The Papuan Dog, without whose help the native would seldom, if ever, be able to get any meat, is a sharp-nosed prick-eared creature about the size of a Welsh terrier. The colour is yellow, brown or black, and the tail, which is upstanding, is tipped with white. Usually the hair is short and smooth, but we saw one dog, brought down to Parimau by a party of pygmies, which had a thick furry coat like a chow dog, which it also resembled in the carriage of its tail. The dogs in the village of the pygmies which we visited, were smooth-coated like those of the Papuans, so it is possible that that thick-coated animal came from some remote district where the natives live at a higher altitude.
The Papuan dogs are very sociable creatures, and they like to accompany the natives on their journeys. They are particularly fond of going in canoes on the river, and two or three are seen in nearly every canoe even when the people are only out fishing. Their food is generally given to them by the women and it consists of raw meat, when there is any, and lumps of sago. A remarkable peculiarity about them is that they never bark, but they make up for this defect by their extraordinary power of howling. Sometimes in broad daylight, if there was no wind, but more often on still fine nights, a party of dogs would sit together, usually on the river bank, and utter a chorus of the most piteous and blood-curdling howls. No amount of stone-throwing or beating with sticks, freely administered by their masters, had the smallest effect on them; they would only move away a few yards and begin again, apparently carried away by an ecstasy of sorrow.
The natives value their dogs highly, as they well may do, for they provide the whole of their meat supply, and they use them to exchange for articles of which they have great need. The people at Parimau have a small piece of iron about the size of a chisel, used for carving their canoes and paddles, for which the enormous price of three dogs had been paid, so they informed us, to the people of the Wakatimi. One day one of our “boys” shot a dog, which had been in the habit of stealing food from our camp. When the natives knew that it was dead, all the people of the village began to wail in the same manner as they do when a person dies, and the owner of the dog smeared himself with mud and mourned bitterly. No doubt the display was somewhat exaggerated in the hope of getting a compensation from us, but at the back of it there was genuine emotion.