The Memoirs of Bābur 910.8.1

910.8.1

Of bird-catchers there is also the band of slave-fowlers, two or three hundred households, whom some descendant of Tīmūr Beg made migrate from near Multān to the Bārān.[861] Bird-catching [Sidenote: Fol. 143.] is their trade; they dig tanks, set decoy-birds[862] on them, put a net over the middle, and in this way take all sorts of birds. Not fowlers only catch birds, but every dweller on the Bārān does it, whether by shooting the cord, setting the springe, or in various other ways. (_k. Fishing._) The fish of the Bārān migrate at the same seasons as birds. At those times many are netted, and many are taken on wattles (_chīgh_) fixed in the water. In autumn when the plant known as _wild-ass-tail_[863] has come to maturity, flowered and seeded, people take 10-20 loads (of seed?) and 20-30 of green branches (_gūk-shībāk_) to some head of water, break it up small and cast it in. Then going into the water, they can at once pick up drugged fish. At some convenient place lower down, in a hole below a fall, they will have fixed beforehand a wattle of finger-thick willow-withes, making it firm by piling stones on its sides. The water goes rushing and dashing through the wattle, but leaves on it any fish that may have come floating down. This way of catching fish is practised in Gul-bahār, Parwān and Istālīf.