ng back again, and
leaving no track that the white man can follow. In the scrub the
novelist's heroine gets lost, search fails of result; she wanders here
and there, and finally sinks down exhausted and unconscious, and the
searchers pass within a yard or two of her, not suspecting that she is
near, and by and by some rambler finds her bones and the pathetic diary
which she had scribbled with her failing hand and left behind. Nobody
can find a lost heroine in the scrub but the aboriginal "tracker," and he
will not lend himself to the scheme if it will interfere with the
novelist's plot. The scrub stretches miles and miles in all directions,
and looks like a level roof of bush-tops without a break or a crack in it
--as seamless as a blanket, to all appearance. One might as well walk
under water and hope to guess out a route and stick to it, I should
think. Yet it is claimed that the aboriginal "tracker" was able to hunt
out people lost in the scrub. Also in the "bush"; also in the desert;
and even follow them over patches of bare rocks and over alluvial ground
which had to all appearance been washed clear of footprints.

From reading Australian books and talking with the people, I became
convinced that the aboriginal tracker's performances evince a craft, a
penetration, a luminous sagacity, and a minuteness and accuracy of
observation in the matter of detective-work not found in nearly so
remarkable a degree in any other people, white or colored. In an
official account of the blacks of Australia published by the government
of Victoria, one reads that the aboriginal not only notices the faint
marks left on the bark of a tree by the claws of a climbing opossum, but
knows in some way or other whether the marks were made to-day or
yesterday.

And there is the case, on records where A., a settler, makes a bet with
B., that B. may lose a cow as effectually as he can, and A. will produce
an aboriginal who will find her. B. selects a cow and lets the tracker
see the cow's footprint, then be put under guard. B. then drives the cow
a few miles over a course which drifts in all directions, and frequently
doubles back upon itself; and he selects difficult ground all the time,
and once or twice even drives the cow through herds of other cows, and
mingles her tracks in the wide confusion of theirs. He finally brings
his cow home; the aboriginal is set at liberty, and at once moves around
in a great circle, examining all cow