Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140308962 ISBN 13: 9780140308969

Publisher: Puffin Books, 1976

‘Hunting stories, like traveller’s tales, are proverbially dangerous to reputations, however literally true they may be . . .’ So wrote J Percy FitzPatrick of his perennial best-seller, never out of print in the century since its first publication. Here is the story of the ‘Boy’ who went to seek his fortune and of his bull-terrier, the plucky runt of the litter; of Marokela, the champion Zulu haulier; of Jantje, the Bushman with all his lore; and of pioneer types from previous goldrushes in California and Australia. A tribute to the life of the 1880s in the outposts of the agrarian Transvaal, this complete edition includes for the first time the author’s ‘Postscript’ and ‘The Creed of Jock’.

About the Author:

J Percy FitzPatrick (1862-1931) was born of Catholic Irish immigrant parents in King William’s Town. Married in 1889, he had five children growing up in Johannesburg. At Rudyard Kipling’s prompting he wrote out several drafts of his stories of his greenhorn youth of twenty years before under the title The Life, the Man and the Dog. He finalised the work and by 1906 he was able to sponsor the British artist Edmund Caldwell to gather material to illustrate the typescript of what became known as Jock of the Bushveld.