ITURI FOREST PEOPLES FUND

The Mota

going bow hunting with the Efe of northeastern Zaire

In the relative cool of the morning hunters sit close to the fires filling small clay pipes, which they attach to the meter-long hollowed midrib of a banana leaf. A concerted draw on the pipe produces a blast of very strong tobacco smoke. As the exhaled cloud clears around Kebe's face he grins a chiseltoothed smile. Efe prefer the look of pointed teeth and they chip their children's incisors and canines with an arrowhead and a small stone. Kebe hands the pipe to me and says that he hopes to kill an iti today. The iti is one of seven species of forest duikers that make up 90 percent of all game captured by Eye bow hunters. The smallest, the blue duiker or medi, weighs a mere 5 kilograms (11 pounds), an iti about 20 kilograms (44 pounds), and the largest, the yellow-backed duiker tochi a comparatively heavy 50 kilograms (ll0 pounds). Compared to a white-tailed deer (100 kilograms or 220 pounds) of North America or red deer (400 kilograms, 880 pounds) of Scotland, forest duikers arc remarkably small ungulates.

As the sun rises above the trees and the day begins to warm, the men string their bows and harden and straighten their arrow shafts over the fire. One of Kebe's metal arrowheads has become loose on the shaft, so he melts a piece of ando, tree resin, over the fire and uses it to reattach the barbed arrow point. Efe mostly hunt terrestrial animals, although they will shoot at primates with untipped poison arrows if they come low enough in the trees or if a sick or aged monkey, foraging on the ground (as do crested mangabeys), is slow to flee. The poison is slow acting, and the prey probably die more often from blood loss than the poison's toxicity.

Just when I thought they had decided not to go hunting today hunts are often cancelled because of bad omens, which are more prevalent when it's raining—Kebe jumps up, calls his dogs, and heads out into the forest. We walk west at a steady pace, fording rivers, climbing hills, crossing precarious log bridges, obviously going somewhere known to the hunters. Within an hour we come to a clearing, where an Efe named Matiasi is sitting next to a small fire. I had not even seen him leave the camp that morning. He said he had left before dawn to sit in a fruiting tree to wait in ambush for any duikers that might find the fallen fruits a tempting food source. This hunting technique, called ebaka, is not as haphazard as it first seems. The Efe only practice it during the dry season when few forest trees are in fruit and duikers have few other food sources. After another quick smoke, the archers set off to form a rough semicircle at the head of a short watercourse. Eyalu waits by the fire with the dogs for about fifteen minutes until he is sure that the archers are in place. Calling "aas aas ibu aas" to beckon the dogs, we start up toward the archers through the much more dense riverine vegetation yelling, beating the brush, and making as much noise as possible.

A game drive or mota like this can take anywhere from thirty minutes to over an hour and is completed once the beaters have reached or passed the archers. Several mota are conducted until the hunters feel they have caught enough game or it is time to give up and return to camp. If an animal is flushed close enough to an archer for him to get a clean shot, the hit animal is seldom killed outright and must be chased down by dogs and hunters. The dead animal, usually a duiker, is butchered on the spot and the meat and innards wrapped carefully in the utilitarian tilipi leaves. Who gets what parts of the animal is fairly rigidly determined. The man who shot the first arrow gets the largest and most prized portions (the hind quarters and liver), while the man who owns the dogs gets the head and one forequarter. If a second arrow hit the animal or if the arrow that killed the duiker did not belong to the archer, the second hunter or arrow owner receives the other forequarter. The rest of the carcass is divided in an amicable manner according to need. If few or no animals are killed, the men still return to camp with food they gather, such as forest mushrooms, tortoises, forest francolin eggs, and fallen fruits. The Efe are also remarkably attuned to the sound of bees; beehives provide honey as well as pollen and grub comb (honeybee comb with larvae in it). When cooked, grub comb tastes rather like loose scrambled eggs.

As I strained to keep up with the swift pace of Kebe and the rest of the band, a borokboro, dark mongoose, broke from the undergrowth and ran within two feet of Matiasi. Although he followed it with a feathered bow until it was out of range, he never tried a shot. I asked him why he let an easy kill escape him. He replied, "Don't you know that my wife is pregnant and that there is a taboo against expectant fathers killing or eating this animal?" Again I realized just how little I knew about this forest and the people who live within it. I was hot, dripping with sweat, and bone tired by the time we got back to camp, but the hunters looked as though they had not broken sweat all day. Small body size means a greater surface area-to-volume ratio; the Efe are thus far more efficient at radiating excess body heat in the humid forest than Europeans and consequently do not overheat as easily.

As we had caught two blue duikers, the camp was filled with chatter and the excited expectation of meat for dinner. Ima-chabo unwrapped a tilipi leaf parcel to show me a pile of opi, the oily, olive-like fruits of the Canarium schweinfurthii tree, and an equally large mound of iswa, fatty alate termites that she had gathered while we were out hunting. All forest game is extremely lean and one very quickly develops a craving for anything with oil in it. Iswa are delicious anyway, and I never needed to find an excuse to eat them. I asked Karambodu when he intended raiding the honey tree that he had marked on our way back from the hunt, and he said not until after the rofo had flowered. The two major canopy trees in the Ituri are ato (Cynometra alexandrl) and rofo (Brachystegia laurentii), which flower from late February through March and from May to August. Honey produced by the rofo tree is the most flavorful, therefore honey is best during the months of July through September. At this time the Efe all but abandon hunting to focus solely on gathering honey, which during these brief months contributes 13. 5 percent of the Efe's annual calories.