“Never mind,” consoled the mother. “Now come up to this end of the track, and look again. Look very carefully now.”

The toddler waded up along the faint line, bent over, stared fixedly again. But this end of the track looked exactly like the other end, neither beginning nor end—nothing. To hide his disappointment he still kept on staring and then—

He tautened, stared harder. Had he—yes, there it came up again, a wee bubble prettily emerging from the end of the track to come drifting up and vanish in the water. Here was another one—he was staring very hard—and yet another was coming, just like a fairy pearl!

“What do you see?”

“Bubbles!”

“Ah ha! Good boy! Now, something must be making those bubbles. Dig down with your hands and see what it is.”

The baby did so, scooping down into the sand, scratching deeper down until he stopped with nose at water level, one great big eye cocked sideways up at his mother. She could hardly refrain from laughing, for he seemed to be all one big eye and tail—she thought he would topple over, but he rose up fairly gasping with triumph as he held aloft in chubby fist a big fat mussel shell.

Throughout the ages, going back to the days of the Great Beasts, the Great Crocodiles, the Great Birds and Reptiles, how many, many times has thus a mother of the Children of the Bush taught her baby son or daughter how to find the first mussel, the shellfish that has helped feed innumerable generations of many, many tribes.

How very, very often has the great, quiet Bush listened sympathetically to that, “Good boy! Good girl! and so now we shall not go hungry this day.”

IX

THE WOMAN-STEALERS

The moons came, and passed away, a summer and winter had come and gone since the lad Red Kangaroo had won his Bora warriorhood. Soon he was to be the tallest man in the tribe, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, lightning quick of movement, with long, powerful legs. No warrior could now wrestle and hold him down, nor throw a spear so straight and far, nor swim farther, nor stay under water longer. There was no man whose long-drawn, piercing cooee could be heard so far away over the bush. All this seems to make Red Kangaroo a superman of the wilds, but this description of him is just as it is handed down to us by the last of his tribe.

These feats of Red Kangaroo endeared him all the more to most of the tribe, for bushcraft, strength, agility, and above all endurance, were naturally greatly esteemed by these children of the bush. Some few men of every tribe, fortunate ones, excel in one, or perhaps two phases of bushcraft; few indeed excel in many. But he was liked for warmer reasons. Always willing to help man, woman or child, his happy laugh as welcome as old Bungadoon’s in camp, on the hunt, or on a long, hard march, he was ever ready with praise for others who distinguished themselves in the hunt or with weapons or in the dance.