As our friends are engaged in this painful but necessary toilet of a voyager through the Queensland scrub, a wild turkey comes blundering by in all the glories of her glossy, blue-black feathers and brilliant red and yellow head,—not the _Otis Australasianus_ which is known to southern settlers as a “wild turkey” and is in reality a bustard, but a true scrub turkey (_Telegallus_).
Billy is not long in tracking the footprints of the bird back to its enormous mound nest. For this ingenious feathered biped, like her smaller contemporary the scrub hen (_Megapodius tumulus_), saves herself from the monotonous duty of sitting on her eggs by depositing them in a capital natural incubator, formed of rotting and heated leaves, which she collects into a pile, and arranges so as to do the hatching part of the business for her.
A meal of turkey eggs and roasted “cozzon” berries, whose red clusters are to be seen hanging from parasitic vines upon the great stems around in plentiful profusion, and then the men retire to rest upon their wet blankets, beneath a great ledge of granite, upon whose surface some aboriginal artist has delineated in different colours the admirable representations of immense frogs in various attitudes.
But trouble commences with the morrow; and when old Weevil raises his stiff and patchwork form from the hard couch upon which he has passed the night, he finds Billy, gun in hand, watching something on the dim summit of the cliffs opposite their camp.
“Sh!” observes that individual, without turning his head; “plenty black fellow all about here. D’you see that beggar’s head?”
“Bust ’em!” yawns the old digger, stretching; “they won’t interfere with us. Let’s have tucker, and ‘break camp’ as soon as we can.”
The frugal repast is soon silently completed, but half a mile down the creek, where the aborigines have constructed an ingenious weir, armed with conical baskets in which to catch what fish may pass that way, Billy and his companion find a small army of copper-coloured natives collected on the opposite side of the stream, who wave and beckon to the two travellers to return whence they came. Their gesticulations and fierce yells not having the desired effect, a series of signals are given by them to other natives in ambush on the jungle-fringed precipices that rise with lycopodium-tasselled ledges above the heads of the intruders.