e
colt had traversed this route, its little foot had made no impression on
the soil; and when we got on the ironstone hills, we altogether lost the
traces of the horse. Both the native and myself imagined, from our seeing
no tracks of the colt, from the indistinctness of those of the horse, and
from the circumstance of the boy's telling us that Mr. Elliott intended
to proceed eighteen miles down the river, that we had followed the wrong
marks; just therefore as night began to fall I moved back to the river.

January 18.

We started at dawn, following down the river, but could see nothing of
Mr. Elliott's tracks: and our evening journey was equally unsuccessful. I
now became very anxious and indeed rather alarmed for the safety of the
missing party, but resolved, as the best plan I could pursue, to strike
across the mountains to Leschenault, making a due west course my true
line of route, but constantly diverging two or three miles to the south
of this, and again returning to it by another route. I should thus have
every chance of falling in with the track I wished to find; and in the
event of my not succeeding I should be certain, if on my arrival at
Leschenault no tidings had been received of Mr. Elliott, that his party
must be somewhere to the southward and eastward of the course I had
taken, and that I might still, by the assistance of the Leschenault
natives to whom this country was known, succeed in finding him before
such a period had elapsed as would render assistance useless.

KILLING A KANGAROO.

On the 19th, in pursuance of this determination, we made a rapid push of
nearly twenty miles in a westerly direction without reckoning our
divergencies to the southward. Nothing however but toil and
disappointment rewarded our exertions. We killed a large Boomer, or old
male kangaroo, the largest indeed I had ever seen; the dogs were unable
to master him he fought so desperately, and it was not until after he had
wounded two of them that I succeeded in dispatching it by a sort of
personal encounter in which a club was the weapon I used. The native who
was carrying my gun had dropped it the instant the kangaroo was started,
and I was thus unable to shoot it. We cut off as much of the flesh as the
dogs and ourselves required for two days and left the rest in the forest.
We halted for the night on a small stream, the only one I had seen since
we quitted the Williams.

COUNTRY UPON THE HARVEY RIVER.

Our departure w