150 TROPICAL WILD LIFE IN BRITISH GUIANA 



had been iminventive enough never to think of this plan, 

 but at least I did not need a second hint and immediately 

 I set my Indian boys to work, at what was doubtless sheer 

 insanity to them, digging a line of pits along the convict 

 trail which led southward, and several more in the jungle 

 itself. After this, one of us always made a morning's round 

 of pits, as the Canadian hunter visits his beaver and marten 

 traps. Sometimes we made excellent hauls which were all 

 the more enjoyable because our booty was not mangled and 

 half-dead, but alive and well. 



Huge beetles and thousand legs blundered into the pits, 

 but we never found a snake or lizard in them. These seemed 

 to feel their way too carefully to be entrapped in any such 

 blatant fashion. Some of the pits were in clay, others in 

 jdiite sand; some caught every heavy rain and had to be 

 provided with life rafts of small pieces of bark so the in- 

 mates could keep themselves afloat. The sand pits were 

 eaten away from above by the rains and required redigging 

 every little while. Altogether it was an easy and exciting 

 method of obtaining certain of the lesser ramblers of the 

 night, of whom we otherwise should have learned nothing. 



To the nests of solitary wasps, which were one of our 

 chief est desires, there was little clue except by direct search. 

 Many were found accidentally, and more by seeing the wasp 

 arrive with a load of mortar or a spider. It was tantalizing 

 to watch an interesting species busily at work on the damp 

 clay of one of our pits, making trip after trip to some fas- 

 cinating cell, and yet to be unable to trace her more than a 

 few yards as she sped swiftly through the maze of vines and 

 leaves. The longest tramp in a distant part of the jungle 

 might result in nothing, while on one's return, if the key 

 had been removed from the microscope case on the table, a 

 new species of wasp would not impossibly be found enthu- 

 siastically building in the lock ! 



