It was thickly sprinkled with
snow and dotted here and there with little green spots where the grass
tufts showed through. A wire fence crossed the hollow lower down.
Luckily we heard their voices before they started shooting, and
instantly we turned and rode for it, the Mausers all opening
immediately and the bullets cracking and whistling round our ears. As
bad luck would have it, my pony, which, like most of them, knows and
dreads the sound of rifles fired at him (though he will stand close to a
battery or among men firing without minding it in the least), became so
frantic at the noise of the bullets that I was quite unable to steer
him. With head wrenched round he bored away straight down the hill
towards the wire. As we got to it I managed to lift him half round and
we struck it sideways. The shock flung me forward on to his neck, which
I clasped with my left arm and just saved myself falling. For an instant
or two he struggled in the wire, a mark for every rifle, and then got
clear. In his efforts he had got half through his girths and the saddle
was back on his rump. A pretty spectacle we must have looked, I sitting
back on his tail, my hat in my hand, both stirrups dangling, and the
bullets whistling round both of us like hailstones. However, I lugged
him out at last, and we went up the side of the fence broadside on to
the shooters, as hard as ever we could lay legs to the ground.
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