Page:The Aborigines of Victoria and Riverina.djvu/59

54 opossum skin which is being heated is deemed sufficiently warm for their purpose. When it is so they cease sucking, and place the heated opossum skin on the wound, holding it tightly pressed against the bitten part with the palm of the hand. When the skin becomes comparatively cool sucking is again had resource to and continued until the skin is again heated to the required degree, when sucking is again discontinued, and the warm skin applied, and so on until the patient is deemed out of danger.

A sting from a deaf adder, however, is considered by them a hopeless case; therefore they never attempt the extraction of the deadly virus injected by that reptile's horny tail spur; in fact, they have not time to try a cure, for the victim rarely lives twenty minutes after being wounded.

These reptiles are the most dreaded, as well as the most dangerous, of the snake kind, not only because of the superior virulency of their poison, but for the reason that nothing will induce them to move from the position in which they are found. If one is touched by a foot, or even a stick, he does not crawl away as quickly as possible, as it is the habit of the other reptiles to do; no, indeed, he merely raises his head and tail simultaneously with the rapidity of thought, and seizes the disturbing object with his mouth, holding firmly thereby whilst he drives his tail spur into it repeatedly.

We once saw a native bitten on the shin by a black snake. When it accurred [sic] we were shooting ducks on a Murray lagoon. The blackfellow, after being bitten, got a stick and killed the snake. He then squatted on the ground, and pinched the bitten part very hard between his thumb nails.