Accordingly, they landed a hundred yards or so up the creek, assailed the contents of the tucker bag, and then proceeded to skirt the right bank, on the look out for duck. A single bird, a very fine drake, fell to Joe's gun near the fallen log which bridged the narrow stream. This crossed, the boys entered into a belt of virgin scrub that extended back a mile or so from Crocodile Creek, abutting Mosquito Creek along its breadth.
"We'd bes' separate, Joe," said Sandy, when they had gone a little distance into the jungle. "You keep on a few hundred yards, and then bear on the left towards the Crocodile. I'll make straight for there from here. It'll be hard if we don't account for a bird or two."
The scrub was very thick and interwoven in places. It contained a number of native fig trees of great height and spread. These trees were in fruit, therefore there was a better chance of getting pigeon, some varieties of which are exceedingly fond of the native fig.
The umbrageous trees formed a lofty canopy whose cool shades were very agreeable after a couple of hours on the water under a January sun. The lawyer and other cane vines hung from the great trees in long festoons, varying in thickness from ropes no thicker than one's little finger to the great cables extending downward from the huge limbs of the fig trees. Besides these growths were scrub bushes, many of which were covered with blossom, and still others with berries, blue and red. There were also spaces of bare ground, occupied only by giant fig and other columnar trees. These, by natural formation, made arched aisles, whose loftiness, lights, distances, and vistas constituted a grandeur, and even splendour, unapproached by any of the great cathedrals of earth. These, however ancient, are but things of yesterday when compared with nature's porticoes, cloisters, and altar spaces.
The boys, however, took little heed of these things. They were in the scrub neither for architectural nor devotional purposes. Pigeons and other scrub game alone had any attractions for them.
After separating they walked warily, listening with both ears and scanning with both eyes. Sounds there were in abundance. The ubiquitous minah, as the noisy and saucy soldier-bird is called, is as widespread as the gum tree itself. The thrush, though smaller than its English namesake, and with a differing note, is equally melodious. Then peculiar to scrub country are the musically metallic notes of the pretty but exceedingly coy bell-bird.
Henry Kendal, the greatest of Australian nature poets, has limned it in song. Here is a stanza—
"The silver-voiced bell-birds, the darlings of daytime,
They sing in September their songs of the Maytime.
When shadows wax strong and the thunder-bolts hurtle,
They hide with their fear in the leaves of the myrtle;
They start up like fairies that follow fair weather,
And straightway the hues of their feathers unfolden
Are the green and the purple, the blue and the golden."
There is also the merry Coachman, who cracks his whip with his beak, so to speak, in such verisimilitude that the wandering new chum looks round eagerly for a coach-team.
Added to these are the soft coo-coo of the doves and the stronger and booming note of the pigeon tribe. And beyond all these, the calls, chirpings, and chatterings of scores of feathered favourites. They who call the Australian bush songless libel it.