The Wanderobo women were fairly well dressed—in skins—but the men wore hardly any clothing at all. When necessity compels them to move they are fairly good hunters, and will creep up to within ten yards of an elephant, to spear it. The spear is fashioned something after the manner of a harpoon, the head being fixed to the shaft in such a way that, on striking the elephant, it becomes detached, and remains in the wound, while the shaft falls to the ground. It would not, of course, be sufficient to kill an elephant but for the fact that it is poisoned; and even then the elephant will often travel a considerable distance before succumbing to the poison. Singularly enough, the poison used appears only to affect the part immediately in the neighbourhood of the wound, and when this has been cut out, the natives eat the remainder of the flesh with perfect safety. Of course, as I mentioned before, the Wanderobo do not get the benefit of all the elephants they wound fatally, as many of the wounded animals manage to wander too far away into the forest to be tracked before they die, and any one finding them gets the benefit of the ivory.
The Wanderobo are very skilful with the bow and arrow, and can easily send an arrow right through a buck at fifty yards’ range, while their method of hunting these animals is distinctly novel. Taking a donkey, they fix a pair of horns to its head, and having carefully marked it with charcoal, to make it look as much like an ordinary buck as possible, they then crawl up on the lee side of it until they get close up to the game, which falls to an easy shot. The donkey seems to know the business, and is a very clever decoy.
I learned during my stay that some of the Wanderobo had once mustered up courage to attack some Swahili, whom they had murdered, some of the tribe giving my men the details of their treachery; but, as a rule, they were much too timid to engage in anything of the sort.
One peculiar point about these people was that they all seemed to have a cast in the eye, which I was a good deal puzzled to account for. Whether the meat diet on which they lived so exclusively had anything to do with it, or whether it was owing to their dirty habits—and they certainly were most abominably dirty—I cannot say; but the peculiarity seemed almost universal in the tribe.