ocks and the tree tops. But God did help
Dot's Kangaroo; the little reeds and rushes held tightly in the earth,
and the poor struggling animal, exerting all her remaining strength,
gained the reedy slope safely. She staggered forward a few reeling
hops, and then fell to the earth like a dead creature. In an instant
Dot was out of the pouch and had her arm round the poor animal's neck,
crying, as she saw blood and foam oozing from her mouth, and a strange
dim look in her sad eyes.

"Don't die, dear Kangaroo! Oh, please don't die!" cried Dot, wringing
her hands, and burying her face in the fur of the poor gasping creature.

"Dot," panted the Kangaroo, "make a noise! Cry loud! Not safe yet!"

The little girl didn't understand why the Kangaroo wanted her to make a
noise, and she had, in her fear and sorrow, quite forgotten their
pursuers. But now she turned, and could hear the blacks, urging on
their dogs as they were making an attempt to skirt round the precipice,
and gain the other side of the chasm. So Dot did as she was told, and
screamed and cried like the most naughty of children; and the gasping
Kangaroo told her to go on doing so.

Then what seemed to Dot a very terrifying thing happened; for she soon
heard other cries mingle with hers. From the desolate morass, and from
the gully in darkness below, came the sound of a bellowing. She
stopped crying and listened, and could hear those awesome voices all
around, and the echoes made them still more hobgoblinish. The
Kangaroo's eyes brightened, as she restrained her panting, and listened
also. "Go on," she said, "we're safe now," so Dot made more crying,
and her noises and the others would have frightened anyone who had
heard them in that lonely place, with the wind storming in the trees,
and the black clouds flying over the moon. It frightened the black
fellows directly.

They stopped in their headlong speed, shouting all together in their
shrill voices, "The Bunyip! The Bunyip!" and they tumbled over one
another in their hurry to get away from a place haunted, as they
thought, by that wicked demon which they fear so much. At full speed
they fled back to their camp, with the sound of Dot's cries, and the
mysterious bellowing noise, following them on the breeze; and they
never stopped running until they regained the light of their camp
fires. There they told the gins, in awe-struck voices, how it had been
no Kangaroo they had hunted, but the "Bunyip",