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126 PYGMIES AND PAPUANS 



Once I had the hick to see an old cassowary with 

 two young birds walking about in a stony river bed, 

 a place which they particularly affect, and it was a very 

 pretty sight to see how the mother bird, after she had 

 caught sight of me, drove away the chicks to a place 

 of safety and all the time kept herself between them 

 and me. The natives hunt and kill and eat a good 

 many cassowaries ; the feathers are used for ornamental 

 head-dresses and belts and for decorating spears and 

 clubs, and the claws are often used as the points of 

 arrows. 



The Papuan Dog, without whose help the native 

 would seldom, if ever, be able to get any meat, is a 

 sharp-nosed prick-eared creature about the size of a 

 Welsh terrier. The colour is yellow, brown or black, 

 and the tail, which is upstanding, is tipped with white. 

 Usually the hair is short and smooth, but we saw one 

 dog, brought down to Parimau by a party of pygmies, 

 which had a thick furry coat like a chow dog, which it 

 also resembled in the carriage of its tail. The dogs 

 in the village of the pygmies which we visited, were 

 smooth-coated like those of the Papuans, so it is 

 possible that that thick-coated animal came from some 

 remote district where the natives live at a higher altitude. 



The Papuan dogs are very sociable creatures, and 

 they like to accompany the natives on their journeys. 

 They are particularly fond of going in canoes on the 

 river, and two or three are seen in nearly every canoe 

 even when the people are only out fishing. Their 

 food is generally given to them by the women and it 

 consists of raw meat, when there is any, and lumps 



