In this stern, silent school for generations the Boer has been trained. Courage has become inherent and hereditary with him; he sucks it in with his mother's milk; and, with it, an equally uncompromising antipathy to war and conflict. For generations, deadly strife and conflict, or the possibility of it, was part of the daily unending discipline of his life. He regards it now as one of life's crowning evils, to be avoided if possible--never to be flinched from when inevitable.
It is this attitude which has led to so much misunderstanding of the Boer's character by those who do not know him, and even by those who think they know him. His view with regard to the chase illustrates exactly his attitude toward human slaughter. If the leopards or wild dogs decimate his flocks, he will spend days in the most unwearied, skilful, and daring hunting; yet when he has killed them he will often return home, and say with a sigh of relief, "Now it will be six months before I need go after them again." If you inform him that in England at great expense men keep and breed up foxes which, with great damage to crops and hedges, they afterwards spend days in hunting, he will look at you as though doubting the truth of your assertion, remarking quietly: "But the Rednecks must then be mad? What do they want with the wild beasts?"[72]
[72] A young Englishman, coming out to Africa some years ago, for the purpose of distinguishing himself by shooting some big game, and hearing there was an old Boer on a farm near by who had the reputation of having been a most noted hunter, endless lions having fallen to his gun, in addition to large game and bucks, determined to visit him. He returned much disappointed. Instead of finding the house filled with trophies of the chase, which he hoped he might perhaps purchase, he found not one skin or pair of horns in the little three-roomed house. After very much difficulty, and as a matter of politeness to the stranger, the old man was at last induced to recount one or two hunting stories. The thing which he appeared to be most proud of was a frame of everlasting flowers which a daughter of his, who had been to school, had made and placed round a cheap print on the wall. He asked the young man whether they had those flowers in his country; and, when told they had not, smiled softly to himself at the manifest superiority of South Africa. It is, of course, not only the true Boer hunter who manifests this simplicity. If the works of the great African hunter, F. C. Selous, with their unvarnished tale of occurrences, be compared with the gilded narratives of some persons who have once shot a tiger from the back of an elephant or a tree-platform, the same unconscious simplicity will be manifest, dividing the man who can do the thing from the man who desires it to be thought that he can do it.