BLACKS AS FISHERMEN 187 



crayfish is a wonderful sprinter. Familiar with its 

 lack of staying power, blacks race after it uproariously 

 as it flees face to foe, all the graduated blades of its 

 turbine apparatus beating under high pressure. Two 

 or three rushes and the crayfish pauses, and then the 

 agile black breaks its long, exquisitely sensitive and 

 brittle antennae, deprived of which it becomes less capable 

 of taking care of itself; or it may find its gorgeous 

 armour-plates smashed with a stone or penetrated by 

 a spear. For the most part, however, the crayfish lurks 

 in coral caves, sweeping a considerable frontal radius 

 with ever-shifting antennae — not in pride or conceit of 

 their beautiful tints and wonderful mechanism, but 

 with a pitiful apprehension of danger, for the admirers 

 of the creature are many and ever so much in earnest — 

 the earnestness of unceasing voracity. 



Having a decided partiafity for eels, the blacks of 

 North Queensland have devised several means of capture, 

 one of which does not call for the exercise of the least 

 skill on the part of the individual whose longing for the 

 dainty becomes imperative. His placid perseverance, 

 too, is of no avail, unless luck favours. Wading in a 

 shallow, mangrove-bordered creek, he blindly probes 

 the bottom with a six-feet length of fencing wire, the 

 modern substitute for the black palm spear. Frequently 

 he trifles thus with coy Fortune for hours, an inch or 

 so separating each prod; and again, in a spasm of indig- 

 nant impatience, he stabs determinedly into the mud 

 at random. Non-success does not make shipwreck of 

 his faith in the existence of the much-desired food in 

 the black mud, for as far back as his own experience 

 and the camp's traditions go, substantial reason for 

 that faith has been plentifully revealed. He returns 

 to the monotonous occupation until an unlucky eel is 

 impaled, and then it is given no chance of escape. 



