Thus, with our difficulties always on the increase, we spent a couple of most arduous months, only deterred from throwing up the venture by a firm belief that the diamonds were there somewhere; often ill with fever, hard up for food, and quite cut off from all news of the outside world. Our only amusement was in trapping animals as the Germans did, improvising traps from spare sieves, and baiting them with small birds. Scarce a day passed but that the traps were full, and in this manner we caught, alive and unhurt, wild-cats, ratels, iguanas, and several of the beautifully spotted “leopard cats”--or genets, to give them their proper name. On more than one occasion a _muis-hond_ (the South African skunk) got into the traps, and made its presence known by the most appalling smell, and a tree leguaan (iguana) once gave me an awful shock, for he lay so quiet under the leaves covering the sieve that I thought it was empty, and the dart of his head--so like that of a snake--made me fall back in the thorn-bush, for I thought I had bagged a huge puff-adder. Towards the end of our stay provisions got so low, and game so wild and scarce, that we had to spend most of our time after it, and one day, whilst looking for a square meal, I had rather a peculiar experience. About two miles above the Drift, and near the Lorelei Mountain, we spotted a flock of ten or a dozen wild geese floating near the German bank, and Dittmer emptied his magazine at them, killing three. The river was still in flood, and with the perversity usual in such cases, the geese floated into the German bank. We wanted them very badly, and as Dittmer could swim but little, it was up to me to go across and get them. Helped by the current, I got across the muddy, turbulent water fairly easily and got the geese, and as I had drifted a long way downstream, I got out with the intention of walking up the bank to opposite where my clothes lay. The thicket on the north bank was dense and teeming with monkeys, baboons, and all sorts of animal life; it was thorny too, and I was as full of spikes as a porcupine, as I picked my way gingerly along the bank upstream, feeling horribly helpless--for, naturally, I had nothing on but a hat--and looking out carefully for snakes. Seeing an open space with tall reeds, I decided to cut across it, but had scarcely got among the bush vegetation of this swampy place, when at my very feet I saw a huge spoor in the black mud, so freshly made that the water still oozed into it, and at the same time heard an awful snoring grunt close to me, answered by another, and realised that I was right among a herd of hippo. I had seen traces of this small herd before at their favourite haunt, higher up near the Great Fish River. There were but four or five of them, but remnants of the hundreds that swarmed the Orange when Alexander first crossed and described it.