There can be no denying that we were reaping a plentiful crop of misfortunes, to which farmers in South Africa are especially exposed. The cattle thieves had mysteriously come and swiftly gone, taking with them a few head of stock into the dense cover of the Fish River Bush, thence to slip them at favourable opportunities into Kaffraria. Then, one morning the news was brought in that a pack of wild dogs, issuing from the Kowie Bush on the west, had sallied out on a rush over the intervening belt of well-stocked cattle country into the Fish River Valley, and there were few farms on the route that had not suffered. At one place a heifer had been pulled down and eaten; at another, a cow had been attacked and so mauled that death from a rifle-ball was a happy release; and on my place the pack had stampeded a mob of young cattle, ran down and killed a steer, besides leaving their marks on many others. In one night they had covered fifteen miles from one wooded fastness to the other, killing as they went, and when in the morning the angry farmers fingered their guns the brutes were resting secure in the distant woods. The wild dogs hunt in packs when after game, and according to a well arranged plan. Thus, one part of the pack will head the quarry in a certain direction where other members are lying in wait, but when on a wild rush across the veld they keep together, and on coming across cattle or sheep they bite or kill out of sheer lust of blood, seldom stopping to eat. Their jaws are enormously powerful, and with a snap and a wrench they tear away mouthfuls of flesh--so that if a pack gets among a flock of sheep they do a vast deal of mischief, and though they cannot pull down an ox, they will cause the death of a cow by tearing at her udder and belly. Fortunately their raids into the comparatively open veld are not frequent, and they prefer to keep in the shelter of wide stretches of bush until game becoming scarce they shift quarters, when they may sometimes be caught in an isolated kloof and shot or poisoned. Uncle Abe had something to say when I met him next at the monthly meeting of our Farmers' Association--an organisation of six paying members and fifteen members who never had enough cash to pay, but who regularly attended on the chance of getting a square meal from any one of the five whose turn it was to give up his largest room to the meeting. Uncle Abe did most of the orating, and it frequently happened indeed that the formal business would be forgotten, while Abe from his usual seat on the door-step held forth on the peculiar gifts of "animiles." His idea was that all branches of animal life acted under a stringent code of laws and regulations.