Man The Fat Hunter

THE BELUGA HUNTERS IN PREHISTORIC TIMES - A MERE 200 YEARS AGO - THE MACKENZIE River delta and adjacent coasts were the richest, most populous region in what is now the Canadian Arctic. About 30,000 bowhead whales summered in the shallow Beaufort Sea, 50-ton (45-tonne) feasts for hunters skillful and daring enough to kill them. There were Dall's sheep in the mountains, moose in the valleys, musk-oxen on the tundra, and in summer vast herds of caribou on the wind-swept coastal plains. 

Seals were common. Great polar bears patrolled the ice, and fat Barren Ground grizzlies patrolled the land. Here were the breeding grounds of much of North America's waterfowl: the myriad tundra lakes were speckled with ducks and geese, loons and swans. Rivers and lakes were rich in fish: char and inconnu, and immense shoals of herring and fat whitefish. 

Most important to the Inuit of this region were the milky-white beluga whales that arrived each year in large pods in late June at the edge of the Mackenzie estuary and remained for six to seven weeks in its shallow, sun-warmed bays and inlets, where they were relatively easy to hunt. The people were the Mackenzie Inuit, the "Beluga Hunters," as archaeologist Robert McGhee of the Canadian Museum of Civilization has called them. When he dug trenches through the thick refuse layers at Kittigazuit, the main village of the Mackenzie Inuit, "87 percent [of all bones] were of beluga." These Inuit took all that a bounteous nature offered, but the beluga large, easily killed, and abundant - was their favorite prey. 

While in other parts of the Canadian North the average population density was one person to every 250 square miles (648 km2), 2,500 to 4,000 Mackenzie Inuit lived in settlements near the river mouth. Inuit camps, specks of humanity scattered across the vastness of the Arctic, were usually home to a few families, perhaps 50 people. Kittigazuit, the main village of the Beluga Hunters, had a summer population of 800 to 1,000 people. 

Among the Inuit at Kittigazuit at the turn of this century was an orphan boy named Nuligak who lived with his crippled grandmother. "Because I was an orphan and a poor one at that, my mind was always alert to the happenings around me. Once my eyes had seen something, it was never forgotten." He became a famous hunter and, in old age, wrote I, Nuligak, the story of his life, wonderfully vivid glimpses of a long-vanished world. 

"The Inuit of those days [about 1900, when Nuligak was five years old lived on game and fish only, and fished and hunted on a grand scale." The 200-yard (823-m)-long Kittigazuit beach was hardly large enough for all the kayaks drawn up there," and the moment belugas were spotted "a swarm of kayaks was launched. At the great whale hunts I remember there was such a large number of kayaks that when the first had long disappeared from view, more and more were just setting out... Clever hunters killed five, seven belugas, and after the hunt the shore was covered with whale carcasses... Once I heard elders say that three hundred whales had been taken. 

The great driftwood racks and stages were packed with drying meat, sealskin pokes were filled with fat, ample food for "kaivitivik, the time of dancing and rejoicing which began with the departure of the sun and ended with its return," Nuligak recalled. "In those days the Inuit could make marvelous things": puppets and toy animals, activated by baleen strings and springs, that hopped and danced across the floor of their great winter meeting hall, while Nuligak and the other children watched in wonder. "There was such an abundance of meals, games, and things to admire that these sunless weeks sped by as if they had been only a few days. 

Until 1888, the Mackenzie Inuit had little contact with the outside world. That year the southern whalers came and the ancient, unchanging world of the Beluga Hunters collapsed in agony, despair, disease, and death. "Aboriginal Mackenzie Eskimo culture could probably be considered to have become extinct between 1900 and 1910," Robert McGhee noted with scientific detachment. 

In 1888, whalers reached the Beaufort Sea, last sanctuary of the rapidly declining bowhead whales. Six years later, 2,000 people wintered at Herschel Island, west of the Delta, soon known as the "Sodom of the North." It was the largest "town' in northwestern Canada, inhabited, according to a Nome, Alaska, newspaper report, "by demons of debauchery and cruelty," the scene, according to horrified missionaries, of "bacchanalian orgies."

Nuligak's memories are less lurid. He remembered the whalers more as friends than as fiends. "White men and Inuit played games together, as well as hunting side by side. We played baseball and wrestled. We danced in the Eskimo fashion to the sound of many drums. 

Unintentionally, though, the whalers brought death to the long-isolated Inuit. They needed great amounts of fresh meat. Musk-oxen vanished from the land. Few bowhead whales remained. In 1914, the Royal North-West Mounted Police reported that caribou were virtually extinct in the Mackenzie region. By then, the Beluga Hunters, too, were nearing extinction. 

As the plague had ravaged medieval Europe, measles and smallpox epidemics wiped out the Beluga Hunters, who lacked immunity to southern diseases. Of 3,000 people, fewer than 100 survived. In 1900, nearly 1,000 Inuit camped at Kittigazuit. In 1906, a single family remained in this village of death and decay. 

Into the vacuum created by the demise of the Mackenzie people flowed Inuit from as far west as Alaska's Seward Peninsula, and even Yuit and Chukchi from Siberia. Traders and trappers came from the south. And whalers from all over the world and from every social stratum - the dregs of San Francisco's slums and a Count Bülow, a remote cousin of the chancellor of the German Reich; Spanish- speaking Africans; Chinese coolies; and people from the Polynesian Islands - - settled in the region and "went native." One day in the town of Inuvik an Inuk girl, a sociology student, asked me: "Where are you from originally?" I told her I was Baltic German, born in Riga, Latvia. "Well, for heaven's sake!" she exclaimed. "My grandfather came from Riga. 

These people, then, part Inuit, part everyone, became the new Beluga Hunters, following, to some extent, the millennial customs and traditions of the nearly extinct Mackenzie Inuit. The changes wrought through the coming of the whalers were enormous, but some things had not changed: the coming of the belugas, the need for food, the ancient rhythm of camp life through the seasons. 

Even the remnants of this ancient whaling culture seemed fated to fade away. Professor Vagn Flyger of the University of Maryland, who studied the Beluga Hunters in 1961 and 1962, predicted confidently that "Eskimo whale camps will soon be no more," and Nuligak wrote in the 1950s that "the Inuit eat white man's food nowadays." In the late 1970s, the oil companies came, their made- in-Japan module headquarters, with gleaming offices and dining rooms, with swimming pools and cinemas, squatting on the tundra, with their spacecraft-like drilling rigs far out in the Beaufort Sea, all backed by multibillion-dollar exploration budgets. Yet, "the old way of life" persisted. When I went to join the Beluga Hunters in the summer of 1985, twenty-five families from the towns of Tuktoyaktuk, Inuvik, and Aklavik had "returned to the land," to ancient camps along the coast where Inuit had lived and hunted belugas for thousands of years. "From time immemorial this has been our life," said Nuligak. 

Order CETACEA

Cetaceans Balæna mysticetus Linn . Arctic Bowhead Whale. Ak'virk (Alaskan Mackenzie, and Coronation Gulf). 

The Bowhead Whale, the largest animal of the Arctic regions, if not directly the most important animal, on account of being the chief means of support of a number of Eskimo communities, has, through the large fleets of vessels engaged in the whaling industry, indirectly been the most responsible agent for bringing the white man's civilization into the western Arctic, with its concomitant effects upon population and fauna. Although whaling had long been prosecuted in the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean west of Point Barrow , the first ship wintered at Herschel Island in 1889–1890 . Later other ships wintered at Baillie Island, Langton Bay, Cape Parry, and two small schooners even wintered as far east as Victoria Island. Whaling was prosecuted independently by Eskimos from Cape Prince of Wales, Point Hope, to Cape Smyth and Point Barrow , Alaska, and east of the Mackenzie, at Warren Point, Baillie Islands, Langton Bay, and other points, before the advent of white men. The Eskimos were accustomed to pursue the whale from their skin-covered umiaks and kill them with stone-headed lances, valuing the whale for its meat and blubber and not for the "whalebone” or baleen. Nowadays there is no Eskimo whaling east of Point Barrow, and the western Eskimos use modern weapons. The whaling industry by white men has become practically dead within the past few years. One ship and one gasoline schooner, the only vessels which whaled in the Beaufort Sea, killed twelve whales apiece during the summer of 1912, but the voyages were considered unprofitable on account of the unsaleability of bone. 

• The largest number of ships which wintered at Herschel Island at one time was fourteen in 1893–1894. 

• The largest catches are said to have been 69 whales by Captain Smith in the Narwhal, 1893–1895 ; 

• 67 whales by Captain Norwood in the Balæna in 1893–1895, 

• and 64 whales by Captain Bodfish in the Beluga in a two-year voyage about the same time. At that time whales were frequently killed near Herschel Island and Baillie Islands, but now they are much less seldom seen inshore. 

A good many Bowhead Whales are killed in the spring by the Siberian natives at their whaling stations at Indian Point, Plover Bay, and East Cape. Whalers say that in the spring the Bowheads do not follow the Siberian coast farther than East Cape, but strike across from there to Point Hope, Alaska, and follow up the American coast around Point Barrow, passing Point Barrow , going to the eastward from about April 20th to June 1st. 

After the Bowheads pass Point Barrow in April and May, little is known of their movements. Whalers are apt to be met with anywhere in Amundsen Gulf in July and August, as early as ships can get out of winter quarters. Whales are sometimes seen spouting off shore in Franklin Bay early in June. In August, in the region between Cape Parry and Banks Island, the whales usually seem to be coming south along the west side of Banks Island , and going west, although they often are seen in Franklin Bay until September . Following them up , the whalers usually find whales most abundant on the “offshore ” or “pea-soup grounds” off Capes Dalhousie and Brown, where the water is rather shoal, eighteen to thirty fathoms. The whales often remain here for some time and if scared away, soon come back. Whales killed here sometimes have mud on their backs as if they had been rolling on a mud bottom , i.e. , whales which are killed without sinking. A dead whale which sinks to the bottom often brings up mud as a matter of course. Bowheads have been chased into fresh water three fathoms deep near Pullen Islands, off the mouth of the Mackenzie River. No parasites are found on Bowhead Whales, like the barnacles and “lice” found on Right Whales and Humpbacks. 

The method of Bowhead whaling is to cruise about under sail, keeping a sharp lookout from the masthead during the whole twenty four hours. Bowhead Whales are very easily frightened and are very seldom if ever seen from a steamship while the propellor is working. Furthermore, after a whale is struck by a bomb, it is extremely infrequent for another whale to be seen in the same vicinity for an hour or more, even though there may have been many in sight before. When a whale is “ raised ,” the ship lowers all its available whale -boats. Each boat usually has a ship's officer as boat header in the stern-sheets, a boat-steerer (harpooner) in the bow , and a crew of four oarsmen . A whale usually stays below the surface for a regular period, from twenty minutes to an hour or more, according to his individual peculiarity. When up, the whale moves slowly along, the top of back just above the water, sometimes just below , making a wake, every minute or two blowing up a white column of vapor to a height of from eight to twelve feet. After spouting several times the whale usually “ turns flukes, " raises his tail out of water, and dives down. After two or three risings, the boat-header can usually tell the rate of speed at which the whale is traveling, the direction of his course, and the time he is apt to stay below. The boat heads for the place of his probable reappearance, keeping a little to windward if possible. When the whale spouts again, the boat-header tries to run the boat directly across the top of the whale's head ,the most favorable chance. As the boat passes over, the boat-steerer (harpooner) in the bow thrusts one or two tonnite (or sometimes black -powder) bombs into the whale's neck with the darting -gun. The darting - gun is a heavy lance - shaft with set-gun at tip. When the point of the harpoon enters, a stiff parallel wire explodes the eight-gauge cartridge which shoots the bomb into the whale. The handle is immediately dis engaged, the barbed harpoon -head remaining in the wound, and attached to the lance -warp (rope) , of which ten fathoms are kept in a box in the bow and one hundred or more fathoms in a tub in the boat. Sometimes a shoulder -gun is used after the darting- gun, if opportunity offers. The shoulder -gun is a heavy eight-bore, shooting a long feathered tonnite bomb with no warp attached . If struck fairly in the neck vertebræ , a whale is sometimes killed instantly with one shot, but sometimes eight or ten shots are required. The whale often tows a boat a long distance if only slightly wounded, and is sometimes lost by going under a large ice - field . As soon as the whale is " struck ” by one boat, the other boats come up as soon as possible, and as the whale rises he is struck as often as possible. On small ships the whalebone baleen from the upper jaw is sometimes cut off in the water, but on the larger ships the upper portion of the whale's skull is cut off and hoisted on deck entire, and the bone removed later. Ordinarily the practice of the Bowhead whalers in recent years has been to remove only the baleen, turning the carcass with its fifty or more barrels of oil, adrift. This is a most wasteful practice, but when "bone” was high in price, a single whale might be worth $10,000 in bone, and the captains preferred not to spend a day saving a thousand dollars' worth of oil, and perhaps lose a possible second whale. The meat of the Bowhead is good, the young whale's flesh in particular being much like beef. The " blackskin ,” or muk -tok , as it is called by the Eskimo, is considered a great delicacy, being usually eaten raw by the Eskimo, and boiled fresh or pickled by the white whalers. At Point Barrow, Alaska, the " Aloe-whaling” is done principally in Eskimo skin - umiaks, and the whalebone is cut out at the edge of the floe. A male which I saw killed August 23d, 1910, in Franklin Bay, was about 57 feet long, flukes 18 feet 4 inches across, and right fin or flipper 10 feet 4 inches around outer curvature. The whale yielded 2100 pounds of whalebone, the longest slabs (from middle of jaw) being about 11 feet in length.

Another piece of news which did not then bear the aspect of tragedy was that an Englishman, Hubert Darrell, had not reached Fort Macpherson after having visited the Baillie Islands in the fall of 1910. When Dr. Anderson repeated this piece of news to me we discussed it and agreed, as we still do, that Darrell was a man who would not have starved under ordinary circumstances, and we therefore felt sure that he had turned up alive and well somewhere or other unless sickness or accident had overtaken him. Darrell was a man who understood thoroughly the principle of “doing in Rome as the Romans do,” and he had on many occasions, to my knowledge, in the past applied that principle so well that he was as safe as an Eskimo in his wanderings about the country; and really safer by far, for he had learned all the Eskimo had to teach him, and added to that knowledge the superiority of the white man's trained mind, and a natural energy and resourcefulness that are rare among men of any race. 

Although it was not until a year later that we became certain that the travels of Darrell over the northland of Canada had come to a tragic ending, I shall insert here a brief sketch of the man and his work. He was one that did not advertise, and although some of the most wonderful journeys ever performed in Arctic lands were done by him, the world would probably never have heard much of them even had he lived a longer time. 

Darrell had come from England as a young man and owned a farm in Manitoba. I think it was the gold rush to the Yukon that first drew him thence to the North, although at that time he did not go much beyond Great Slave Lake, where he spent some time with the half caste and Indian hunters and travelers. He had already learned their ways when David T. Hanbury came there in 1901 and induced Darrell to join him on a trip eastward from Slave Lake to Chesterfield Inlet. 

After spending the winter near Hudson Bay, a party consisting of Hanbury, Darrell, a third man named Sandy Ferguson, and about twenty Eskimo went inland, crossing north over Back's Great Fish River to the Arctic coast, following the coast west to the Coppermine River and ascending it to Dismal Lake, and there crossing over the divide which separates the waters of the Arctic Ocean from those of Great Bear Lake. Here the Eskimo turned back in August, and on their way home incidentally paid a visit to Captain Amundsen when he was wintering on King William Island, while the three white men proceeded by canoe across Great Bear Lake to the Mackenzie River. This was a journey of more than seven months in which the entire party had lived wholly on the country. It was Hanbury's last trip, but not so with Darrell. 

I met Darrell first at Shingle Point on the Arctic coast, just west of the Mackenzie River, when I was spending my first winter among the Eskimo (1906–1907), and when he was on his way guiding a party of mounted policemen from Herschel Island to Fort Mcpherson. That was always his way. He was about as new to that country as the policemen were, but still he was a competent guide, for he never lost his head, and after all, in most places in the North it is not difficult to find your way if you keep your wits about you. 

It was the winter before I saw him that he had made one of his most wonderful journeys. That winter Captain Amundsen with the Gjoa was wintering at King Point, halfway between the Mackenzie River and Herschel Island. In the fall of 1905 Captain Amund sen, as the guest of some whalers, traveled south in their company across the Endicott Mountains to the Yukon. The whalers and Amundsen had several sleds, and Eskimo to do the housework and camp making, and they traveled over a well- known road, where it is only a matter of three or four days from the time you leave the last Eskimo camp on the north side of the divide, where you can any time purchase deer meat, condensed milk, flour, or any such article you think you may need, up to the time you come to the first Indian camp on the south side of the divide, where you can supply yourself with dried fish, venison, and other articles of food. Amundsen has of course never said a word to indicate that he considers this Alaskan journey he made a difficult one, which as a matter of fact it is not; but the world at large insists upon considering it a marvelous feat, and the story, which the telegraphs and cables flashed all over the world, of the arduous road over which Amundsen had come to Eagle City, keeps echoing and reëchoing in the speech of men and in the pages of magazines. 

That same winter Darrell also made a trip south from the Arctic Ocean to the Yukon. Instead of having whalemen for companions and Eskimo for guides, he went alone. Instead of having several teams and sledges, he had no dogs and only a small hand sledge which he pulled behind him; and on that sledge he carried sixty pounds of mail. He made his way from Fort Macpherson over the mountains by a more difficult road than that followed by Amundsen's party. Although he traveled alone he had no adventures and no mishaps (adventures and mishaps seldom happen to a competent man), and when he arrived on the Yukon the telegraph despatches recorded the simple fact that mail had arrived from the imprisoned whalers in the Beaufort Sea, and not a word of who had brought it or how it had been brought.

On the Yukon Amundsen happened to meet Darrell. He recognized the feat for what it was — one of the most remarkable things ever done in Arctic lands. “ With a crew of men like that,” Amundsen says, “ I could go to the moon.” Although he no doubt never expected to see him again, Captain Amundsen invited Darrell to visit him on the Gjoa at Shingle Point. Darrell does not seem to have agreed to this at once, and Amundsen returned with his party north to the coast, leaving Darrell behind on the Yukon. But one day towards early spring Darrell turned up at Amundsen's camp at King Point. He had come alone again over the mountains by a new route, and without adventure, as always. 

From the time I saw him guiding a party of mounted police in November, 1906, I did not see Darrell again until the summer of 1908, when I met him at Arctic Red River, the most northerly Hudson's Bay post on the Mackenzie River proper. In the meantime he had been making his quiet journeys alone, here and there through the north, and that fall I believe he crossed the mountains again to the Yukon. I do not know what his movements were from that on until the fall of 1910, when he appeared at the Eskimo village at the Baillie Islands, without dogs as usual, and dragging his sled behind him. The schooner Rosie H. was wintering there at the time, but Captain Wolki was away and the ship was under the command of her first officer, Harry Slate. 

To travel alone and without dogs is an unheard of thing even among the Eskimo, and both they and Mr. Slate tried first to get Darrell to stop over and next offered to give him some dogs to haul his sled, but both without avail. He was used to traveling that way, he said, and it would be too much bother to hitch up the dogs in the morning. He told them further, truly, that nothing would go wrong so long as no accident happened, and that to have dogs with him if an accident did happen would be of no particular use. 

Darrell had been with a canoe up Anderson River the previous summer and had left his camp near the mouth of the river at the foot of Liverpool Bay. In order to return there he started southwest from the Baillie Islands, and a few days later he met some Eskimo by whom he sent a letter to Mr. Slate. At first Darrell had intended to come and visit me (for our base at Langton Bay was only ninety miles east of the Baillie Islands), but Slate had told him that I would not be at home, and only Ilavinirk's family were keeping the camp for me. He had therefore decided not to come. The letter he wrote Mr. Slate, which contains some messages to me, is the last positive thing we know of Darrell. In it he says, as he had already told Slate, that he intended to go the three hundred miles or so to Fort Macpherson and thence across the mountains to Dawson, and intended to return the next year. Eskimo information makes it clear that he left his camp in Liverpool Bay, but in what direction he went we do not know. Personally, in making such a journey, I should have traveled along the coast; but Darrell was used to the woodlands, and certainly the woods are an advantage in a way, although the snow is soft among the trees. It may be that he tried to go straight overland through the forested area from Liverpool Bay to Fort Macpherson. It is also possible that he may at the last moment, because of approaching sickness or for some other reason,, have taken to the ice of the Anderson River with the idea of reaching a camp of the Fort Good Hope Indians, who may be expected at one place or another after you get a hundred miles up the Anderson. 

The only thing discovered since Darrell was last seen that may possibly be a clew, is that some Eskimo told me at the Baillie Islands in March, 1912, that the previous summer they had been in a boat up the Anderson River and had seen a blazed tree with some writing upon it. As a good many of the Fort Good Hope Indians can read and write, the chances are that this is some of their scribbling. Nevertheless I advised the Eskimo if they went up to the place again to cut down the tree and bring the piece containing the writing down to Captain Wolki at the Baillie Islands. It is not likely we shall ever know what the ultimate end of Darrell was; but whatever it was, those who knew him feel sure that he met it bravely and without heroics.

(Hubert Darrell's writings are in Oxford - https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/c5cc2dca-ab2c-3087-aead-cce2545ca9b7?terms=%22Darrell%20Hubert%201875-1910%22)

Before leaving the subject of animal food we must say a word or two on cannibalism. Human flesh is nowhere a regular article of food ; some blacks undoubtedly kill to eat, others only eat those who are killed in battle, or have died of disease. Sometimes there is a magical idea attaching to the use of human flesh or fat, especially kidney fat, which is cut out before death has taken place : it is held to convey to the eater the courage of the victim. Sometimes it is the bodies of enemies which are disposed of in this way ; in South Queensland it was the recognised method of giving honourable burial to your friends. In many parts both sexes and all classes eat human flesh ; elsewhere it is only the men who will do so. There are no special ceremonies connected with cooking or eating in most districts, and most parts of the body are eaten, the thighs being the bonne bouche. In West Australia, on the Gascoyne River, some ritual is found in connection with eating human flesh. A girl was killed, when she was bathing with several others, by a native, who decoyed her away. She was very plump ; the object of killing her was to acquire this desirable quality. A big fire was made, and after removing her intestines, two natives carried her round the fire a few times in an upright position, the others meanwhile singing in a low voice. Then the body was put in the heart of the fire, where a space had been cleared, covered with ashes and cooked like a kangaroo. One of the participants in the feast was a companion who had been bathing with her. 

In the Turribul tribes ceremonial combats follow the initiation ceremonies. If a man is killed in one of these his body is eaten. Each tribal group sits by its own fire, and a great medicine man singes the body all over till it turns copper coloured. Then the body is opened, the entrails and heart are buried, and pieces of the flesh cut off and thrown to the different parties ; the fat was rubbed on the faces of the principal medicine men, and the skin and bones were carried by the mother for months. The grave in which were the heart and other parts was so sacred that none save a few old medicine men would approach it ; it was marked with blackened sticks tied with grass. Near Maryborough the skin was taken off, and the body distributed to the men and old women, the father or father's brother officiating as carver. The kidney fat was rubbed on the spears, and the kidneys themselves stuck on the points ; this was to make the weapons deadly. The meat is stated to look like horseflesh and smell like beef when it is being cooked. Statements have been made that a girl was sacrificed in South Queensland to some evil spirit ; there is no evidence to show that this was the case, and it may be dismissed as an invention.

Birds form an important article of food in all parts of Australia, the most important being the emu, turkey, duck, pigeon, and various kinds of cockatoo. Some of the methods of capturing these and other birds are sublimely simple ; in New South Wales, Angas tells us, a native would stretch himself on a rock in the sun, a piece of fish in his hand ; this would attract the attention of a bird of prey, which the black would promptly seize by the leg as soon as it tried to carry off the fish. In the same way water-fowl were taken by swimming out under water and pulling them beneath the surface, or, with a little more circumstance, by noosing them with a slender rod, the head of the fowler being covered with weeds as he swam out to his prey, which he dragged beneath the water; as soon as he had the bird in his hand he broke its neck, thrust it into his girdle, and was ready for another victim. Shags and cormorants more often rest on stakes than on the surface of the water ; accordingly, on the Lower Murray, stakes were set up for them ; the native swam out with his noose and snared them as before. During dark nights they drove shags from their resting-places, catching them as they tried to settle, and receiving in the process severe bites from the terrified birds. Almost equally simple was the method of taking black swans in West Australia. At the moulting season young men lay in ambush on the banks till the birds had got too far away from deep water to be able to swim off; then they ran round them and cut off their retreat. The West Australians would also kill a bird as it flew from its nest ; one man creeping up threw his spear so as to wound it slightly as it sat, and the other brought it down with his missile club as it flew off. Boldest of all, perhaps, is the method of taking turkey bustards in Queensland ; the fowler hangs a moth or a grasshopper, sometimes even a small bird, to the end of a rod, on which is also a noose. With a bush in front of him he creeps up to his prey, which is fascinated by the movements of the animal on the rod ; as soon as the black is near enough he slips the noose over its head and secures it. In the Boulia district pelicans are taken from ambushes ; the fowler throws shells some distance into the water, attracting the bird, which thinks the splashes are made by fish rising ; then the black pats the water with his fingers, to mimic the splashing of fish on the surface, the pelican swims round and presently falls a victim to the boomerang, or is captured by hand. The Torres Straits pigeon is taken by simply throwing any ordinary stick into the flock, as it passes down to the foreshore at no great distance from the ground ; or it may be knocked down in a more elaborate way. The flocks take the same path every night, and a high bushy tree is selected which lies in their path ; the black holds in his hands a thin switch, some fifteen feet long, which is tied to his wrist to prevent it from being accidentally dropped ; he himself is lashed to the tree to prevent accidents ; and when the pigeons come past he sweeps at them, generally bagging a fair number. On Hinchinbrook Island, the roosting-trees were known to the natives. They prepared fires beneath in the daytime ; when the pigeons had retired to rest, the fires were lighted and down came the birds. On the Tully the black observes on what trees the cockatoos roost. Then he makes fast to a suitable branch a long lawyer cane, which reaches to the ground ; at night he mounts this, holding on by his first and second toes when he moves his hands; slung round his neck he carries a long thin stick ; and with this he knocks the birds down as soon as he is within reach of them. Small cockatoos and other birds are also captured with bird-lime, which is spread not only on the branches on which they roost, but also on the young blossoms. The swamp pheasant is taken on its nest by means of a net ; in Gippsland they are taken on the nest by hand. The boomerang is a very effective weapon in a large flock of birds. Grey describes how they are knocked down with the kyli at night ; wounded birds are used as decoys ; for these birds seem to be much attached to each other. One is fastened to a tree, and its cries bring some of its companions to its aid. In Victoria and South Australia wickerwork erec- tions were made for the birds to settle on ; near them the black lay in ambush, his noose ready, and attracted his prey by imitating their calls. Emus are powerful birds, weighing perhaps 130 lbs,, and they are not so easily captured. Strong nets, sometimes fifty yards in length, are often employed to take them. The hunter notes the track by which the bird visits a water-hole, and sets up his net some thirty or forty yards behind it, the operation taking no more than five minutes ; when it returns, its flight is prevented by stationing men at possible avenues of escape, the hunters rush out and the bird is entangled in the net or knocked over with boomerangs or nulla- nullas. Sometimes an alley was built, broad at the entrance and narrowing continually, till it ended in a net ; near the opening, midway between the ends, the hunter concealed himself and imitated the call of the bird ; this he does by means of a hollow log, some two or three feet long, from which the inside core has been burnt. Holding this close to the ground over a small excavation, he makes a sort of drumming sound ; the emu struts past the men in ambush, and is easily driven into the net. Emu pits are dug, either singly or in combination ; near the feeding-grounds sometimes they are combined with a fence, opposite the openings of which they are placed, with a large central pit, in which are ambushed three or four blacks to call the birds. The emu is hunted with dogs or surrounded by the whole of a black camp ; it may also be speared by stalking it. The hunter rubs himself with earth to get rid of any smell from the body ; then with bushes in front of him and a collar-like head-dress in some parts, he makes for the bird. Young cassowaries are often run down. Ducks are often taken by stretching a long net across a river or lagoon ; the ends are fixed in the trees or on posts ; and one or more men go up-stream at a distance from the river, and then drive the birds down. At a suitable distance from the net they are frightened and caused to rise ; then a native whistles like the duck-hawk, and a piece of bark is thrown into the air to imitate the flight of the hawk ; at this the flock dips and many are caught in the net. For this mode of cap- ture four men are required. Ducks are also stalked and speared, or snared by fixed nooses set in the swamps, according to a statement of Morrell's, which, however, he leaves us to infer the kind of bird caught in this way. Flock pigeons are taken by a method unlike any described. Their habits are noted, and a small arti- ficial water-hole made in the neighbourhood of their usual drinking-place ; near this the fowler conceals himself, with a net ten or twelve feet in length laid flat on the ground close to the water ; the lower edge is fixed to the ground by means of twigs, and along the whole length of the upper edge runs a thin curved stick, the end of which the black holds in his hand ; the pigeons sit on the water like ducks ; and as soon as a favourable opportunity presents itself, the fowler, with one movement of the arm, turns the net over and bags the unsuspecting birds. For scrub turkeys a series of lawyer cane hoops are set up with connecting strips ; this is baited in the morning with nuts, fruit, etc., and about sundown he takes up his position in his ambush some twelve feet away right in front of the opening ; as soon as the turkey walks in, the black rushes out and secures it. In West Australia birds were generally cooked by plucking them and throwing them on the fire ; but when they wished to dress a bird nicely they drew it and cooked the entrails separately, parts of them being considered great delicacies. A triangle was then formed round the bird by three red-hot pieces of stick against which ashes were placed ; hot coals were stuffed inside it, and it was served full of gravy on a dish of bark. In Victoria a sort of oven was made of heated stones on which wet grass was strewn ; the birds were placed on the grass and covered with it ; more hot stones were piled on and the whole covered with earth. In this way they were half stewed. An ingenious method of cook- ing large birds was to cover them with a coating of mud and put them on the fire; the mud-pie was covered with ashes and a big fire kept up till the dish was ready ; then the mud crust was taken off, the feathers coming with it, and a juicy feast was before the hungry black. The Austrah'an is by no means uncivilised ; he appreciates high game as much as any gourmet amongst us, but he enjoys it in a somewhat different way. The Cooper's Creek aborigines collect in a bladder the fat of an exceedingly high, not to say putrid pelican, and bake it in the ashes ; then each black has a suck at the bag, the contents of which are distinctly stronger than train-oil, and what runs out of the mouth is rubbed on the face ; thus nothing is wasted.