Page:Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits.djvu/69

Rh respectively the 5th and 30th January, 1832, that are worth quoting, and from which the substance of what follows is derived.

In the pursuit of these tribes he was accompanied by a party of 15, mostly blacks, and he fell in with the enemy on the great central plateau of Tasmania, which he crossed and re-crossed times almost without number before he could come upon the active and suspicious tribes he was after. He was at a place called Bashan Plains on the 25th of December, when he saw their smoke under a mountain called the Platform Bluff, which, however, was a long way off. How he knew them to proceed from the fires of the blacks I know not, but he constantly asserts in his writings that his own trackers knew the smoke of a native's fire from that of the white—whether by its volume or what he does not say; and it seems they were never mistaken.

I pause a moment to say that habit, or the exigencies of their state, had given this race a wonderful acuteness of observation, not intelligible to us. Thus we learn from the report of another of their pursuers—not a very successful one—namely the once well-known Jorgen Jorgensen, that they possessed a faculty for discovering water in situations where no European would think of looking for it, and that these strange places were their favourite camping grounds; and this it is possible, may on this occasion, have been the key, enabling them to determine whether or not the smoke they saw proceeded from fires kindled by some of themselves, from observing them in a place to which none but their own people would resort.

Christmas Day, of 1831—which must have been a dreary one to him and his companions—was passed on the elevated pasture field of Bashan Plains. It was noticed of Robinson on this day, though he was not much given to fits of dejection, he was rather downcast, the natural effect of langour occasioned by the weariness of an unusually protracted chase after the tribe, whom he began to despair of overtaking. But towards evening of this day, the heart-cheering intelligence was brought him by some of his sable scouts, that the smokes of their camp fires were visible, and that they were in the glens of the mountain called the Platform Bluff. The news once more rekindled the usual ardor with which he always undertook a pursuit, and the march recommenced.

When he came on their footmarks at last, his people—such was their acute knowledge of these faint imprints on the grass, which a European would not discern at all—that they at once pronounced them to be those of the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes united. ("A female," says he, "assured me they were the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes. She knew them by their