"It's about the size of a badger, and in shape something like a large rat," replied Brady; "but when, he's roasted, he's for all the world like a young pig; you'd hardly know the difference if it wasn't he's not quite so fat. The first time you see a hole with fresh tracks going in, you dig the fellow out and roast him, and you'll thank me for as good a dinner as ever you had in your life. He bites foully, though, I can tell you, so take care of your hands."
"I must lay up some store of provisions for the winter," replied Dudley; "but how to preserve them I do not know, unless I dig a saltpan by the Sea."
"Pooh, nonsense!" answered the man, "you'll find plenty of salt-pans ready made. There's too much of that commodity about. I can't say it's very good, for there's mostly something bitter mixed with it; but one must not be dainty in these countries. If you look about, you'll find many a hole of twenty acres or more, with the salt as hard upon the top as ice. And you have nothing to do but to cut yourself a little tank out of the coral limestone, and make a pickling-pan of it."
"That would be a laborious business, I'm afraid," replied Dudley, "for which I have not proper tools."
"Lord bless you! you can cut it like cheese," replied the bushranger. "Then you've nothing to do but to let it stand out in the air for a little while, and it grows as hard as flint. Why, the man that I was talking about, that I saw between this and Adelaide, has built himself quite a house of it, and all with his own hands."
As he spoke, they came to the top of a little rising ground, from which the land sloped away with very gentle undulations for five or six miles. Mount Shanck, with its truncated cone, and Mount Gambier, with its peaky summits, were both within sight; while to the eastward, over a wild extent of scrub, the blue tops of some distant hills were seen, and the ground below, between them and the foot of Gambier, was wonderfully and beautifully varied with wide spaces of rich green pasture, and manifold clumps and small woods of gigantic shadowy trees, the long shadows of which fell upon the verdant meadows as if thrown upon green velvet.
"Well, that's mighty pretty!" cried the bushranger, as he and Dudley stopped to gaze. "It puts me in mind of England--doesn't it you? It's for all the world like some great gentleman's park, isn't it now? It's a fine place that England, any how. I've never seen anything like it; d--n them for sending me out of it, I say!"
"What a vast variety of different kinds of vegetation!" said Dudley. "What are those dark, gloomy-looking trees there, to the eastward?"
"That's what they call the tea-tree," answered his companion; "bad enough tea it would make, however; and this one here, under which we are standing--heaven knows how high it is, for it seems as if it were looking after the clouds up there--they call the stringy bark, and those just below us are the blackwood trees. Those fellows that you see out in the meadows, with their little leaves all strung upon a stalk, they call mimosas here--I don't know what their right name is; but what's better than all, I see you've got lots of juniper here: all those bushes that you see; and when their berries are ripe, if you could but get some molasses, or maize, or anything of that kind, and make a still out of an old kettle, you could brew yourself some capital gin, and be as merry as a king."
"Without subjects," said Dudley.