80 TIMEHRI. 
owners, and the distance from end to end of thé area 
thus inhabited is about 3 miles, most have a huntsman 
attached to them, whose varying success supplies the 
labourers with fresh meat. The huntsman at the camp . 
where I stayed was particularly fortunate, and varied 
his performances with the gun, by occasionally poisoning 
a creek with hiari (Lonchocarpus densifiorus). Once 
he and his brother, who a€ted as Nimrod for another 
Company, obtained about a hundred weight of fish from 
a creek they took two days to dam upand poison. Some 
of the fish they brought home, haimara (Erythrinus 
macrodon) weighed seven or eight pounds a piece and 
were much appreciated by all. 1 asked the huntsman 
how much of a creek about ten feet wide and one foot 
and a half deep, a pound of hiari would poison; he did — 
not seem to have any very concise idea, although | 
showed him the piece of water I spoke of. HILLHOUSE 
in a paper on the Mazaruni River read before the Geo- 
graphical Society in 1833, says a solid cubic foot of hiari 
will poison an acre of water, but he does not specify the 
depth of the water, He mentions one famous poisoning 
where upwards of two thousand fish of four pounds 
average weight were taken. I was not fortunate in my 
own sport, beyond shooting a few powis and parrots. 
The most interesting game bird | obtained was a very 
diminutive trumpet bird, (Psophia Crepitans), which 
was brought me alive by one of my boat-hands, who had 
caught it in the forest. It could not have been more 
than three or four days old and at first was very 
wild; but soon became tamer, readily fed from my 
hand and followed me everywhere. Its downy covering 
was somewhat prettily marked from head to tail with 
