NATIVE HUNTING METHODS 123 



grass round his head and pull the birds one by one 

 under water, breaking their necks and letting them 

 float till he has enough for his needs. He will find 

 and capture snakes by watching the movements of 

 their companions, the butcher birds. He will catch 

 a bee, stick a piece of feather or down on it, let 

 it go, and follow its flight until he finds its hive and 

 honey. He will walk into the sea at a place where a 

 white man cannot see a single shell and in a few 

 minutes, by digging in the spots of yielding sand with 

 his feet, find enough cockles for his meal. He can 

 find food where a white man would starve. 



This ingenuity is seen almost as much in fishing 

 as in hunting. Hooks made of shells or tortoise- 

 shell, harpoons, spears, baskets, cages, nets, hollow log 

 traps, weirs, dams, fences, and poisoning are all 

 employed as a means of obtaining fish. He will, 

 indeed, use one fish to catch another. The remora, 

 or sucker-fish, with a string attached to its tail, is used 

 to help the black fellow to turtle, dugong, or other 

 food fish. 



The huge beds of cockle-shells, some of them about 

 a mile long and hundreds of yards across, with ovens 

 of flat stones, found among the sand-hills near the 

 shore in parts of Australia, show the enormous numbers 

 of molluscs the aboriginal gathered and cooked. The 

 big inlanid fishing weirs offer further evidence of his 

 ingenuity as a fisherman. 



And the Australian aboriginal is an expert water- 

 finder. By looking at certain vegetation or noting 

 the fall of the ground he is able to tell where and 

 at what depth wa'ter will be found, and he sinks his 

 water-hole accordingly. He knows after a shower or 



