The power of the spear is never better shown than in the chase of the kangaroo. When a native sees one of these animals engaged in feeding, he goes off to a little distance where it cannot see him, gathers a few leafy boughs, and ties them together so as to form a screen. He then takes his spears, throw-stick, and waddy, and goes off in chase of the kangaroo. Taking advantage of every cover, he slips noiselessly forward, always taking care to approach the animal against the wind, so that it shall not be able to detect his presence by the nostrils, and gliding along with studied avoidance of withered leaves, dry twigs, and the other natural objects which, by their rustling and snapping, warn the animal that danger is at hand.
As long as possible, the hunter keeps under the shelter of natural cover, but when this is impossible, he takes to his leafy screen, and trusts to it for approaching within range. Before quitting the trees or bush behind which he has been hiding himself, he takes his spear, fits it to the throw-stick, raises his arm with the spear ready poised, and never moves that arm until it delivers the spear. Holding the leafy screen in front of him with his left hand, and disposing the second spear and other weapons which cannot be hidden so as to look like dead branches growing from the bush, he glides carefully toward the kangaroo, always advancing while it stoops to feed, and crouching quietly behind the screen whenever it raises itself, after the fashion of kangaroos, and surveys the surrounding country.
At last he comes within fair range, and with unerring aim he transfixes the unsuspecting kangaroo. Sometimes he comes upon several animals, and in that case his second spear is rapidly fixed in the midlah and hurled at the flying animals, and, should he have come to tolerably close quarters, the short missile club is flung with certain aim. Having thrown all the missiles which he finds available, he proceeds to despatch the wounded animals with his waddy.
In the [illustration No. 1], on the 739th page, the action of the throw-stick is well shown, and two scenes in the hunt are depicted. In the foreground is a hunter who has succeeded in getting tolerably close to the kangaroos by creeping toward them behind the shadow of trees, and is just poising his spear for the fatal throw. The reader will note the curious bone ornament which passes through the septum of the nose, and gives such a curious character to the face. In the background is another hunter, who has been obliged to have recourse to the bough screen, behind which he is hiding himself like the soldiers in “Macbeth,” while the unsuspecting kangaroos are quietly feeding within easy range. One of them has taken alarm, and is sitting upright to look about it, just as the squirrel will do while it is feeding on the ground.
The reader will now see the absolute necessity of an accurate aim in the thrower—an accomplishment which to me is a practical mystery. I can hurl the spear to a considerable distance by means of a throw-stick, but the aim is quite another business, the spear seeming to take an independent course of its own without the least reference to the wishes of the thrower. Yet the Australian is so good a marksman that he can make good practice at a man at the distance of eighty or ninety yards, making due allowance for the wind, and calculating the curve described by the spear with wonderful accuracy; while at a short distance his eye and hand are equally true, and he will transfix a kangaroo at twenty or thirty yards as certainly as it could be shot by an experienced rifleman.
In some parts of Australia the natives use the bow and arrow; but the employment of such weapons seems to belong chiefly to the inhabitants of the extreme north. There are in my collection specimens of bows and arrows brought from Cape York, which in their way are really admirable weapons, and would do credit to the archers of Polynesia. The bow is more than six feet long, and is made from the male, i. e. the solid bamboo. It is very stiff, and a powerful as well as a practised arm is needed to bend it properly.
Like the spear shaft, this bow is greatly subject to being worm-eaten. My own specimen is so honeycombed by these tiny borers that when it arrived a little heap of yellow powder fell to the ground wherever the bow was set, and, if it were sharply struck, a cloud of the same powder came from it. Fortunately, the same looseness of texture which enabled the beetle to make such havoc served also to conduct the poisoned spirit which I injected into the holes; and now the ravages have ceased, and not the most voracious insect in existence can touch the weapon. The string is very simply made, being nothing but a piece of rattan split to the required thickness. Perhaps the most ingenious part of this bow is the manner in which the loop is made. Although unacquainted with the simple yet effective bowstring knot, which is so well known to our archers, and which would not suit the stiff and harsh rattan, the native has invented a knot which is quite as efficacious, and is managed on the same principle of taking several turns, with the cord round itself just below the loop. In order to give the rattan the needful flexibility it has been beaten so as to separate it into fibres and break up the hard, flinty coating which surrounds it, and these fibres have then been twisted round and round into a sort of rude cord, guarded at the end with a wrapping of the same material in order to preserve it from unravelling.
The arrows are suitable to the bow. They are variable in length, but all are much longer than those which the English bowmen were accustomed to use, and, instead of being a “cloth yard” in length, the shortest measures three feet seven inches in length, while the longest is four feet eight inches from butt to point. They are without a vestige of feathering, and have no nock, so that the native archer is obliged to hold the arrow against the string with his thumb and finger, and cannot draw the bow with the fore and middle finger, as all good English archers have done ever since the bow was known.
The shafts of the arrows are made of reed, and they are all healed with long spikes of some dark and heavy wood, which enable them to fly properly. Some of the heads are plain, rounded spikes, but others are elaborately barbed. One, for example, has a single row of six barbs, each an inch in length, and another has one double barb, like that of the “broad arrow” of England. Another has, instead of a barb, a smooth bulb, ending gradually in a spike, and serving no possible purpose, except perhaps that of ornament. Another has two of these bulbs; and another, the longest of them all, has a slight bulb, and then an attempt at carving. The pattern is of the very simplest character, but it is the only piece of carving on all the weapons. The same arrow is remarkable for having the point covered for some two inches with a sort of varnish, looking exactly like red sealing-wax, while a band of the same material encircles the head about six inches nearer the shaft. The sailor who brought the weapons over told me that this red varnish was poison, but I doubt exceedingly whether it is anything but ornament.
The end of the reed into which the head is inserted is guarded by a wrapping of rattan fibre, covered with a sort of dark varnish, which, however, is not the black-boy gum that is so plentifully used in the manufacture of other weapons. In one instance the place of the wrapping is taken by an inch or so of plaiting, wrought so beautifully with the outside of the rattan cut into flat strips scarcely wider than ordinary twine, that it betrays the Polynesian origin of the weapons, and confirms me in the belief that the bow and arrow are not indigenous to Australia, but have only been imported from New Guinea, and have not made their way inland. The natives of Northern Australia have also evidently borrowed much from Polynesia, as we shall see in the course of this narrative.