Jock Of The Bushveld by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick (Chapter 22)( Page 2 ) The Old Crocodile

Such was the cynical advice given many years ago by one who had bought his experience in childhood and could not forget it.  Sent home as a small boy from a mission station in Zululand to be educated by his grandparents, he found the demand for marvels among his simple country relatives so great that his small experience of snakes and wild animals was soon used up; but the eager suggestive questions of the good people, old and young, led him on, and he shyly crossed the border.  The Fields of Fancy were fair and free; there were no fences there; and he stepped out gaily into the Little People's country--The Land of Let's Pretendia! He became very popular. One day, however, whilst looking at the cows, he remarked that in Zululand a cow would not yield her milk unless the calf stood by. The old farmer stopped in his walk, gave him one suspicious look, and asked coldly, "What do they do when a calf is killed or dies?" "They never kill the calves there;" the boy answered, "but once when one died father stuffed the skin, with grass and showed it to the cow; because they said that would do." The old man, red with anger, took the boy to his room, saying that as long as he spoke of the lions, tigers and snakes that he knew about, they believed him; but when it came to farming!  No!  Downright lying he would not have; and there was nothing for it but larruping. "It was the only piece of solid truth they had allowed me to tell for months," he added thoughtfully, "and I got a first-class hiding for it." And was there no one who doubted Du Chaillu and Stanley and others?  Did no one question Gordon Cumming's story of the herd of elephants caught and killed in a little kloof? and did not we of Barberton many years later locate the spot by the enormous pile of bones, and name it "Elephants' Kloof?" There are two crocodile incidents well-known to those whom time has now made old hands, but believed by no one else; even in the day of their happening they divided men into believers and unbelievers.  The one was of `Mad' Owen--only mad, because utterly reckless- riding through Komati Drift one moonlight night alone and unarmed, who, riding, found his horse brought to a stop, plunging, kicking and struggling on the sand bank in mid-stream where the water was not waist deep.  Owen looking back saw that a crocodile had his horse by the leg.  All he had was a leaded hunting-crop, but, jumping into the water he laid on so vigorously that the crocodile made off, and Owen remounted and rode out. There are many who say that it is not true--that it cannot be true; for no man would do it.  But there are others who have an open mind, because they knew Owen--Mad Owen, who for a wager bandaged his horse's eyes and galloped him over a twenty foot bank headlong into the Jew's Hole in Lydenburg; Owen, who when driving four young horses in a Cape cart flung the reins away and whipped up the team, bellowing with laughter, because his nervous companion said he had never been upset and did not want to be; Owen, who--But too many things rise up that earned him his title and blow the `impossible' to the winds. Mad Owen deserves a book to himself; but here is my little testimony on his behalf, given shamefaced at the thought of how he would roar to think it needed. I crossed that same drift one evening and on riding up the bank to Furley's store saw a horse standing in a dejected attitude with one hind leg clothed in `trowsers' made of sacking and held up by a suspender ingeniously fastened across his back.