80 THE ODYSSEY OF AN ANIMAL COLLECTOR 
The native method of catching reed-lemurs, which are confined 
to Lake Alaotra, is to set fire to the reeds towards the end of the 
dry season, when the old dead vegetation burns easily. This drives 
them from their hiding-places out into the open where they are 
easily captured owing to their inability to move at great speed. 
Anororo consisted of a single street lined on both sides with 
reed huts almost touching one another. These numbered about 
two hundred and fifty, and the whole village of well over one 
thousand inhabitants covered an area of only four hundred yards 
by fifty yards. The land side of the village was for most of the 
year so swampy as to be impassable, and intercourse with other 
lakeside villages was so cut off that these people had developed a 
dialect and customs peculiar to their own village. The influence 
of missionaries has broken down many of their quaint customs, 
but until very recently the entire lives of the inhabitants were 
governed by superstition. There were lucky and unlucky days, 
and these were determined by some complicated system with 
which no outsider was familiar. Fishing and hut-building, and in 
fact any form of work that had not necessarily to be performed 
daily, was never attempted on the stipulated bad days, and inter- 
course with outside people for the purpose of selling fish was 
confined to the lucky ones. If a stranger arrived on an unlucky 
day, he had to wait outside the village until the following day, 
for otherwise, it was said, he would either die in the village, be- 
come violently ill and lose his senses, or get lost and perish on his 
attempt to depart by canoe. 
It was amusing to see shrimps spread out on mats in the streets 
to dry, with some old native woman sitting in the shade in a 
nearby doorway with a long papyrus rod with which she shooed 
off fowls when they came too near. Fowls are persistent creatures, 
and as they also love shrimps they frequently caught the watchers 
off guard when they were attending to something inside their huts. 
The shrimp population of the lake must be considerable judging 
by the ease with which they are caught and the quantity obtained. 
It is the women who do the catching and they wade in shallow 
water dragging their baskets, through which the water is sieved, 
leaving behind the shrimps. 
In the swamps on the land side of the village two large earth 
