upon a new dwelling-place.

The long procession moves along without any order whatever. Everybody
carries something that they did not want to leave behind in the
abandoned village. The very little children are fastened to their
mother's backs, the others caper merrily round the women, and the old
people walk slowly on, sometimes leaning on their sticks.

All the men and the youths are armed with their deadly cane and poisoned
arrows.

Several dogs--not unlike little setters--escort the company and give the
alarm when danger threatens. With them, in friendly intimacy, are
monkeys, squirrels and tame wild-boars, while fowls cackle in the
dossers where they have been put for fear of being lost in the jungle.

This is an emigrating tribe. Are they then taking a long journey that
they are so well provided with food?

Such a supposition would be erroneous. Those fowls, boars, squirrels and
monkeys are not a reserve stock of provisions for the travelling Sakais
but are their friends and companions, brought up by them with kind care
and which are considered as a part of the family.

A Sakai never eats an animal that he has reared; it would seem to him to
commit a crime. He uses the fowls, however (which are a trifle smaller
than those in Europe) as a means of exchange for tobacco, rice and other
articles but he would never eat one himself unless reduced to the verge
of starvation.

How different to civilized persons who breed animals and poultry on
purpose to devour them, who fatten fowls in coops, cruelly convert
cockrels into appetizing capons, peg geese to the ground that their
liver may supply an extra dainty for the table and protect the poetic
love of pigeons in order to cook their little ones!

Oh, yes! we protect animals, even the birds that fly wild in the woods,
we surround them with attention, we make laws in their favour, why? for
what? That we may have the pleasure of eating them!

* * * * *

A halt is called. The Elder, assisted by some of the men inspect the
site to see if in its vicinity there are any sort of flowers or birds of
ill-omen. If any such are discovered the journey is continued but if
there are none they begin at once to kindle a fire.

[Illustration: Felling a tree.

_p._ 147.]

A little bamboo reed is taken and a hole made in it through which is
passed a towy substance found upon palm-trees and known by the name of
_lulup_ among the Malays. Round this