GOOD-BYE SERGOIT 253 
straight to the honey tree.” You must be a little patient 
for it will flutter with seeming aimlessness before you, 
flying from one tree to another, as though it could not 
quite trust you to give it a fair share of the sweet spoil. 
Then it makes up its little mind that it cannot have what 
it wants without your aid, and flies straight to the tree 
it has marked. I have followed a bird for many hundred 
yards. It would wait for me, and while it was waiting, 
never cease to utter its sharp, chirping cry. Once I was 
up it would go on again. The whole proceeding always 
seemed to me very wonderful. 
Mr. Jackson tells me the bird sometimes leads his 
follower to a leopard or a cerval cat’s lair, seemingly 
wishing to have his enemies killed. 
Hyenas are very numerous all over the Nzoia Plateau. 
I had an illustration of their extraordinary cunning. We 
seta trap for some that would keep howling hideously 
near camp. The accompanying (bad) photograph gives 
some idea of how it was set. A branch, not seen in the 
photograph, stretches over the trap. “Two short stakes 
are driven into the ground two or three inches apart. A 
cord hangs from the bough above and supports the 
Schneider carbine, which moves easily between them. A 
crotched stick in front supports the muzzle of the gun. 
This is cocked and a string passed round the trigger and 
fixed to the two stakes between which the butt of the rifle 
hangs. Fasten meat to the muzzle, and a tug at that 
will drag the gun forward against the string across the 
trigger, and anything pulling at the meat is shot in the 
head or chest. 
The trap had not been set a couple of hours the first 
night before we heard the shot. We went down in the 
morning and found a young hyena dead. 
That was the last we secured. ‘The trap was set con- 
stantly and as constantly fired, but never again was any 
