Percy FitzPatrick · 1907 · road

Percy FitzPatrick's 1907 classic, told first as bedtime stories to his children and written down at Rudyard Kipling's urging. In the 1880s he drove ox-wagons along the Old Transport Road between the Transvaal goldfields and the coast at Delagoa Bay, and the runt of a litter born at a camp on that road became the best dog in the Lowveld.

1. 1
   Lydenburg

   FitzPatrick comes to the Eastern Transvaal goldfields at twenty-two and fails at mining, then takes up transport riding - his first trek leaving on 8 May 1885 as the novice among seasoned men with ox teams.

2. 2
   Pilgrim's Rest

   The diggings the wagons supply, reached by the diggers' road over the escarpment - a gold camp of tents and tin that is still standing today because nobody ever quite got round to knocking it down.

3. 3
   Graskop

   Paradise Camp on the edge of the escarpment, one of the places marked on the Jock trail today - and the summer camp FitzPatrick describes with the stream he named Tumbling Waters running past it.

4. 4
   Sabie

   Down the escarpment through Spitzkop and Sabie into the Lowveld, where the fever kept the road to the dry winter months and the wagons made no more than twenty miles in a day.

5. 5
   Pretoriuskop

   In May 1885, at a camp in what is now the Kruger Park, Jess has a litter of six and the runt is to be drowned as unlikely to live - and a twenty-three-year-old asks for him instead, and calls him Jock.

6. 6
   Komatipoort

   The drifts on the Crocodile and Komati rivers and the pass at Godleni, the worst of the road and the best of the dog stories - the kudu, the crocodile, the leopard, and the fight with the baboon.

7. 7
   Delagoa Bay

   Lourenco Marques on the coast, the port the whole road exists to reach - loading for the return and turning the wagons round for another six weeks of the same in the opposite direction.

8. 8
   Barberton

   FitzPatrick ends up editing the Gold Fields News in the town that now has a statue of the dog - and Jock is given away to a storekeeper at Mac Mac and shot by mistake in the dark, which is how the book ends.