1 72 AUSTRALIAN PICTURES. 



One of the warriors of the tribe died. ' Pepper ' was buried with all honours ; 

 but, as usual, the great question was who had bewitched him. The common 

 practice was resorted to for discovering the enemies. 



1 Shortly after sunrise the men, spear in hand (for no one ever left the 

 camp without at least one spear), went over to the new grave. Entering its 

 enclosure, they scanned with eager eyes the tracks which worms and other 

 insects had left on the recently-disturbed surface. There was a good deal of 

 discussion, as, in the eyes of the blacks, these tracks were believed to be 

 marks left by the wizard whose incantations had killed the man, and who was 

 supposed to have flown through the air during the night to visit the grave of 

 his victim. The only difficulty was to assign any particular direction to the 

 tracks, as in fact they wandered to and from every point of the compass. At 

 length one young man, pointing with his spear to some marks which took a 

 north-westerly direction, exclaimed, in an excited manner : " Look here ! Who 

 are they who live in that direction ? Who are they but our enemies, who so 

 often have waylaid, murdered, and bewitched Bangerang men ? Let us go and 

 kill them." As Pepper's death was held to be an act particularly atrocious, 

 this outburst jumped with the popular idea of the tribe, and was welcomed 

 with a simultaneous yell of approval which was heard at the camp, whence 

 the shrill voices of the women re-echoed the cry. 



1 A war-party, fifteen in number, proceeded stealthily, and chiefly by 

 night marches, to the neighbourhood of Thule station, visiting on their way 

 those spots (known to one of the volunteers) at which parties of the doomed 

 tribe were likely to be found. After several days' wandering from place to 

 place, subsisting on a few roots hurriedly dug up, and suffering considerably 

 from hunger and fatigue, they caught sight, as they were skulking about 

 towards sundown, of a small encampment, without being themselves seen, 

 upon which they retired and hid in a clump of reeds. About two o'clock in 

 the morning the war-party left their hiding-place and returned to the neigh- 

 bourhood of the camp, and having divested themselves of every shred of 

 clothing, and painted their faces with pipe-clay, they clutched their spears and 

 clubs, and, walking slowly and noiselessly on, soon found themselves standing 

 over their sleeping victims. 



' According to native custom, no one was on watch at the camp, and I 

 have often heard the blacks say that their half starved clogs seldom give the 

 alarm in cases of strange blacks, though they would bark if the intruders 

 were white men. They gently raised the rugs a little from the chests of the 

 doomed wretches, and at a given signal, with a simultaneous yell, plunged 

 their long barbed spears into the bosoms or backs of the sleepers. Then 

 from the mia-mias, which were quickly overturned, came the shrieks of the 

 dying, the screams of the women and children, blows of clubs, the vocife- 

 ration of the prostrate, who were trying to defend themselves ; the barking 

 of the dogs and the yells of the assailants, who numbered fully three to one. 



