Towards Evening Wylie Returned Gloomy And Sulky, And Without Having Fired A Shot; Neither Had He Brought The Horses Up

With him to water as I had requested him to do, and now it was too late to go for

Them, and they would have to be without water for the night. I was vexed at this, and gave him a good scolding for his negligence, after which I endeavoured to ascertain what had so thoroughly put him out of humour, for ordinarily he was one of the best tempered natives I had met with: a single sentence revealed the whole - "The - - dogs had eaten the skin."

This observation came from the very bottom of his soul, and at once gave me an idea of the magnitude of the disappointment he had sustained; the fact was, upon leaving the camp in the morning he had taken a firestick in his hand, and gone straight back to where we skinned the kangaroo on the 21st, with the intention of singeing off the hair and eating the skin, which had been left hanging over a bush. Upon his arrival he found it gone: the wild dogs had been beforehand with him and deprived him of the meal he expected; hence his gloomy, discontented look upon his return. As yet I had not told him that I had been fishing; but upon showing him what I had brought home, and giving him the two largest for supper, his brow again cleared, and he voluntarily offered to go out again to try to get a kangaroo to-morrow.

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