Hunting on a minor scale is a very favourite recreation, and the children find a daily amusement in catching rats and field-mice. They weave baskets in the form of long tubes, which they lay flat upon the ground in the immediate neighbourhood of the mouse-holes; they then commence a regular _battue_, when the scared mice, scampering back to regain their homes, run through the stubble, and often rush into the open traps, where, like fish in a weir-basket, they are easily secured. In this way the Bongo boys catch considerable quantities of meriones, _Mus gentilis_, and _M. barbarus_, which they tie together by their tails in clusters of about a dozen, and barter them to each other as dainty morsels. “These are our cows,” they would shout to me with great glee whenever I met them returning after their sport had been successful. Another use which is made of the mice which are captured by this simple artifice is to employ them for a bait for securing what they esteem the especial delicacy of roast cat. On the narrow paths which traverse the steppes like rifts in the long grass, they construct diminutive huts out of some twisted reeds; by placing the mice inside these they are very often able to entice the cats into a snare. With the exception of human flesh and the flesh of dogs, the Bongo seem to consider all animal substance fit for eating, in whatever condition it may be found. The putrefying remnant of a lion’s feast, which lies in the obscurity of a forest and is only revealed by the kites and vultures circling in the air above, is to them a welcome discovery. That meat is “high” is a guarantee for its being tender, and they deem it in that condition not only more strengthening than when it is fresh, but likewise more easy of digestion. There is, however, no accounting for taste, certainly not with the Bongo, who do not recoil from the most revolting of food. Whenever my cattle were slaughtered, I always saw my bearers eagerly contending for the half-digested contents of the stomach, like the Esquimaux, whose only ideas of vegetables appears to be what they obtain from the contents of the paunches of their reindeers; and I have seen the Bongo calmly strip off the disgusting amphistoma-worms which literally line the stomachs of all the cattle of this region, and put them into their mouths by handfuls. After that, it was not a matter of surprise to me to find that the Bongo reckons as game everything that creeps or crawls, from rats and mice to snakes, and that he is not particular what he eats, from the carrion vulture to the mangy hyæna, or from the fat earth-scorpions (_Heterometrus palmatus_) to the caterpillars of the winged termites with their oily beetle-bodies.