Sept. 29, 1906.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
499 
The African as a Hunter. 
Reading an article in a recent number of the 
Field on the netting of wild ducks by Australian 
aboriginals, it struck me that some interest might 
attach to an account of the methods adopted by 
the natives of Nyassaland for the snaring and 
killing of game. Their methods are all of the 
most primitive, and there can be little doubt that 
the art of the hunter is slowly, but surely, dying 
.out. It is not necessary to go into the remoter 
reasons of this, but probably one great contribut¬ 
ing cause is the repression by the white man of 
the sporting instinct in the native. Although 
there remain a few old Bint and percussion guns, 
brought in by the slave-raiding Arabs of other 
days, the tribes have been largely disarmed, and 
no native is allowed to possess a gun except 
under a license, which it is more or less difficult 
for him to obtain, and the general killing or 
snaring of game has been made illegal under the 
game preservation laws. After all, perhaps least 
mischief is done by the negro who is the proud 
possessor of a gun, for though, like the rest of 
them, he looks for the easiest prey, and kills 
females and young Tor choice, yet his old gas- 
pipe barrel is so erratic in its shooting that he 
can only hope to bag his beast at very close 
ranges, and so clumsy is he in most cases at 
stalking that it is seldom enough that he comes 
to quarters. And natives are equally unsuccess¬ 
ful in hunting with the bow; their iron-tipped 
reed arrows are ill-made and ill-balanced, their 
heavy bows are calculated for men of far greater 
strength than they possess,, and even at close 
ranges their lack of skill is remarkable in a 
people whom creatures of the direst struggle for 
existence should have trained to no small skill 
in the use of weapons of self-defense. 1 
The great excitement of the year outside every¬ 
day life comes in the middle of the dry season, 
when some months of sun have dried 'up the 
country and parched the grass and leaves to 
tinder. Then a huge organized party, drawn 
from several villages, will go out one morning, 
with clubs, spears, axes, bows, and cur dogs in 
dozens, to surround' a piece of open bush or grass 
country, perhaps a couple of miles square. It is 
.fired in several places at once round the outer 
edge, and the sportsmen stand by to wait the 
escaping animals, which, as the natives are 
huddled in a dense ring on every side, seldom 
escape without at least a wound. Occasionally 
lengths of coarse bark rope netting are pegged 
down, and should a beast come blundering into 
them there is little hope for him, as he is at 
once assailed with a dozen spear thrusts and ax 
blows while entangled. I was once invited by. 
natives to attend one of these “mchiri” hunts, 
as they call them, and was promised great sport 
at a “hot corner.” An immense rabble of men 
and dogs turned out and surrounded a big tract 
—five or six miles—of open bush, containing a 
good number of larger forest trees and some 
rocky gorges, notorious for holding leopard and 
wild pig. I had a gun in case anything alarm¬ 
ing bolted my way, but excited the disgust of 
my native hosts by firing at nothing all day. 
The idea was to slay any beast that tried to 
bolt, and then follow in at once on the hot 
embers of the fire to look for leopards, which, 
finding themselves surounded by flames or by- 
men and dogs, will some times take refuge in 
the higher branches of a big tree and wait till 
the fire has passed. But the whole thing was 
a failure. We saw nothing but a pig and a 
couple of duiker, which escaped, and the head 
man, aoologizing to me afterwards for the fiasco, 
said, "I am surprised at our failure. This is an 
excellent place, and we always kill much game. 
Last year we killed two leopards and a lion, and 
they killed two of us. It was the sport of men.” 
Immense damage was done by these “mchiris.” 
The males and the more powerful animals break 
through the nets or the men and escape, but the 
females and young are slaughtered wholesale, as 
they fall an easier prey. I once came across, a 
hastily deserted camp in the forest near where 
such a hunt had taken place, and found Ihirty- 
seven skulls lying about, all of young and female 
antelope, duiker, reedbuck, waterbuck, kudu and 
eland. 
A very common way of taking game without 
trouble is by that most general and most ancient 
of traps, the pitfall. It is usually about 12 feet 
deep, and may or may not have sharpened stakes 
or spears set in the V-shaped bottom of it to impale 
any animal which may fall in. I have seen a 
series of these pits dug at intervals of twenty 
yards, and extending over a line half a mile long, 
with a rough, strong fence of boughs built be¬ 
tween, so that animals must pass over the falls 
on their way down to the water, and one of the 
finest kudu I ever saw was killed there. In 
another case narrow openings had been left in a 
similar fence, and at each opening was set a 
noose attached to a stout young sapling. As the 
beast nosed its way through, the sapling flew 
back and drew the rope up tight around its neck. 
It was not a sporting trap, that. The horned 
males would merely be caught by the muzzle, 
and at once draw themselves free, while only 
the hornless females and young would be fairly 
caught by the neck and strangled. Among natives 
who live beside a lake or stream great damage 
is done to the crops during the night by hippo, 
and it is usual to dig pitfalls in the track of the 
beast between the water and the maize garden 
or, rice field. As these tracks are often the only 
way through the dense undergrowth, such falls 
make an excellent “booby-trap” for the unsus¬ 
pecting white man, and one whom I know was 
only saved by his rifle jamming across the hole 
from being impaled on several spears at the 
bottom. 
No systematic • efforts are made to kill out 
carnivora, even near the settlements. Fatalism 
is too deeply engrained in them for that, and it 
is only when they are driven to desperation by 
the repeated raids of a lion on a village—when 
they do not know whose'turn it may be next —- 
that they will turn out and try to account for 
(he beast. Some tribes.will rather desert a pes¬ 
tered village than track down a man-eating lion 
to its lair. Occasionally, however, one meets with 
foolhardy courage, as in the case of an old head¬ 
man 1 knew, who, angered at the loss of a brother 
overnight, went off alone and unnoticed next 
morning to spoor up the lion, which he shot 
dead with an arrow as it slept over the half-eaten 
corpse. He deserved a better fate for his bravery, 
but that same night the lion’s mate broke into 
his hut and mauled him so terribly that he died, 
after inflicting some fatal blows with an ax on 
his assailant. Leopards are more often killed if 
they persistently steal the village goats, and the 
young bloods of an Angoni village will some¬ 
times. turn out in force to hunt one. On such 
occasions it is a point of honor not to use a 
spear, but to beat the animal to death with knob- 
kerries. Few casualties happen. The beast is 
kept from attacking any particular man by being 
struck on every side at once, and, with blows 
raining on him thick all around, he is soon 
finished. One which I skinned was heavily 
bruised all over the body, and had the skull 
pounded to a jelly.—H. A. Lincoln, in London 
Field. 
Long Island Game. 
Long Island City, Greater New York, Sept. 
19 -—I believe small game of all kinds is very 
plentiful this season. I went out for English 
snipe early Monday morning and right here in 
the heart of the city saw more bird life of every 
description than T have seen on any day since 
I was a boy. I killed but one snipe, as the good 
spots have not yet been cut, but I saw several 
flying round the meadows looking for a place 
to pitch. I saw a pair of blue-winged teal pitch 
in the brook and put up one black duck. The 
air was literally full of robins, bobolinks, crow 
and red-winged blackbirds and swallows, upon 
which half a dozen species of hawks seemed to 
be preying. From every patch of brush came 
the calls of the catbird, brown thrush and che- 
wink, while a band of crows on the lower part 
of the meadow made things lively with their in¬ 
cessant cawing. I flushed, so many green herons 
that I gave up trying to keep count of them. 
My bag of snipe was not very heavy, but I 
felt well repaid for my early morning tramp, and 
only regretted that I could not spend the entire 
morning nosing about the meadows. 
There have been some field plover on the hills 
here in Long Island City the past few weeks 
and some have been killed. Yesterday after¬ 
noon I saw two boys with three small yellowlegs 
which they had just killed, and I understand 
there have been quite a few of these birds killed 
011 the Flushing meadows the past week or two. 
From all over the island quail arid rabbits are 
reported as fairly plentiful. Black and wood- 
ducks seem to have done fairly well, and I know 
of several broods of the latter that were raised 
hereabout and are now just beginning to fly 
about the swamps. 
1 expect to have good sport on woodcock this 
fall, as they are reported quite plentiful, but the 
weather has been too warm to enjoy gunning 
them, and I am waiting for it to get cooler. A 
friend reports he put up fourteen woodcock one 
day last week, but the brush was so thick he 
did not kill a bird. John H. Hendrickson. 
Adirondack Bears. 
Elizabethtown, N. Y., Sept. 17 .—Editor For¬ 
est and Stream: 1 wish to state through the 
columns of Forest and Stream that there is no 
close season on black bears in Essex county. 
Bruin may be hunted here at any time, and bear 
hunters are invited to come to Essex county, 
where bears are more plentiful than in any other 
county in the State of. New York, according to 
the best obtainable statistics. Furthermore. I be¬ 
lieve that partridge hunting is as good in this 
section of the Adirondacks as one could reason¬ 
ably wish. Hundreds of partridges are killed 
every autumn in Elizabethtown, and the same is 
true of surrounding towns. The season opened 
to-day and over twenty partridges have already 
been killed in Elizabethtown and the sun is still 
an hour high. These statements of fact arc made 
to offset opinions expressed by a Utica, N. Y„ 
correspondent in Forest and Stream, under date 
of Sept. 10. Partridge hunting generally bids 
fair to be unusually good throughout the Adi¬ 
rondacks this fall. This last is the opinion of a 
man on the spot. George L. Brown. 
Quail in Tennessee. 
Mr. H. S. Bevan, of Tennessee, while in New 
York city recently, said quail in the vicinity of 
his home were abundant, as the last winter and 
spring were favorable to them. The chief evil 
with which the sportsmen of Tennessee have to 
contend at present, he said, is the negro and his 
dogs. But these negroes, unlike so many found 
hunting in the South with ancient blunderbusses 
and mongrel dogs, are armed with good guns 
and pointers or setters that can be depended on 
to find birds. While they have improved as to 
guns and dogs, however, they have not changed 
their methods of shooting, but will pot an entire 
covey of quail on the ground whenever an op¬ 
portunity is offered. In this way, with the help 
of an intelligent dog, it is not an uncommon thing 
for a single negro to wipe out several coveys in a 
day’s shooting. 
Brunswick Foxhound Club. 
The Brunswick Foxhound Club issued invita¬ 
tions concerning its eighteenth annual field trials 
to be held at Barre, Mass., the week beginning 
Oct. 8 . Entries to the Derby close Oct. 7; to the 
all-age, Oct. 8; both at 9 o’clock P. M. Address 
Bradford S. Turpin, 66 Devonshire St., Boston, 
Mass. 
One day as John W. Mugridge, the lawyer, and Judge 
Minot were walking along the street in Concord, N. IT., 
together, Mr. Mugridge, in his sepulchral voice, said: 
“Judge, let’s go into partnership. You furnish the 
capital and I’ll furnish the brains.” 
The judge quickly pulled a two-cent piece from ms 
pocket, and holding : t in the palm of his hand, said to 
Mugridge: ‘Very well, cover that, John! Cover that!” 
BREAKFAST IN CAMP 
is nothing without coffee, and coffee is nothing without 
Cream. Ordinarily cream is out of the question nine 
times out of ten, but Rorden’s Peerless Evaporated Cream 
takes its place perfectly and keeps indefinitely until 
opened. ft is unsweetened and has the natural cream 
flavor and color.— Adv. 
