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 Macropidae of Australia. A portion of 

 the letter is extracted, and runs as follows : 



" The * TBoomer ' 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 seethe 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, 

 I 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 where 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 something more than two hours, and 

 it was evident by the way the hounds were running that he was a long way before us ; 

 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 length 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 for the combined efforts of man 

 and beast. 



When the animal finds that it is overpowered in endeavor 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 pointed 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 dogs, 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 struggle unless he succeeds in launching a fatal missile at the 

 advancing animal. 



