The Ovimbundu are as well satisfied if the "Honey Guide" leads them to meat as to honey. They do not follow it unless they are prepared to hunt a live animal, and, if the prey turns out to be dead, a little detail like the odor of decay does not destroy their appetites. The men insisted that we should take time off from our business to see what the bird would lead us to, and I gave in. I was carrying a rifle, and it was not ordinarily lion country, so there was not likely to be danger. Our bee-man whistled at the bird, and, after a short duet back and forth, the bird flew off. It perched on another branch and chattered away until our party came up and the leader whistled at it again. Once more it flew, lighted, cried its "Cherr, cherr," waited Natives make a crude hive for the wild bees, and hang it from the branch of a tree in this manner for us to catch up and whistle, and then led us on.
After three stages in this game, the bird once more perched on a branch, but this time remained silent. "Somewhere near are the bees," said our leader. Sure enough, quite close was another abandoned white ant hill taken over by a bee colony. The bee-man robbed it of its treasure, left a reward of honeycomb for the bird, and we resumed our way well sweetened. In the days that followed, while we were staking out our concession, we had several more meetings with honey birds. The interior of the country was so sparsely populated that great parts of it were not settled at all, and the government licensed individuals and institutions to stake out claims to unoccupied and unused land under certain conditions. Our mission had received a "concession" of a designated size in this territory, and it was my business to stake it out with wooden posts marked with the government's concession number.
This work naturally took our party over a considerable area. Following honey guides that we saw in the course of our work, we found seven bee colonies. Five were in anthills, easily robbed, but the other two happened to be in hollow trees. This did not deter our bee-man. He would gird himself, take his axe in hand and climb the tree, chop out a side of the trunk, and hand the honey down. He was never once stung by any of the bees that lit on him. But the eighth, and last, opportunity we had to follow a honey guide, we hunted high and low for hive or honey. "He lied," said our bee-man disgustedly.
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