So on the morning of this eighth sun there was no lagging. When they came to the Namoi at a favoured spot²⁹ most of the crowd spread out along the river bank cheerfully to set their nets and traps and lines. A small party had been ordered by Burradella to proceed upstream and wade across river by the shallows to a small lagoon.³⁰ Near mid-shadow time (towards three o’clock) they were to cross back again and hurry to rejoin the main party when all would return to Mullibah Lagoon.

This little party waded through the shallows and hastened to the lagoon in lively spirits. They spread out across the shallows, energetically stirring up the mud with their feet, chattering and laughing in joke and gossip while continually picking up with hand or toes the fat mussel shells their feet were digging for. Soon their bark and rush-plaited game bags were filled with the mussels. Meanwhile, as the muddied water became thicker, here and there the head of a fish poked gasping to the surface, smothering with mud-clogged gills. Vain for him to sink when they splashed towards him, for he must come up or choke to death on the bottom. The piccaninnies gleefully snatched up the woebegone yabbies and turtle that went crawling out to the lagoon bank sickened by the mud. At mid-sun they cooked and ate a hearty meal of this good food, for it was so plentiful today that they would still fill their food containers to overflowing before returning to the main body.

Towards mid-afternoon the guards mustered them, urging haste, to wade back across river and rejoin Burradella’s main party. They had not gone far³¹ when Weetah stopped with a little cry of dismay. She had lost her dilly-bag; she remembered now she had left it on a log at the river crossing while she paused a moment to attend the baby, the proud Giluram’s masterpiece. That bag contained many things useful to a young married woman—varying needles painstakingly fashioned from splinters of kangaroo and emu bone, finer needles from fishbone, awls from the long tooth of the kangaroo, sewing threads laboriously spun from bark fibres and hair of humans and animals and prepared from sinews of animals. Her tying cords of animal hide, flint and shell knives, tinder to dust on her fire-making sticks when rubbing them together to make a fire on a wet day, balls of dried clays and kaolins that when wetted are used to put over a wound with acacia-leaf ash from a particular tree, fish-hooks of bone and shell, with other indispensable family things, were treasured in that dilly-bag.

There was a “something” else, a little something she prized ever so much more highly than anything else in all the great big world, excepting Giluram and the baby. But—those medicines! She might need those medicines any time; she dreaded a day when Giluram might be brought home wounded, and she carried these medicines securely wrapped in a neat, secure, waterproof little bag from a particular part of the skin of a kangaroo. It was within that comfy little bag that she carried the “something” she prized so much. No one else had ever seen it, except once when shyly she had shown it to Giluram. But she had found it long before her happiness when Giluram had been able to claim her; she had found it when she thought she could never have him; she had found it and wished over it—oh, so many, many times! It was her lucky charm—a little, rounded, pearly stone.