Jock Of The Bushveld by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick ( Chapter 7 )( Page 2 ) Into The Heart Of The Bush

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
utterly 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 collapse.  The knees seemed to give way: they could not remain standing.  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 dread 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 galloping 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 mere fringe enclosing the little range of kopjes; and between the stems of
the trees I could see our camp and waggons 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 thumping the exhausted horse with his rifle and his heels to keep up its staggering gallop.  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 galloped past within ten yards of me--so close that his muttered "Get on, you brute;
get on, get on!" as he thumped away at his poor tired horse, were perfectly 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 gasping 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 absurdity is greatest and no harm has been done.  But see it!  See it--and realise the suspense, 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 judgment 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 drawn 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 plentiful; the day was hot and still; and as we had had a very long early morning trek there was not much inclination 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, literally, to a comfortable home, admiring sisters and a rich indulgent father--after having sought his fortune unsuccessfully on the goldfields for fully four months.  Buggins
was good-natured, unselfish, and credulous; but he had one fault--he `yapped': he talked until our heads buzzed.  He used to sleep contentedly in a rumpled tarpaulin all through the night treks 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.