Thus throughout the ghostly moonlight nights he spied upon camp after camp, calculating the family numbers by the few bark or grass gunyahs, or by the suggestion of sleeping forms round the dull embers of the fires. Before daylight he would be swiftly climbing back up a spur of the range to seek yet another hide-out from which to locate yet another camp, alert for wallaroo or carpet snake or possum for food—after which he would be ready for sleep.

He had not found what he sought. He became anxious, for he knew that with the passing of each day the danger of discovery rapidly increased. So when the moon grew bigger and gave better and longer light he left the high mountains and came right down into the forest lands that here and there were dotted with areas of heavy scrub.

Day by day, in such a patch of scrub, he would hide, eat, and sleep, to emerge with the owls and moon at night.

XVI

THE MENACE

Thus daily from one sheltering scrub after another he watched enemy warriors stroll away for the hunt, then parties of women and children dawdle away with their dilly-bags and digging sticks to the wide spaces of the bush. The people in the main camps here were much more numerous than in the family-group hunting camps back towards the foothills. He tingled every time he watched the heavy-browed, black-bearded warriors pick up their weapons and lovingly balance them a moment before casually striding away to their day’s hunting. He chuckled at the thought of how their careless attitude would change if they could suddenly know what big game was spying on them from this tangled scrub close by. What amazement! Then what an exultant howl of the pack! How they would come at him! With what savage exultation they would hunt him and hurl those long, cruelly barbed spears deep within his body, how they would race to the kill to club him to death—if they could.

If they could! He shivered. For almost every man fears death. If discovered now his case would be hopeless, for he was well away from the mountains that offered shelter to a hunted man. Here in the open bush country a few cooees and smoke signals would immediately arouse the tribesmen near and far from all around him. Even if he were not quickly killed he would at last be run to death like an exhausted dingo.

Yes, if he were discovered now he would never see his beloved tribal lands again, never again his uncle Tulumi, nor Burradella, nor old Bungadoon, nor Giluram, nor old Mullionkale the play-maker, nor any of the tribe—not even the chief, Jerrabri, and the elders.

Grimly, choosing the ground on which he would leave the faintest of tracks, if any, he carried on his search, only to find the women’s parties well guarded, the older women alert. Peering from cover he would see girls and young women starting out with the children, the older women scattered among them, all carrying their fish-traps and dilly-bags and digging sticks, the old women now and then scolding them well together. He would grin impishly at thought of the panic he would cause if they only knew what was watching them. Then would come frowning remembrance of how at times he had spoken hotly against the laxity of the women and guards of his own tribe. He now grudgingly realized that the system was much more efficient than he had believed. He saw now that an enemy woman-stealer who thought that all he had to do to steal a woman from the Gunn-e-darr tribe was to sneak into its territory, hide by a camp, pounce out upon his woman and hurry her away, had another think coming. It might, and occasionally did, happen that way, but that would be the woman-stealer’s lucky day.