126 
COOKTOWN 
CHAP. 
the natives as they passed to and fro. Here an old 
woman with apish jaws, wrapped in a rug, was crooning 
over the hot embers, roasting some roots ; beside her a 
dog with a numerous litter of puppies. I asked her 
how many, and she held up her ten skinny fingers. 
“ Blucher,” a fine big man, came forward and shook 
hands. “ Rosie,” his wife, a young-looking girl, who 
we knew had been severely beaten that day, hung back 
in the hut ; she had killed two of his wives, and that 
day had tried to kill number three. 
Another old woman, more like a hideous witch than 
anything else, whose skeleton would have been a 
treasure to any museum, had her legs bent outwards 
and flattened like boomerangs. She was finishing a grass 
bag, splitting the canes with her teeth as she worked it. 
Two large wallabis were swung in a tree, and a plentiful 
supply of yams and zamia nuts were lying scattered 
about in dilly bags. Two mummified babies fastened 
up in bark were doing duty as pillows inside one of the 
huts, and the indefinable mixture of smells was too 
much for our olfactory nerves and soon drove us off. 
The dancing shadows from the fires played upon dark 
supple forms and burnished skins, while the imperturbable 
features of others, as they eyed us, did not entice us to 
stay. The crickets were chirping with might and main 
in a deafening competition with a chorus of frogs, as we 
turned our backs on the camp ; bats whirled in and out of 
the moonlight, night owls whooped, moths flapped our 
faces, and a troop of mists softly chasing back others 
hurried us away from fever and ague, home to a fire. 
COOKTOWN. 
I decided on Saturday to go on to Thursday Island 
by the next steamer, and as it was too late to arrange 
about riding into Cooktown, I had no alternative but to 
