52 THE ODYSSEY OF AN ANIMAL COLLECTOR 
The thing that impressed us most about the Annamites was 
their capacity for hard work. The roads were dotted with men 
carrying loads of produce to market in Chinese fashion, more or 
less equal loads being fixed to the opposite ends of a bamboo 
pole. With this on his shoulder an Annamite will go along at a 
jog-trot for miles. This seems to be the sole means of transport 
among these country folk, there being no carts in evidence. Life 
was evidently not easy here, for the natives would undertake 
almost anything for money, and this proved to be of immense 
help to us. It was an unbelievable contrast to anything we had 
come across in Africa, and every morning someone arrived offer- 
ing such things as fresh fish, crabs, oysters, incredibly cheap. 
Through a French-speaking interpreter we soon contacted the 
villagers who knew the ways of the forest and were expert trap- 
pers. One of the main objects of our trip was to get a collection 
of the rarer pheasants, particularly the long-tailed Rheinart’s 
Pheasant, whose home lay in the higher parts of the Col des 
Nuages in places where the forest undergrowth offered natural 
protection. A few Europeans may have got a glimpse of this bird 
crossing some forest road or track, but I am not sure if anyone 
has ever seen it otherwise in spite of its great size, and yet one has 
only to fire a gun up in these hills and immediately their loud 
challenging call-notes will come as a response from widely dis- 
persed haunts. This ability of concealment is found in most birds 
of terrestrial habits that dwell in forests, and accounts for so many 
being easy to trap though almost impossible to see. Some of the 
pheasants, the Spicifer Peafowl, and the wild jungle fowl, were 
found at the lower levels, especially the last, the cocks of which 
could be heard crowing everywhere with a much shorter crow 
than our domesticated fowls which are their direct descendants. 
We soon got under way and a number of trappers set off for 
the higher slopes of the forested range where I understood they 
slept in rude shelters made by themselves from branches and 
leaves, and here they would stay for a week or more. All the 
ground-dwelling birds are cleverly snared by these people, the 
snares being made of string from fibrous bark attached to springy 
bamboo sticks and set in a variety of places, such as in narrow 
animal tracks along which pheasants wander, or in small open 
