At some seasons, especially at the end of the rainy months, fishing and hunting offer productive sources for obtaining the means of subsistence. Hunting is sometimes practised by independent individuals going out separately; but at other times it takes the form of an extensive _battue_, in which the men belonging to a whole district will combine to take a share. Occasionally, too, a rich booty is obtained from the trenches and snares. Nets are used in all the _battues_ for game, and the Bongo devote as much attention to the construction of these nets as they do to the weaving of their fish-snares and basket-pots. Their fishery is principally limited to the winter months. [Sidenote: HUNTING-SNARES.] Elephant-hunting has for the last twelve years been among the things of the past. It is only the oldest of the men—and here the number of the men that are really old is very small—who appear to have any distinct recollection of it at all. The huge lance-heads, which are now only weapons of luxury in the possession of the wealthy, or upon some rare occasions used for buffalo-hunting, are the sole memorials of the abundance of ivory of which Petherick, as an eye-witness, has given so striking a description. The snares by which the Bongo succeed in catching the smaller kinds of game generally consist of the stem of a tree balanced horizontally by means of ropes.[29] A spot which the game is known to haunt is selected for the erection of these snares; a hedge, or some sort of enclosure, is set up on each side of the tree so that the game may be obliged to run underneath: it is arranged so that the animals as they pass tread upon a kind of noose or slip-knot which slackens the ropes by which the tree is suspended, and the falling weight crushes and kills the game below. The numbers of snares of this description which are found in the bush-thickets is a sufficient proof of their efficacy. The smaller species of antelopes, ichneumons, civets, genets, wild cats, servals, and caracals, are all in turn caught by this stratagem.