On My Return I Had A Large Crowd Of Carriers Around Me Watching Me
Skin My Birds, While Arigita Explained Everything To Them In Lordly
Fashion, Only Too Pleased To Get The Chance Of Being Listened To,
While He Expounded To Them His Superior Knowledge.
What he told them
I, of course, could not tell, but he informed me that when I put the
final stitch in the nostrils of the birds, my audience declared that
I did this to prevent the birds from breathing and so one day coming
to life again.
When the wise Arigita asked them how this could be,
since they had seen me take out the body and brains, they scoffed at
him and said that spirits would come inside the skins so that they
could sing again.
Monckton, meanwhile, had made a raid on the native gardens and brought
in quite a lot of taro. The police had killed several more Doboduras,
and in one place they had quite a fight. Our old man prisoner escaped
in the night, although he was handcuffed.
We returned to the coast the next day, as there seemed no chance of our
coming to terms with these Doboduras. Our only chance would have been
to defeat them in a big engagement. They seemed too frightened of us
to stand up for a big fight, but hid themselves in the bush, and were
thus hard to get at. We left ten police behind to trap the natives,
and, thinking we had left, a few of them returned to the village,
and the police shot four more of them and soon caught up with us,
bringing in the shields, stone clubs and spears of the slain.
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