The Game Fields of the Eastern Transvaal2

Abstract

IN proceeding into the interior of Africa from almost any point on the eastern coast, the traveller passes over a low coastal plain to the foot of the scarp of a high plateau. This plateau is succeeded to the west by a still higher one, which is gained either by a second steep ascent or by a gradual slope. The existing river valleys and former earth-movements have in places interrupted this arrangement; but, notwithstanding a few such exceptions, it persists with remarkable uniformity from Abyssinia to Natal, where the dominant meridional geographical lines bend round into the east and west series that rules in Cape Colony. In the eastern Transvaal, this zonal arrangement of the country is well developed. Inland from Delagoa Bay is a tract of undulating lowland, ending at the foot of the Libombo Mountains, which separate Swaziland and the Transvaal from Portuguese East Africa. Seventy miles further to the west is the parallel range of the Drakensberg or Kahlamba (to adopt the author's spelling of the name, which is usually written Quahlamba). Between these mountain ranges is a belt of bush-covered veldt. The Crocodile River (a tributary of the Komati) and the Olifants River flow from west to east across this belt, at a distance of about l00 miles from one another. These, with the mountains, enclose a roughly quadrangular area, some 7000 square miles in extent, which is the favourite hunting-ground of Mr. F. V. Kirby. Small though this area is, it includes very varied types of country. To the west are the densely wooded eastern slopes of the Drakensberg, and part of the turf-clad plateaus or terraces beyond; to the east lies low country with sub-tropical vegetation, intervening between the Libombo Mountains and the Limpopo River. Most of the area consists of barren, scrub-covered plains known in this part of Africa as Bush-veldt, and near the equator as the Nyika. Most of this area was once rich in game. In the Bush-veldt lived the rhinoceros and buffalo, the sable and roan antelopes, the gnu, waterbuck, zebra and mpalla. The wooded foothills of the Drakensberg, or the “Kloof Country,” was the home of the koodoo, the hill-leopard, the bush-buck, and the reed-buck. On the western plateau, or the “Krantz Country,” in addition to some of the animals mentioned, lived the oribi and the mountain reed-buck.