Jock Of The Bushveld by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick (Chapter 25)( Page 6 ) Our Last Hunt

In a little while he seemed satisfied that all was well, and with head thrown slightly forward and the sure clean tread of his kind, he took his line unhesitatingly down the hill.  As he neared the thicker bush twenty yards away a sudden impulse made me give a shout.  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.  When I turned round Jock was still asleep: little incidents like that brought his deafness home. It was our last day's hunting together; and I went back to the dreary round of hard, hopeless, useless struggle and daily loss. One day, a calm cloudless day, there came without warning a tremendous booming roar that left the air vibrating and seemed to shake the very earth, as a thousand echoes called and answered from hill to hill down the long valley.  There was nothing to explain it; the kaffirs turned a sickly grey, and appealed to me; but I could give them no explanation-- it was something beyond my ken--and they seemed to think it an evil omen of still greater ill-luck.  But, as it turned out, the luck was not all bad: some days passed before the mystery was solved, and then we came to where Coombes, with whom a week earlier I had tried--and failed--to keep pace, had been blown to pieces with his boys, waggon, oxen, and three tons of dynamite: there was no fragment of waggon bigger than one's hand; and the trees all around were barked on one side.  We turned out to avoid the huge hole in the drift, and passed on. There were only twenty oxen left when we reached the drift below Fig Tree.  The water was nearly breast-high and we carried three-fourths of the loads through on our heads, case by case, to make the pull as easy as possible for the oxen, as they could only crawl then.  We got one waggon through with some difficulty, but at nightfall the second was still in the river; we had carried out everything removable, even to the buck-sails, but the weakened bullocks could not move the empty waggon. The thunder-clouds were piling up ahead, and distant lightning gave warning of a storm away up river; so we wound the trek-chain round a big tree on the bank, to anchor the waggon in case of flood, and reeling from work and weariness, too tired to think of food, I flung myself down in my blankets under the other waggon which was outspanned where we had stopped it in the double-rutted veld road, and settling comfortably into the sandy furrow cut by many wheels, was `dead to the world' in a few minutes.  Near midnight the storm awoke me and a curious coldness about the neck and shoulders made me turn over to pull the blankets up.  The road had served as a storm-water drain, converting the two wheel furrows into running streams, and I, rolled in my blankets, had dammed up one of them.  The prompt flow of the released water as soon as I turned over, told plainly what had happened.  I looked out at the driving rain and the glistening earth, as shown up by constant flashes of lightning: it was a world of rain and spray and  running water.  It seemed that there was neither hope nor mercy anywhere; I was too tired to care, and dropping back into the trough, slept the night out in water.