African Camp Fires eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 275 pages of information about African Camp Fires.

African Camp Fires eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 275 pages of information about African Camp Fires.

From the house site we descended the slope to where the ostriches and the cattle and the people were in the late sunlight swarming upward from the plains pastures below.  These people were, to the chief extent, Wakamba, quite savage, but attracted here by the justness and fair dealing of the Hills.  Some of them farmed on shares with the Hills, the white men furnishing the land and seed, and the black men the labour; some of them laboured on wage; some few herded cattle or ostriches; some were hunters and took the field only when, as now, serious business was afoot.  They had their complete villages, with priests, witch doctors, and all; and they seemed both contented and fond of the two white men.

As we walked about we learned much of the ostrich business; and in the course of our ten days’ visit we came to a better realization of how much there is to think of in what appears basically so simple a proposition.

In the nesting time, then, the Hills went out over the open country, sometimes for days at a time, armed with long high-power telescopes.  With these fearsome and unwieldy instruments they surveyed the country inch by inch from the advantage of a kopje.  When thus they discovered a nest, they descended and appropriated the eggs.  The latter, hatched at home in an incubator, formed the nucleus of a flock.

Pass the raising of ostrich chicks to full size through the difficulties of disease, wild beasts, and sheer cussedness.  Of the resultant thirty birds or so of the season’s catch, but two or three will even promise good production.  These must be bred in captivity with other likely specimens.  Thus after several years the industrious ostrich farmer may become possessed of a few really prime birds.  To accumulate a proper flock of such in a new country is a matter of a decade or so.  Extra prime birds are as well known and as much in demand for breeding as any blood horse in a racing country.  Your true ostrich enthusiast, like the Hills, possesses trunks full of feathers not good commercially, but intensely interesting for comparison and for the purposes of prophecy.  While I stayed with them came a rumour of a very fine plucking a distant neighbour had just finished from a likely two-year-old.  The Hills were manifestly uneasy until one of them had ridden the long distance to compare this newcomer’s product with that of their own two-year-olds.  And I shall never forget the reluctantly admiring shake of the head with which he acknowledged that it was indeed a “very fine feather!”

But getting the birds is by no means all of ostrich farming, as many eager experimenters have discovered to their cost.  The birds must have a certain sort of pasture land; and their paddocks must be built on an earth that will not soil or break the edges of the new plumes.

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Project Gutenberg
African Camp Fires from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.