112 BIG GAME SHOOTING 
sadly conscious of their inability to make an effort for attack 
or escape. I witnessed this butchery but once, and, willingly, 
would never again. 
In the open country the Bechuana, though muffs at 
elephant hunting, catch large numbers of animals in the hopo. 
The Ba-Quaina and Ba-Wangketsi, especially, were clever 
at this kind of work. The hopo is a large pit dug in a 
favourable spot, generaliy just the other side of a slight rise, 
in neighbourhoods where game is abundant, and is often 
used year after year. From the sides of it stiff, diverging 
hedges of bush and branches are run out for a considerable 
distance, and the beaters, sweeping a large area of country in a 
crescent, open at first, but gradually contracting its horns as 
the game approaches the hedges, manage to drive slowly 
forward large masses of antelope, quagga, and wildebeest. 
Men are suitably placed here and there outside the range of 
the fences, to indicate gently to the game the way they are 
expected to take. When they are well within the lines the 
men bear down on them, and by shouts urge them forward 
péle méle to the hopo, which by the rise in the ground is 
hidden from the leaders until too late ; for the weight of the 
scared body behind them, always pressing on, carries the fore- 
most ranks into the pit, which, in a successful drive, is soon filled 
with a heaving mass of struggling life. Numbers of the driven 
escape through the hedges and through the crowd, by this 
time close up, many of them, the quagga especially, charging 
the drivers, who, sitting or kneeling, cover themselves with 
their shields, and ply their assegais as opportunity offers, from 
beneath them. I should have said that some of the hunters 7 
are ambushed near the hopo, and these dispose of any animals j 
that, coming to the surface, seem likely to escape. The ~ 
southern tribes manage sometimes to kill the hippopotamus by ‘ 
suspending a heavy spike of iron, or of wood burnt and sharp- : 
ened to a point, and weighted with a large stone. This, by an © 
ingenious contrivance, is fastened to the branch of a tree over- — 
hanging the animal’s path as it leaves the water at night to graze, — 
