Page:Journals of Several Expeditions Made in Western Australia.djvu/224

 a consequent unwillingness to move further than was necessary, did more than their own caution towards the safey of the winged tenants of the groves. Dearth of fuel and innumerable gnats procured us by no means a favourable bivouac.

Early the next morning I was awakened by a large flight of cockatoos, and was looking at my gun to insure its going off, when a cloud of ducks suddenly alighted on the water, close at hand. I killed two, and, becoming my own retriever, undressed to get them; the river in the middle is not deep, and the bottom muddy, and abounds in a weed that unpleasantly twines round the limbs of the swimmer; there is greater depth towards the sides.

On leaving our own, and advancing two miles up the Vasse, came on Mr. Preston's bivouac, which Kenny, one of the men, who had also been of that party, recognised. A quarter of a mile further up were the rapids, which we had first crossed.

From this point, I intended to make my march homewards as direct as possible, in order to draw a tolerable estimate of the actual distance, and to observe what facilities or difficulties that line might hold out to the intended road. To find then this course, I took the sketch I had lately traced of my former circuitous route, and measuring by the scale the distance between the two extreme points, found that what I had made between fifty and sixty miles, was not in reality thirty miles off from the point whence I started, and the course that would bring me about on the middle, between the elbow and the rapids of the Blackwood, was S.S.W.; that these conclusions of mine were not infallible, will be seen in the sequel, together with the probable cause of my error. Before, however, I leave