Ill THE LAKE DISTRICT 87 



was trained to pick up the scent upon the ground, 

 and follow it till it led to a tree up which an 

 Opossum had recently climbed ; the dog then 

 stood barking at the foot of the tree until we 

 came up to it, when a search would be made 

 among the branches, and the Opossum, generally 

 hanging motionless on one of the topmost branches, 

 would be brought down with a gun. The sport 

 does not sound exhilarating, but the chief excite- 

 ment for me was the reckless floundering in the 

 dark, and the extraordinary skill with which my 

 guide found his way about the forest without 

 any apparent landmarks to go by. It frequently 

 struck me that the shepherds and men familiar 

 with the bush were able to recognize individual trees 

 and logs in an apparently chaotic forest, much 

 in the same way that a Londoner learns to know 

 shops and houses in the street, and they certainly 

 pick up the tracks of a Kangaroo or any native 

 animal with unerring certainty. 



Besides the above-mentioned vegetable-feeding 

 Diprotodonts, I came across the two species of 

 Dasyure or Native Cat at the Great Lake, small 

 carnivorous Marsupials of nocturnal habit, which 

 prey upon birds and small mammals, and fre- 

 quently commit depredations among the poultry 

 of the settlers. The two Tasmanian species known 

 respectively as Native Cat (Dasyurus viverrimus) 

 and Tiger Cat (D. maculatus) are distributed over 

 the island and are quite commonly met with ; 

 they occur also on the Australian mainland, but 



