Page:Life and Adventures of William Buckley.djvu/83

 a handle to it and a knob at the end. These two war weapons are excellent at close quarters.

Now readers, let us go back to the plain where I said we were living in peace and with great abundance of food for many months; of coarse, travelling about that particular locality occasionally as it suited oar purposes, either for hunting, or for mere pleasure.

Getting tired at length of the sameness of food, we all left and travelled about twenty miles, as I suppose, into the bush, to a place called Boordek, where opossums were plentiful, My brother-in-law, as he considered himself to be, had shown me how to ascertain when these animals were up the trees, and how the natives took them; this was, in the first place, by breathing hard on the bark, so as to discover if there was any opossum hairs left attached to it when the animal ascended. This found, he next out a notch in the bark with his tomahawk, in which to insert his toe, and then another notch, holding the tomahawk in his mouth after making the incision, and so on upwards; by this means climbing the highest trees, and dragging the animals out of their holes, and off the branches by their legs and tails, and then throwing them down to me at the foot; my business, being to kill, and carry them. At the former I was tolerably expert, so that he often cried out from aloft, Merrijig; which means well done. We lived in clover,at this place, getting plenty of opossums, and a very excellent root, which, when roasted, I found as sweet as a chesnut, and as white as flour.