yed his meal.

About a year or so later I was given another instance of the "cuteness"
of the wicked "goanner." My sister (aged twelve) and myself (two years
younger) were fishing with bamboo rods for mullet. We were standing, one
on each side, of the rocky edges of a tiny little bay on the coast near
Port Macquarie (New South Wales). The background was a short, steep
beach of soft, snow-white sand, fringed at the high-water margin with a
dense jungle of wild apple and pandanus-trees.

The mullet bit freely, and as we swung the gleaming, bright-silvered
fish out of the water on to the rocks on which we stood, we threw them
up on to the beach, and left them to kick about and coat themselves with
the clean, white sand--which they did in such an artistic manner that
one would imagine they considered it egg and breadcrumb, and were
preparing themselves to fulfil their ultimate and proper use to the
_genus homo_.

My sister had caught seven and I five, when, the sun being amidships, we
decided to boil the billy of tea and get something to eat; young mullet,
roasted on a glowing fire of honeysuckle cobs were, we knew, very nice.
So, laying down our rods on the rocks, we walked up to the beach--just
in time to see two "goanners"--one of them with a wriggling mullet in
his mouth--scamper off into the bush.

A careful search revealed the harrowing fact that nine of the twelve
fish were missing, and the multitudinous criss-cross tracks on the sand
showed the cause of their disappearance. My sister sat down on a hollow
log and wept, out of sheer vexation of spirit, while I lit a fire to
boil the billy and grill the three remaining mullet. Then after we had
eaten the fish and drank some tea, we concocted a plan of deadly
revenge. We took four large bream-hooks, bent them on to a piece of
fishing-line, baited each hook with a good-sized piece of octopus (our
mullet bait), and suspended the line between two saplings, about three
inches above the leaf-strewn ground. Then, feeling confident of the
success of our murderous device, we finished the billy of tea and went
back to our fishing. We caught a couple of dozen or more of fine mullet,
each one weighing not less than 1-1/2 lbs.; and then the incoming tide
with its sweeping seas drove us from the ledge of rocks to the beach,
where we changed our bamboo rods for hand-lines with sinkers, and flung
them, baited with chunks of mullet, out into the breaking surf for
sea-bream. By four