210 SAVAGE SUDAN 



wholesale style to boot. Not entirely is their success due 

 to speed and physical endurance, though those attributes 

 count for much ; but rather to organised levies-in-mass 

 whereby, aided by dogs, and often by firing the grass for 

 miles (since they are up to every move on the board), they 

 encircle whole troops of game, drive them into some cul- 

 de-sac, and there mob and massacre the lot. Big resolute 

 beasts may break-back through the yelling cordon ; the 

 feebler, the females and the young, are done to death, 

 either speared in the covert or clubbed from canoes as 

 they swim, should any succeed in reaching the river. 



Besides this system of wholesale "driving," by fire, 

 dogs, and spear, the savages are adepts at employing 

 snares chiefly of the noose-and-bent-stick type which 

 they set at all the water-holes, capturing thereby gazelles, 

 oribi, reedbuck, etc. 



Their methods of killing the hippopotamus, both by 

 pitfalls and by hand-thrust harpoons ashore (with an 

 ambatch-float attached), have elsewhere been described 

 (p. 198). I asked them, by the way, why they never 

 harpooned the hippo afloat, as Baker's "howartis" did on 

 the Settite swimming stealthily up from the leeward 

 (Nile Tributaries, pp. 394-5). The reply was : "It is 

 too dangerous to harpoon the hippo by swimming, since, 

 after he is speared, he can bite a man into two pieces." 



The following extracts from diary, selected from 

 dozens similar, will serve to show how serious is the 

 danger to game. 



" Khor Filus. By outflanking them with a double 

 ring of flame and beaters, and then driving the game 

 into the river, the Shilluks speared in one day over one 

 hundred head, including thirty waterbuck." 



" Western Bend. This morning a line of Shilluks, 

 with dogs, extended a full mile inland, pushing the game 

 eastwards. Presently, direct to windward (north), a line 

 of flame burst forth, and we then realised that a second 

 driving-line was converging from the north and east, thus 



