We reached the Crocodile River drift on a Sunday morning, after a particularly dry and dusty night trek¹. ‘Wanting a wash’ did not on such occasions mean a mild inclination² for a luxury: it meant that washing was badly needed. The dust lay inches deep on the one worn veld road, and the long strings³ of oxen toiling⁴ along kicked up suffocating⁵ clouds of fine dust which there was seldom any breeze to carry off: it powdered white man and black to an equal level of yellowy red. The waggons⁷ were a couple of hundred yards from the river; and, taking a complete change, I went off for a real clean up.  
We generally managed to get in a couple of bathes at the rivers—real swims—but that was only done in the regular drifts and when there were people about or waggons crossing. In such conditions crocodiles rarely appeared; they prefer solitude⁸ and silence. The swims were very delightful⁹ but somewhat different from ordinary bathes; however remote may have been the risk of meeting a crocodile when you dived, or of being grabbed by one as you swam, the idea was always there and made it more interesting.
 
Being alone that day I had no intention of having a swim or of going into the open river, and I took a little trouble to pick a suitable pool with a rock on which to stand and dress. The water was clear and I could see the bottom of the pool. It was quite shallow—three feet deep at most—made by a scour¹¹ in the sandy bed and divided from the main stream by a narrow spit of sand a couple of yards wide and twenty long. At the top end of the sand spit was a flat rock—my dressing¹² table.
 
After a dip in the pool I stood on to the sand spit to scrub off the brown dust, keeping one unsoaped eye roving round for intrusive¹³ crocodiles, and the loaded rifle lying beside me. The brutes¹⁴ slide out so silently and unexpectedly that in that exposed position, with water all round, one could not afford to turn one’s back on any quarter for long. There is something laughable—it seemed faintly humorous even then—in the idea of a naked man hastily washing soap out of his eyes and squeezing away the water to take a hurried look behind him, and then after careful survey, doing an ‘altogether’ dowse just as hastily—blowing and spluttering all the time like a boy after his first dive.
 
The bath was successful and ended without incident—not a sign of a crocodile the whole time! Breakfast was ready when I reached the waggons, and feeling very fit and clean in a fresh flannel¹⁶ shirt and white moleskins, I sat down to it. Jim Makokel’ brought the kettle of coffee from the fire and was in the act of pouring some into a big mug when he stopped with a grunt¹⁷ of surprise and, looking towards the river, called out sharply, “What is it?”
 
One of the herd¹⁸ boys was coming at a trot¹⁹ towards us, and the drivers, thinking something had happened to the oxen, called a question to him. He did not answer until he reached them and even then spoke²⁰ in so quiet a tone that I could not catch what he said. But Jim, putting down the kettle, ran to his waggon⁶ and grabbing his sticks and assegais called to me in a husky shouting whisper—which imperfectly describes Jim’s way of relieving his feelings, without making the whole world echo: “Ingwenye, Inkos! Ingwenye Umkulu! Big Clocodile! Groot Krokodil, Baas!”
 
Then abandoning his excited polyglot²¹ he gabbled off in pure Zulu and at incredible speed a long account of the big Crocodile: it had carried off four boys going to the goldfields that year; it had taken a woman and a baby from the kraal near by, but a white man had beaten it off with a bucket; it had taken all the dogs, and even calves²² and goats, at the drinking-place; and goodness knows how much more. How Jim got his news, and when he made his friends, were puzzles never solved.
 
Hunting stories, like travellers tales, are proverbially dangerous to reputations, however literally²³ true they may be; and this is necessarily so, partly because only exceptional things are worth telling, and partly because the conditions of the country or the life referred to are unfamiliar²⁴ and cannot be grasped. It is a depressing but accepted fact that the ideal, lurid—and, I suppose, convincing—pictures of wild life are done in London, where the author is unhampered by fact or experience.
 
“Stick to the impossible, and you will be believed: keep clear of fact and commonplace, and you cannot be checked.”
 
Such was the cynical²⁶ advice given many years ago by one who had bought his experience in childhood and could not forget it. Sent home as a small boy from a mission station in Zululand to be educated by his grandparents, he found the demand for marvels²⁷ among his simple country relatives so great that his small experience of snakes and wild animals was soon used up; but the eager suggestive questions of the good people, old and young, led him on, and he shyly crossed the border. The Fields of Fancy were fair and free; there were no fences there; and he stepped out gaily²⁸ into the Little People’s country—The Land of Let’s Pretendia! He became very popular.
 
One day, however, whilst looking at the cows, he remarked that in Zululand a cow would not yield her milk unless the calf²⁹ stood by.
 
The old farmer stopped in his walk, gave him one suspicious look, and asked coldly, “What do they do when a calf is killed or dies?”
 
“They never kill the calves there;” the boy answered, “but once when one died father stuffed the skin, with grass and showed it to the cow; because they said that would do.”
 
The old man, red with anger, took the boy to his room, saying that as long as he spoke of the lions, tigers and snakes that he knew about, they believed him; but when it came to farming! No! Downright lying he would not have; and there was nothing for it but larruping.
 
“It was the only piece of solid truth they had allowed me to tell for months,” he added thoughtfully, “and I got a first-class hiding for it.”
 
And was there no one who doubted Du Chaillu and Stanley and others? Did no one question Gordon Cumming’s story of the herd of elephants caught and killed in a little kloof? and did not we of Barberton many years later locate the spot by the enormous pile of bones, and name it “Elephants’ Kloof?”
 
There are two crocodile incidents well-known to those whom time has now made old hands, but believed by no one else; even in the day of their happening they divided men into believers and unbelievers. The one was of ‘Mad’ Owen—only mad, because utterly³⁰ reckless—riding through Komati Drift one moonlight night alone and unarmed, who, riding, found his horse brought to a stop, plunging³¹, kicking and struggling on the sand bank in mid-stream where the water was not waist deep. Owen looking back saw that a crocodile had his horse by the leg. All he had was a leaded hunting-crop, but, jumping into the water he laid on so vigorously that the crocodile made off, and Owen remounted and rode out.
 
There are many who say that it is not true—that it cannot be true; for no man would do it. But there are others who have an open mind, because they knew Owen—Mad Owen, who for a wager³² bandaged his horse’s eyes and galloped³³ him over a twenty foot bank headlong into the Jew’s Hole in Lydenburg; Owen, who when driving four young horses in a Cape³⁴ cart flung the reins³⁵ away and whipped up the team, bellowing³⁶ with laughter, because his nervous companion said he had never been upset and did not want to be; Owen, who— But too many things rise up that earned him his title and blow the ‘impossible’ to the winds.
 
Mad Owen deserves a book to himself; but here is my little testimony³⁷ on his behalf, given shamefaced at the thought of how he would roar to think it needed.
 
I crossed that same drift one evening and on riding up the bank to Furley’s store saw a horse standing³⁸ in a dejected attitude with one hind¹⁵ leg clothed in ‘trowsers’ made of sacking and held up by a suspender ingeniously fastened across his back.
 
During the evening something reminded me of the horse, and I asked a question; and the end of Furley’s answer was, “They say it’s all a yarn³⁹ about ‘horsewhipping’ a crocodile: all we know is that one night, a week ago, he turned up here dripping wet, and after having a drink told us the yarn. He had the leaded hunting-crop in his hand; and that’s the horse he was riding. You can make what you like of it. We’ve been doctoring the horse ever since, but I doubt if it will pull through!”
 
I have no doubt about the incident. Owen did not invent: he had no need to; and Furley himself was no mean judge of crocodiles and men. Furley kept a ferry boat for the use of natives and others when the river was up, at half a crown a trip. The business ran itself and went strong during the summer floods, but in winter when the river was low and fordable it needed pushing; and then Furley’s boatman, an intelligent native, would loiter about the drift and interest travellers in his crocodile stories, and if they proved over-confident or sceptical, would manoeuvre⁴⁰ them a little way down stream where, from the bank, they would usually see a big crocodile sunning himself on a sand spit below the drift. The boys always took the boat. One day some police entered the store and joyously⁴¹ announced that they had got him—“bagged the old villain⁴² at last!”; and Furley dropped on a sack of mealies groaning⁴³ out “Glory, Boys! The ferry’s ruined. Why, I’ve preserved him for years!”
 
The other crocodile incident concerns “Lying Tom”—brave merry-faced blue-eyed Tom; bubbling with good humour; overflowing⁴⁴ with kindness; and full of the wildest yarns⁴⁵, always good and amusing, but so steep that they made the most case-hardened draw a long breath.
 
The name Lying Tom was understood and accepted by every one in the place, barring Tom himself; for, oddly enough, there was another Tom of the same surname, but no relation, and once when his name cropped up I heard the real Simon Pure refer to him as “my namesake—the chap they call Lying Tom.” To the day of his death Tom believed that it was the other Tom who was esteemed⁴⁶ the liar²⁵.
 
Tom was a prospector⁴⁷ who ‘came in’ occasionally for supplies or licences; and there came a day when Barberton was convulsed by Lying Tom’s latest.
 
He had been walking along the bank of the Crocodile River, and on hearing screams ran down just in time to see a kaffir woman with a child on her back dragged off through the shallow water by a crocodile. Tom ran in to help—“I kicked the dashed thing on the head and in the eyes,” he said, “and punched its ribs⁴⁸ and then grabbed the bucket that the woman had in her hand and hammered the blamed thing over the head till it let go. By Jimminy, Boys, the woman was in a mess: never saw any one in such a fright!”
 
Poor Tom suffered from consumption in the throat and talked in husky jerks broken by coughs and laughter. Is there one among them who knew him who does not remember the breezy cheeriness, the indomitable pluck, the merry blue eyes, so limpidly⁴⁹ clear, the expressive⁵⁰ bushy eyebrows⁵¹, and the teeth, too perfect to be wasted on a man, and ever flashing with his unfailing smiles?
 
Tom would end up with—“Niggers said I was ‘takati’: asked for some of my medicine! Blamed got no pluck: would’ve let the woman go.”
 
Of course this story went the rounds latest and best; but one day we turned up in Barberton to deliver our loads, and that evening a whisper went about and men with faces humorously puzzled looked at one another and said “Lying Tom’s a fraud: the crocodile story is true!”
 
For our party, shooting guinea-fowl in the kaffir lands along the............