“I never shall forget the sight that poor old Sanko, one of my native boys, was when he came off the middle watch, the first night we reached the high country. Sanko was a ‘white-haired boy’ when he came off watch to call me that morning, and no mistake about it, although his waving locks and beard had been as black as night the day before.
“No, Mr. Angland, he hadn’t seen a ghost! You’re a bit too fast.
“But he _had_ seen something strange to him, and that was a fall of snow. And when he poked his head in at the door of the ‘fly’ (tent) and called me, his good-humoured, hairy face was white with snow crystals. He really gave me a kind of ‘skeer,’ as our American cousins call it, for a moment. He looked like the apparition of some one I had known in life. I thought I was dreaming at first; and I had had fever a little while before, and was still rather weak from its effects. I mention this because the scare Sanko gave me may have made a more lasting impression upon me than I thought at the time, and had something to do with what happened the next night. All I did at the time, however, was to tell Sanko not to call the next watch, as the cattle would not shift in the snow. And rolling myself up in my blankets, I was soon asleep again.
“One of the greatest hardships of cattle droving is the watching necessary at night. All sorts of things may occur to frighten them; and when that does happen, off they rush, a resistless flood of mad animals, into the darkness, breaking each other’s necks and legs, and the remainder getting lost. Cows that want to return to where they dropped a calf will sometimes start a mob. The cunning brutes will watch you as you ride past them on your ‘night horse’ on your way round the mob, and then slink off into the shadows, and be miles back along the track by daylight. A thunderstorm is also a frightful cause of mobs stampeding. But the worst thing to be dreaded by the drover is a deliberate attempt to frighten the cattle by cattle-thieves, or ‘duffers,’ as we call them, who used in my time—there’s little of it done now, I believe—sometimes to steal the larger part of a travelling herd by this means. Well, the plan of these midnight robbers is to watch till your horses have wandered a bit from the camp, and then, getting amongst them, slip their hobbles and drive them quietly away. Then, knowing you can do nothing to stop them, the rascals proceed to startle the cattle by shouting, a gun-shot, or some such means; and you are lucky if you get half your horses, let alone half your cattle, back again.