Very unusually also for a lad his age, he was quick to admire each new tribal baby, to the smiling content of the mother, who did not realize he was thinking of future warriors and mothers of the tribe. His ready tongue and appreciative smile, not to mention his sharp nose, brought him as a welcome guest to where anything tasty was cooking.

“He can smell a hunk of emu meat or a fat goanna on the coals a mile away,” chuckled old Bungadoon. “Just as well I’m three men in one as a hunter or Pumbul and I and the family would go hungry many a day!”

At which Pumbul would smile her quiet, knowing old smile and urge Red Kangaroo to try yet another tasty morsel.

While Boobuk the warrior would growl at Kapota, his long-suffering wife, “You always seem to like Red Kangaroo to come prowling along here and fill his belly. But you chuck my tucker at me as if I were a dog—it’s always covered with lumps of charcoal, too! What has Red Kangaroo got that I haven’t got?”

“Everything!” Kapota would snap.

“What’s everything?” demanded Boobuk.

“A smile and a laugh and a good word for the food I cook and the way I cook it and the trouble I’ve taken to catch it!” Kapota would snap. “Whereas all you’ve got is the weather-beaten rump you squat down on, and the grunt you wolf your meat with! You’ve got nothing else—except the snore when you plop back to sleep it off!”

Such an answer would bring a surly growl and an unbelieving frown to Boobuk the warrior’s corrugated brow, leaving the ever-ready Kapota with the satisfaction of the last word.

“And that’s all I ever have got,” she would complain bitterly to her friends, “from that hulking great guzzler. Just a growl, and guzzling noises, and a snore.”

No wonder that poor Boobuk was so often bitterly puzzled. For he actually was that pride of every tribe—a man-killing warrior, no one so savagely fierce, such a ruthless batterer when it came to an all-in fight as he. Yet his own wife, Kapota, seemed the only person in his world who did not appreciate him.

Everyone, nearly everyone that is, liked Red Kangaroo, even the women. That smile, and cheerful voice of his were welcome—almost everywhere. There were times, though, when he sat quietly and thoughtfully, or stole away to brood with the bush and himself. But he was not brooding on this lovely morning as he strode through the bush, weapons in hand—only two war spears in case of emergency, for he was a hunter for today, and tomorrow, too, and tomorrow again. He was bound for Tambar Springs, home of the ibis, to join the warrior Kuribri, who with his young friends Giluram and Kerran, Burowa, Duri, and Keri, had sent him word there was such good hunting. Twenty miles away, but he gloried in the walk; he would meet them easily by mid-sun. His noiseless step was light and springy as he trod the good earth, breathing in the early morning sweetness, keen eyes alert, ears drinking in the quiet, the whispering, the querulous or alarmed, the cocksure or distant voices of the bush that speak only to those attuned to hear. Striding on through a lovely grove of tall red and yellow gums, he emerged by a sunlit billabong with the blue-grass caressing his knees. He stopped inquiringly at a tinkle of girlish laughter somewhere on ahead, down by the water’s edge amongst those reeds.