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 
