ulbs,
sweet and nutty to the taste--are divided, three-fourths to Sinikwe,
one-fourth to Nakeesa. These bulbs are bestowed in thin transparent
crops taken from dead guinea-fowls, which are now softened in water for
the purpose. A skewer of wood is run throughout several; in half an
hour the sun has again dried these curious receptacles, and the
Bushman's bread supply is complete. Taking his lion's share of the
food, and munching a few bulbs before he departs, Sinikwe now exchanges
with his wife a few sentences in that curious, whining, inarticulate
form of speech peculiar to the Bushman, every passage of it as full of
clicks as tongue, throat, teeth, and palate can make it; shoulders his
belongings, and sets off briskly upon the spoor of the wounded giraffe.

Nakeesa is to follow him at leisure; she will, you may swear, be up at
the carcase long before Sinikwe has made much havoc with it. But she
has to carry more water and the child, and will take her own time. She
devours a few bulbs and then goes to the water-pit. At present there is
no water there, only some moist sand in a deep hollow. But Nakeesa
knows what she is about. To the end of a hollow reed she has fastened a
tuft of grass. This she inserts into the damp hole which she scoops
from the sand. Then she kneads sand round the base of her rude pump and
over the tuft of grass and sucks. Little by little the water thus
collected reaches and fills her mouth, from which it is discharged, by
means of a thick stalk of desert grass, into an ostrich shell. It is
hard work and slow, but in two hours Nakeesa has filled her three
remaining ostrich shells. These and some others, the holes of which are
all carefully sealed with grass, she bestows in a rude net of fibre.

With this load, together with a calabash of water, her babe, her larder
and household gear (the bulbs, a steinbok skin, and the tortoiseshell),
she sets off on her way towards that banquet of giraffe flesh for which
her soul now pines. It is a long, long journey, but she has no trouble
whatever in following Sinikwe's spoor. She traces it to the spot where
the Masarwa set off upon the tracks of the wounded cow, and then, mile
after mile through the desert, she deciphers easily the familiar tale
that slowly the earth unfolds to her. The giraffe is strong and lusty,
and the poison takes long to do its work upon so huge a frame.

Nakeesa toils on doggedly with her load. She sleeps the first nig