472 HUNTING THE KANGAROO. 
Boomer or Forester, as the animal is indifferently called, whenever he chooses to turn to 
bay and bid defiance to his pursuers. 
A very graphic account of a Kangaroo hunt was sent to Mr. Gould, and is published 
by him in his very valuable monograph on the Macropidie of Australia, A portion of 
the letter is extracted, and runs as follows :— 
“The ‘Boomer’ is the only Kangaroo which shows good sport, for the strongest 
Brush Kangaroo cannot live above twenty minutes before the hounds. But as the two 
kinds are always found in perfectly different situations, we were never at a loss to find a 
‘Boomer, and I must say that they seldom failed to show us good sport. 
We generally ‘found’ in a high cover of young wattles, but sometimes in the open 
forests, and then it was really pretty to see the style in which a good Kangaroo would go 
away. I recollect one day in particular, when a very fine Boomer jumped up in the very 
midst of the hounds in the ‘open ;’ he at first took a few jumps with his head up, in 
order to look about him, to see on which side the coast was clearest, and then, without a 
moment's hesitation, he started forward and shot away from the hounds, apparently ~ 
without an effort, and gave us the longest run I ever saw after a Kangaroo. 
He ran fourteen miles by the map, from point to point, and if he had had fair play, 
IT have very little doubt but that he would then have beaten us; but he had taken along 
a tongue of land which ran into the sea, so that, being pressed, he was forced to try to 
swim across the arm of the sea, which, at the place aie he took the water, cannot have 
been less than two miles broad. In spite of a fresh breeze and a hard sea against him, he 
got fully half-way over, but he could not make head against the waves any farther, and 
was obliged to turn back, when, being faint and exhausted, he was soon killed. 
The distance he ran, taking the different bends in the line, cannot have been less 
than eighteen miles, and he certainly swam two. I can give no idea of the length of 
time it took him to run this distance, but it took us some thing more than two hours, and 
it was evident by the way the hounds were running that he was a long way before US 5 
it is also plain that he was still fresh, as quite at the end of the run he went on the top 
of a long, high hill, which a tired Kangaroo will never attempt to do, as dogs gain 
so much on them in going up-hill. His hind-quarters weighed within a pound or two 
of seventy pounds, which is large for the Van Diemen’s Land Kangaroo, though I have 
seen larger. 
We did not measure the leneth of the hop of this Kangaroo, but on another occasion, 
when the Boomer had taken along the beach and left its prints in the sand, the length of 
each jump was found to be just fifteen feet, and as regular as if they had been stepped 
by a sergeant.” 
The Boomer is a dangerous antagonist to man and dog, and unless destroyed by 
missile weapons will often prove more than a match fer the combined efforts of 
man and beast. 
When the animal finds that it is overpowered in endeavour by the swift and powerful 
Kangaroo dogs, which are bred for the express purpose of chasing this one kind of prey, 
it turns suddenly to bay, and placing its back against a tree- trunk, so that it cannot be 
attacked from behind, patiently awaits the onset of its adversaries. Should an unwary 
dog approach within too close a distance of the Kangaroo, the animal launches so 
terrible a blow with its hinder feet, that the long and pe inted claw with which the hinder 
foot is armed cuts like a knife, and has often laid open the entire body of the dog with a 
single blow. Experienced does, therefore, never attempt to close with so terrible an 
antagonist until they are reinforced by the presence of their master, who generally ends 
the ‘struggle with a bullet. Sometimes, however, the Kangaroo is so startled by the 
apparition of the hunter that it permits its attention to wander from the dogs, and is 
immediately pulled down by them. : 
If the hunter should be on foot, he needs beware of the Kangaroo at bay, for the 
creature is rather apt to dash through the dogs and attack its human opponent, who is 
likely to fare badly in the strugele unless he succeeds in launching a fatal missile at the 
advancing animal. 
