Red Kangaroo, the warrior lad, had grown into a man—a thinking man.

Not so Boobuk the warrior. Boobuk was a good man when pushed into action; at all other times he found it pleasant to hunt if the hunting was not too strenuous—pleasant, too, to loaf or eat or sleep, or just to drowse on the river bank while others did the fishing. Boobuk hardly knew what thought was; anyway, he had no time for thought, he had his worries instead. Kapota, his wife, of course—the only but greatest worry in the world to Boobuk, his nearest approach to a headache. She had spoilt even such a lovely night as this had been, just pleasantly warm, the bush a dreamy stillness, stars a-twinkle in the sky, happy groups round each little campfire, a momentary flame painting chocolate bodies into bronze. Subdued voices here and there, laughter here and there, tinkle of kylies, haunting chant of girlish voices in some age-old love song, the rumbling bellow of old Bungadoon laughing at his own joke—and then the shrill voice of Kapota, followed by a bull-like roar.

Silence had fallen on the camp at this particularly outrageous disturbance from the warrior Boobuk’s gunyah; then he had come flying out, tearing away a sheet of bark as he landed backwards upon his campfire, leaping up with a howl, his roars followed by shrill abuse and the whiz of a nulla thrown by the irate Kapota. Growling furiously to the subdued laughter from the shadowy gunyahs, Boobuk came like a great shambling ape to throw himself down by old Bungadoon’s campfire.

“Women!” snarled Boobuk. “Women! And those fools of cubs howling their eyes out for them! Wait till Red Kangaroo and his cub mates get their women! They’ll wish they’d never been born!”

“What’s wrong now?” chuckled Bungadoon.

“Women!” roared Boobuk as tenderly he felt his buttocks where he had fallen back upon his own fire. “You heard, didn’t you? Women! Red Kangaroo and his mob can have my Kapota and everything in my gunyah with her—if they’d only take her!”

Old Bungadoon gleefully caressed his paunch; he dearly loved to see Boobuk in a rage.

“You don’t know how to handle her,” he said soothingly. “Why don’t you give her the father of a hiding?”

“Because she’d give me worse, you fool!” snapped Boobuk.

“Oh, indeed!” observed Bungadoon thoughtfully. “Have you ever given her a hiding—a real hiding?”

“Once,” grunted Boobuk.

“Ah! And what did she do?”

“Ate me alive with bulldog ants!” snapped Boobuk.

Old Bungadoon’s eyes opened wide, Pumbul gazed silently, all the “family youngsters” and their small friends listened entranced.

“How did she eat you alive with bulldog ants?” inquired Bungadoon wonderingly.

“She didn’t, you fool!” growled Boobuk. “The ants ate me!”

“Why?” inquired Bungadoon.

“Because she threw them all over my belly!”

“What did she do that for?” asked the puzzled Bungadoon.

“To get even, of course.”

“Then why did you let her do it?”

“I didn’t!” howled Boobuk and sat straight up and glared at Bungadoon. “It was a hot day, and I was asleep—asleep out in the bush, under a shady kurrajong-tree. She sneaked up, found a bulldog ants’ nest near by, cut up some raw pademelon meat and put it in the bottom of her coolamon, laid the coolamon beside the nest. When the coolamon was full of hungry ants she snatched it up and ran to me and emptied the ants all over me!”