Norris sprang forward with a shout; but he had not run more than thirty yards before the bull began to kick.  It kneeled upon its forelegs, rose thence on to its hind legs, and finally stood up.  Norris guessed what had happened.  He had hit the bull in the neck instead of behind the shoulders, and had broken no bones.  He fired his second barrel as the brute streamed away in an oblique line southeastwards from the wood, and missed.  Then he ran back to camp, slapped a bridle on to his swiftest horse, and without waiting to saddle it, sprang on its back and galloped in pursuit.  He rode as it were along the base of a triangle, whereas the bull galloped from the apex, and since his breakfast was getting hot behind him, he wished to make that triangle an isosceles.  So he jammed his heels into his horse’s ribs, and was fast drawing within easy range, when the buffalo got his wind and swerved on the instant into a diagonal course due southwest.

The manoeuvre left Norris directly behind his quarry, and with a long, stern chase in prospect.  However, his blood was up, and he held on to wear the beast down.  He forgot his breakfast; he took no more than a casual notice of the direction he was following; he simply braced his knees in a closer grip, while the distorted shadows of himself and the horse lengthened and thinned along the ground as the sun rose over his right shoulder.

Suddenly the buffalo disappeared in a dip of the veld, and a few moments later came again into view a good hundred yards further to the south.  Norris pulled his left rein, and made for the exact spot at which the bull had reappeared.  He found himself on the edge of a tiny cliff which dropped twenty feet in a sheer fall to a little stream, and he was compelled to ride along the bank until he reached the incline which the buffalo had descended.  He forded the stream, galloped under the opposite bank across a patch of ground which had been trampled into mud by the hoofs of beasts coming here to water, and mounted again to the open.  The bull had gained a quarter of a mile’s grace from his mistake, and was heading straight for a huge cone of granite.

Norris recognised the cone.  It towered up from the veld, its cliffs seamed into gullies by the rain-wash of ages, and he had used it more than once as a landmark during the last fortnight, for it rose due southwest of his camp.

He watched the bull approach the cone and vanish into one of the gullies.  It did not reappear, and he rode forward, keeping a close eye upon the gully.  As he came opposite to it, however, he saw through the opening a vista of green trees flashing in the sunlight.  He turned his horse through the passage, and reined up in a granite amphitheatre.  The floor seemed about half a mile in diameter; it was broken into hillocks, and strewn with patches of a dense undergrowth, while here and there a big tree grew.  The walls, which converged slightly towards an open top, were robed from summit to base with wild flowers, so that the whole circumference of the cone was one blaze of colour.