“Tree kangaroo. Get him! The curator will want one!” cried the boy, drawing his revolver. He aimed carefully, and at the report the animal flinched, but seemed to maintain its hold in the branches. He fired again, with the same result. The tree kangaroo now moved sluggishly toward another branch.
“Shoot, Sadok! I must have hit him, but he sure can carry a lot of lead!”
Sadok raised the blowgun to his lips and held his cupped fist over his mouth. Filling his lungs, he blew a full breath. The dart soared up into the tree top and they saw it sticking from the animal’s side. Presently his limbs grew limp and he partly fell, but his long, hooked claws caught in the branches and hung. He made no further move.
“Dead as a mackerel, but I’ll have to swarm up after him!” declared Nicky, emphatically. He was a fearless climber, and he shinned the trunk and was soon in the branches. Worming up one of them, he reached the tree kangaroo. It was like its cousins, the wallaby of New Guinea and the great gray kangaroo of Australia, but with heavy, coarse fur and long, hooked claws especially adapted to climbing.
“Hit him both times, myself,” he called down: “Gorry! but he’s tenacious of life!” He detached the animal from its hold and dropped it down. It weighed some sixty pounds. They were an hour skinning it, after which Sadok put away some of the choicest meat, for he never let an opportunity for food go by in the jungle.
Then Nicky spied a great blue butterfly, the Papilio ulysses, soaring through the tops of the screw pine overhead. They set off in hot pursuit, with the skin of the kangaroo hanging to his belt.
“Dwight will want this fellow!” urged Nicky, stumbling through thickets and over stony and coralline ground. Hermit crabs scuttled out of their way in the underbrush; lizards of every shade streaked across under their feet, but still the lad kept his eyes on that magnificent prize which persistently flew high. At length it came down and alighted on a moist spot in the earth, evidently thirsty. He crept up and dropped his helmet over the great metallic-blue beauty.
“Hooray! What a prize for Dwight! How in thunder am I ever going to carry it, though?” He started to pin it to his helmet, but Sadok shook his head.
“Him all tore, in bushes,” he objected. “Me show’m.” Searching the jungle awhile, he presently came back with a broad, flat cactus leaf which he was busily paring of thorns as he walked. Then he slit it open with his kriss and gouged out a recess for the body of the butterfly in its pulpy interior. Lining it with flat pieces of pandanus, he was ready for Papilio ulysses, who was forthwith spread out, flat winged, and then securely bound in his green prison with thongs of rattan.
“Some sandwich!” grinned Nicky as it was slipped into the map pocket of his rucksack. “Worth about fifty dollars just as it stands! Won’t I have some fun with old Dwight, with it, though!”