As Soon As
The Moon Rose, I Went With Charley To Bring Him On; But When We Came To
The Place Where They Had Left Him, He Was Gone.
It was impossible even
for Charley to track him in the uncertain moonlight; and, as the night
was very cold and foggy along the flats and hollows of the river, we made
a fire, to wait for daylight.
By a most unfortunate accident, my hat
caught fire, and was consumed in an instant; it was a great loss to me in
such a climate, and under daily exposure to a most powerful sun. I had to
make shift with a small bag made of strong canvass, the long end of which
I turned over my face to shade it. When the sun rose, we resumed our
search, and succeeded in finding the poor beast, after tracking him for
six miles across the country; he had evidently rambled in search of
water, and had generally been attracted by shady hollows, in which any
one would have reasonably expected to find it. He had, however, been
completely unsuccessful; the hollows appeared to have been dry for a very
long time; he travelled tolerably well to our camp, where he was
immediately killed, skinned, quartered, and cut up. His meat was not
quite so flaccid and watery as that of our last bullock; but it was by no
means good. He was an old, and a heavy beast, and the experience we had
of him strongly corroborates my observations, that such beasts can
neither bear the fatigues of a long journey, nor travel with a load,
unless regularly well fed and watered.
On this occasion we made a grand discovery, of which we afterwards
profited greatly. A portion of the skin of the bullock was dried, and a
certain quantity was added to our soup at night; which we soon found to
be not only a great improvement, but to be in itself much preferable to
the tasteless meat of our knocked-up bullocks. The stomach was also made
use of on this occasion, as our useful dog, Spring, was well provided
with emu meat. We had our last pot of tea on the 22nd, and we were now
fairly put on dry beef and water.
By a mere accident, we discovered a remarkable medicinal property of the
glutinous secretion of the seed-vessels of a drooping Grevillea. John
Murphy, having no pockets in his trowsers, put the seeds which he found
during the stage into his bosom, close to the skin, where he had already
deposited a great number of Sterculia, and was much inconvenienced by the
starry prickles which surround the seeds. Afterwards, finding the
drooping Grevillea in fruit, he gathered some capsules and placed them as
before stated. Upon arriving at the camp, he felt great pain; and, on
examining the place, he saw, to his greatest horror, that the whole of
the skin of the epigastric region was coloured black, and raised into a
great number of painful blisters.
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