Encamping on this river, they still remained a few days longer in the neighbourhood before finally separating, usually taking from here different directions during the day in search of game, and meeting again at night. The game in the district, however, for the most part proved scarce and wild, a circumstance afterwards accounted for by the fact that other parties had been and still were hunting the neighbourhood at the same time. There was, nevertheless, abundant evidence of its being a good game country; and, as it was, giraffe, koodoo, waterbuck, and sable antelope were met with, besides wild pig, quagga, and sassaybi. The spoor of elephant and rhinoceros was also seen, none of it, however, very recent. The Ramaqueban--at this season a fine broad stream, with long grass and a large undergrowth of rank weeds upon its banks--was crossed in many of their rambles, and near it on one occasion were seen the graves of two Englishmen. “Started at nine,” writes Frank Oates on February 16th, “crossed the Ramaqueban, and passed the graves of two Englishmen, who died here, one of fever, one killed by an elephant. The latter had come from England to shoot, and was killed by the tusks of the first elephant he saw. The fever is very bad on this river; the vegetation is extremely rank, and the water lies very deep over much of the veldt. The graves,” he concludes, “had been surrounded by stakes to keep off the wolves, but the river, overflowing its banks, had nearly washed them away; still the heaps of stones covering the bodies and a few stakes remain.” The same evening, wandering far into the bush, Frank Oates slept out with some of his boys who had accompanied him. “We stopped at 5 P.M.,” he says, “and huts were made. It was a hot night, and the big fires made it worse. The white ants too kept tumbling over me all night, and knocking down leaves from the roof.[34] We were perhaps sixteen miles from the waggon.” Still, however, though in a less tried district, there seemed but little game, and what was seen was wild. Returning to the camp next day, “I stopped in the afternoon,” he writes, “when the boys found a nest of small bees, full of delicious honey, on which and coffee I dined sumptuously.” [Illustration: GIGANTIC ANT-HILL.] And now discouraged by the wildness and scarcity of the game, the Dutchman soon after--about the 20th--took his departure, returning to John Lee’s, the Hottentot having left two days previously for the Shashe River, whither he had been summoned to join another Dutch hunter, Piet Jacobs, in search of elephant.