ke a bag, thus forming a fish-trap in
which are caught any number of fish. Crayfish and mussels they caught
by digging down their holes in the mud for them. Their mode of catching
shrimps was very (with all apologies to scientists for using the word)
primitive. Quite nude, the women sit down in the water, let the shrimps
bite them; as they nip, seize them.

Iguanas burrow into the soft sand ridges and there remain during the
winter, only coming out after the Curreequinquins--butcher birds--one
of their sub-totems, sing their loudest to warn them that the winter is
gone, calling Dooloomai, the thunder, to their aid lest their singing
is not heard by their relations, who after the storms come out again in
as good condition as when they disappeared.

Black men do not approve of women cooks. At least the old men, under
the iron rule of ancient custom, will not eat bread made by gins, nor
would they eat iguana, fish, piggiebillah, or anything like that if the
inside were removed by a woman, though after themselves having prepared
such things, they allow the gins to cook them--that is, if they have
not young children or are enceinte; under those conditions they are
unclean.

CHAPTER XIII

FORAGING AND COOKING

It is very strange to me to hear the average white person speak of the
blacks collectively as having no individuality, for really they are as
diverse in characteristics as possible; no two girls I had in the house
but were totally different.

There has been too much generalisation about the blacks. For instance,
you hear some people assert all blacks are trackers and good bushmen.
That there are some whose tracking power is marvellous is true, but
they are not the rule, and a black fellow off his own beat is often
useless as a bushman.

So with their eyesight; what they have been trained to look out for
they see in a marvellously quick way, or so it seems to us who have not
in their lines the same aptitude. Of course, for seeing things at a
distance a black has the advantage, unless the white has had the same
open-air life. Some white bushmen are as good as any blacks.

Nimmaylee, a little black girl who lived in the house, used to tell me
all sorts of bush wonders, as we went in the early summer mornings for
a swim in the river. She was a great water-baby, with rather a contempt
for my aquatic limitations. Then she thought it too idiotic to want to
dry yourself with a towel,--just like a mad white wom