an object as an elephant, visited the area not long afterwards, the people were anxious to learn from me whether more elephants were coming, and, if not, where they could be got. Bokkos is in a congested district, and annually there is a famine period. The country is grassy uplands, with rocks outcropping all about. Not a tree for miles, and no game at all. Leopards there are, and some rats and an occasional rock-rabbit; lizards also, and once every seven years an antelope that has strayed from goodness knows where. It was a seventh year the last time I was in the place. These disadvantages notwithstanding, the men of Bokkos and their dogs-the sorriestlooking pie-dogs in all Africa, and the pie-dog is never a happy hearty beast-go forth to get what they can. In a poor lot these Bokkos pies are the poorest. Patchy sorelooking curs, tails drooping, ribs sticking out, they slink snapping through life about forty-eight hours behind the last scrap of offal. Nevertheless, anything the Bokkos pack puts up is doomed, rat or rabbit or lizard. The long line of hungry hunters sweeps on and on, firing the grass as it goes, a perfect pandemonium of noise and smoke, and runs the quarry down, be it what it may. There is no escape; its day has come. One day this outfit found a Beef," a hartebeest, no less, and ran after it for many hours. The creature was all in when it stumbled into the midst of the Tummot pack, a similar crowd, also hunting hungrily. These slew the hartebeest right in sight of the Bokkos men, who rushed forward with angry cries, and started hammering the killers. All this within a mile of a small mining camp, where the miners, a brace of excellent "Aussies," sat tight and had a good view. There was nothing else for them to do. The affair developed into a regular battle, and it was only the oncoming of night and heavy rain that put a stop to the affray, causing the peace-loving hunters and their dogs to turn up the battle and go home. Happening along the next morning, I forgathered with the "Aussies," and from them learned that there was much more human blood than hartebeest blood shed there that day. not to the contrary, a big lake -until 1914, that is. The pool was home for a number of hippo, and when in that year of drought the water-level sank lower and ever lower, these moved out and trekked miles across country to the river, and so passed out of this narrative. But two conservative old things, the Gombe Die-Hards, stayed, and at the last met a sticky muddy end. When the water had all gone there remained mud, deep, caked a-top, miles of it, and the brace of last-ditchers stuck fast therein, and perished miserably. What was called the Ningi Bush possessed a great reputation as an area where "Beef" of all sorts abounded. People who had never been within hundreds of miles of it told you what a shooter's paradise was there. The few men who had skirted it or passed a day or two in it said the same -game tracks everywhere, and reports from every native and at every village of "Beef" seen last night or that morning. The thing was a regular shibboleth. I subscribed to it, like everybody else, my betters. And when the day came for me to be sent up to Ningi to do a job of work, people congratulated me and advised as to guns. At the small town of Ningi I found established a very good fellow, a mine prospector. He was an excellent shikari, and he had been in Ningi a year. And when he told me there was precious little to shoot in the Ningi Bush, I did not believe him. Well, I spent three months there, in the best shooting time, and natives told me the usual tales about stuff they had seen. But it was always "Beef' yesterday and Beef tomorrow-never" Beef "to-day. I covered the whole area, and saw every village and native; there are plenty of both in it. I saw saw elephant-tracks and droppings, of one elephant, once, and the beast had evidently been moving fast; he was not staying in the Ningi Bush. Of other game I saw none, nor signs of any, except a very few wet-weather tracks months old. A lion came and barked round my camp one night, a wet night, which I remember very well on account of a grand battue of scorpions. When we made camp in the forenoon it was on a bit of fallow, and an acre of this was roughly cleaned with hoes. I sleep always with a light, and was roused in the small hours by a scratting noise. Outside the rain was falling softly but steadily. I did not skip out of bed sudden-like. One learns not morning's hoeing had opened up their little homes; then the rain had flooded them out, and they came away to the light, seeking the dry. Still, one lion does not make a game reserve, and scorpions do not count at all. male savage, with one wrist trussed then trussed up under his chin. The man in red was what we call a Dogari-Dogberry translates the word quite well,-a policeman of the native administration. To this person I said "Good-morning," and he replied in one of the fifty or sixty Nigerian languages that I do not speak. So Umoru, the man of many tongues, was sent for. The explanation of the Ningi myth, I take it, is simply that a limited area of light bush fringed about with farms and villages lay not far from a main road. Any "Beef" that did show up was chased about, and in the course of twenty-four hours was seen and reported by scores of natives from dozens of places. Simply that and nothing more. But the shibboleth lived, and I daresay is going strong today, though it is nine or ten years since I battled with the Ningi scorpions. Kona is a dull dirty dump of thatched mud huts in the midst of the bush alongside the path that writhes from Lau to Jalingo. Two of the huts are the Rest Camp. I was sitting in one of them, and outside the rain was falling. Some was falling inside as well, but one must not expect too much of a second year native-made thatch; besides, Nigeria is always Nigeria. Appeared at the door of my hut a little crowd of dripping natives, all pretty well naked, save a great bull of a fellow in a red gown and trousers and turban, who carried a a dreadful large club in his right hand, and held the free end of a rope in his left. At the other end of this string was a The lad on the string, it appeared, was a murderer, his name Kapbakada, which seems to fit. He had stuck a poisoned spear into the arm of his brother Bermatu, and so slain that one. The damp and shivering savages not on strings were witnesses. All came in out of the rain, and the Court (myself) proceeded to avizandum. An old gentleman, who gave his name as Kindau, swore on a knife that he would tell no lies, and then said he was the prisoner's father. Also he claimed to be father to the deceased Bermatu. "A few days ago," he said, "I, with my two sons and a number of friends, went out to hunt. We all had poisoned spears. These people here are some of the friends who came with us. In the middle of the morning we saw a leopard, and followed it. It went into a cave in a hill. We went in after it. The entrance was a low narrow passage, and we had to go in single file. Deceased was in front; behind him the prisoner. Very soon we came on the leopard. It was dark in the cave, but we could see its eyes, and it was making noises. So we started to come back out of the cave. Deceased was the last out, and he hurried rather, so that he ran on to the spear of the man in front of him. When we got out he fell down, and soon died." By the Court. "Is it cusIs it customary in your country so to hunt leopards ? " some people down and bury it. The thing was stinking hard when I found it. The "king" came, and presently I was told he wanted a word with me. He said, might he and the elders eat the carcase instead of wasting it in a hole in the ground. I said I had no objection, provided the feast started ek dum. I did ask him and his friends Answer. "Yes, when there is how they could stand the smell, nothing else to go after." let alone sit down beside it and eat the stinking filth. The answer I have never forgotten— Food never smells unpleasantly," they said. The Pardam folk are a small, weakly, and unwarlike community, who suffered much at the hands of some cannibal neighbours. I was able to make things a little easier for them, and went my ways loaded with their thanks. Six months later they sent a deputation to ask that I would turn the cannibals on to their town to deal with droves of baboons that hunted them off the farms and ravaged and spoiled them, thereby preparing a famine. The big dog-faced monkey, with forty or fifty of his relations in company, is a dangerous visitor. If I were asked to explain what was in the minds of these people when they so singlefiled into a dark cul-de-sac after a leopard, I would give it up. They eat leopard, of course, Trekking along through the just as they eat dead horse or hills one morning we became anything else. Some time ago aware of strange noises. Umoru an aged sick pony covered and I went on to have a look. with sores, the property of a The noises were getting louder wandering juggler tumbler--very ugly, unpleasant, angry, musician named Turlutu, lay threatening noises. down and died alongside my camp. I sent up the hill and asked the "king" to bring All ex plained by a bunch of baboons after a leopard, which they had bayed in an open rocky place The game-pit digger is a nuisance, and a danger, and a nasty fellow, and I have always sought, when opportunity offered, to induce him to occupy his time in some other way. He sites his pits all over the place; except himself, nobody knows where they are, and he never fills one in. As it takes Nature some hundreds of years to remedy his neglect, we have here yet another instance of the evil men do living after them. The commonest catch in a game-pit is snakes; and the sight of a cobra or a puff-adder sitting all unmerry down at the bottom amongst the spikes twelve feet below the surface, almost reconciles one to the activities of the game-pit engineer. The Montol people eat them. Once I was trailing along a bush-path with a malefactor whose catching had cost no end of trouble. The string was a bit slack, and the fellow suddenly dived down. He was so quick that I hardly saw what he did, but he got a four-foot black snake by the tail, swung it round a time or two, and biffed its head against a tree. Not, however, before the brute had spat in his face, and as a spot of the venom went in an eye, my malefactor was pur blind for several days. This did not, however, prevent him from cooking and eating the snake, nor from extracting certain fat or oil from it, which he swopped with my orderly for tobacco. I forget what the oil was to ward off, but it was something pretty serious. To return to game-pits. I had to make a boundary between two village areas; and the king of one, an unpleasant troublesome fellow, whom I more than suspected of having freshly game-pitted the path by which I entered his domain, was all unwillingly showing me round. We were going through a patch of bush which was part of the disputed territory, and I am glad to say that the "king" disappeared suddenly, completely, and all unimperially into one of his own pits. We were walking side by side when he did it. It was quite a shock to all of us, and my nerves at any rate were not soothed by the dismal wailing noise that came from the pit. However, it was an old pit, and the spikes in the bottom had decayed away, nor was there a single snake there. So "King "Dungdep suffered no serious hurt. Before he was hauled up he said, with every appearance of sincerity, that he would have the whole village out that very day and fill in every single game-pit. I hope he implemented that undertaking. |