and “Buggins is lost” came from several—all choking with laughter.
Jimmy got up and, stepping out into the open beside the waggon, called, “Say, Buggins, what in thunder are you doing?”
To see Buggins slide off the ant-heap and shuffle53 shamefacedly back to the waggon before a gallery of four white men and a lot of kaffirs, all cracking and crying with laughter, was a sight never to be forgotten.
I did not want to get lost and be eaten alive, or even look ridiculous, so I began very carefully: glanced back regularly to see what the track, trees, rocks, or kopjes looked like from the other side; carefully noted54 which side of the road I had turned off; and always kept my eye on the sun. But day after day and month after month went by without accident or serious difficulty, and then the same old thing happened: familiarity bred contempt, and I got the beginner’s complaint, conceit55 fever, just as others did: thought I was rather a fine fellow, not like other chaps who always have doubts and difficulties in finding their way back, but something exceptional with the real instinct in me which hunters, natives, and many animals are supposed to have; though, in fact, I could not get lost. So each day I went further and more boldly off the road, and grew more confident and careless.
The very last thing that would have occurred to me on this particular day was that there was any chance of being lost or any need to take note of where we went. For many weeks we had been hunting in exactly the same sort of country, but not of course in the same part; and the truth is I did not give the matter a thought at all, but went ahead as one does with the things that are done every day as matters of habit.
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2
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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3
waggon
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| n.运货马车，运货车；敞篷车箱 | |
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4
ecstasies
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| 狂喜( ecstasy的名词复数 )； 出神； 入迷； 迷幻药 | |
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joints
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| 接头( joint的名词复数 )； 关节； 公共场所（尤指价格低廉的饮食和娱乐场所） （非正式）； 一块烤肉 （英式英语） | |
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6
scented
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| adj.有香味的；洒香水的；有气味的v.嗅到(scent的过去分词) | |
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scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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abreast
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| adv.并排地；跟上(时代)的步伐，与…并进地 | |
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everlastingly
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| 永久地，持久地 | |
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buck
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| n.雄鹿，雄兔；v.马离地跳跃 | |
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stump
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| n.残株，烟蒂，讲演台；v.砍断，蹒跚而走 | |
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landmarks
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| n.陆标( landmark的名词复数 )；目标；（标志重要阶段的）里程碑 ~ (in sth)；有历史意义的建筑物（或遗址） | |
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13
sane
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| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
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inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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15
utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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collapse
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| vi.累倒；昏倒；倒塌；塌陷 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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gallop
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| v./n.(马或骑马等)飞奔；飞速发展 | |
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galloping
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| adj. 飞驰的, 急性的 动词gallop的现在分词形式 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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waggons
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| 四轮的运货马车( waggon的名词复数 )； 铁路货车； 小手推车 | |
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23
thumping
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| adj.重大的，巨大的；重击的；尺码大的；极好的adv.极端地；非常地v.重击(thump的现在分词)；狠打；怦怦地跳；全力支持 | |
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exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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25
galloped
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| （使马）飞奔，奔驰( gallop的过去式和过去分词 )； 快速做[说]某事 | |
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brute
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| n.野兽，兽性 | |
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thumped
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| v.重击， （指心脏）急速跳动( thump的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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gasping
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| adj. 气喘的, 痉挛的 动词gasp的现在分词 | |
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absurdity
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| n.荒谬，愚蠢；谬论 | |
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suspense
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| n.（对可能发生的事）紧张感，担心，挂虑 | |
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judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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plentiful
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| adj.富裕的，丰富的 | |
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trek
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| vi.作长途艰辛的旅行；n.长途艰苦的旅行 | |
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inclination
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| n.倾斜；点头；弯腰；斜坡；倾度；倾向；爱好 | |
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literally
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| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
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38
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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credulous
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| adj.轻信的，易信的 | |
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contentedly
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| adv.心满意足地 | |
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41
rumpled
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| v.弄皱，使凌乱( rumple的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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42
tarpaulin
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| n.涂油防水布，防水衣，防水帽 | |
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43
treks
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| n.远距离行走 ( trek的名词复数 )；长途跋涉，艰难的旅程（尤指在山区）v.艰苦跋涉，徒步旅行( trek的第三人称单数 )；（尤指在山中）远足，徒步旅行，游山玩水 | |
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44
wavy
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| adj.有波浪的，多浪的，波浪状的，波动的，不稳定的 | |
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45
arena
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| n.竞技场，运动场所；竞争场所，舞台 | |
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46
benevolent
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| adj.仁慈的，乐善好施的 | |
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47
lizards
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| n.蜥蜴( lizard的名词复数 ) | |
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48
erratic
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| adj.古怪的，反复无常的，不稳定的 | |
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49
manoeuvre
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| n.策略，调动；v.用策略，调动 | |
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50
apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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51
deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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52
specimens
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| n.样品( specimen的名词复数 )；范例；（化验的）抽样；某种类型的人 | |
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53
shuffle
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| n.拖著脚走，洗纸牌；v.拖曳，慢吞吞地走 | |
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54
noted
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| adj.著名的，知名的 | |
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55
conceit
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| n.自负，自高自大 | |
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