were in danger of being
wounded or killed, he would change himself into that bird and fly away.

A great wirreenun can substitute one yunbeai for another, as was done
when the opossum disappeared from our district, and the wirreenun,
whose yunbeai it was, sickened and lay ill for months. Two very
powerful wirreenuns gave him a new yunbeai, piggiebillah, the
porcupine. His recovery began at once. The porcupine had been one of
his favourite foods; from the time its spirit was put into him as his
yunbeai, he never touched it.

A wirreenun has the power to conjure up a vision of his particular
yunbeai, which he can make visible to those whom he chooses shall see
it.

The blacks always told me that a very old man on the Narran, dead some
years ago, would show me his yunbeai if I wished; it was Oolah, the
prickly lizard.

One day I went to the camp, saw the old man in his usual airy costume,
only assumed as I came in sight, a tailless shirt. One of the gins said
something to him; he growled an answer; she seemed persuading him to do
something. Presently he moved away to a quite clear spot on the other
side of the fire; he muttered something in a sing-song voice, and
suddenly I saw him beating his head as if in accompaniment to his song,
and then--where it came from I can't say--there beside him was a
lizard. That fragment of a shirt was too transparent to have hidden
that lizard; he could not have had it up his sleeve, because his
sleeves were in shreds. It may have been a pet lizard that he charmed
in from the bush by his song, but I did not see it arrive.

They told me this old man had two yunbeai, the other was a snake. He
often had them in evidence at his camp, and when he died they were seen
beside him; there they remained until he was put into his coffin, then
they disappeared and were never seen again. This man was the greatest
of our local wizards, and I think really the last of the very clever
ones. They say he was an old grey-headed man when Sir Thomas Mitchell
first explored the Narran district in 1845. We always considered him a
centenarian.

It was through him that I heard some of the best of the old legends,
with an interpreter to make good our respective deficiencies in each
other's language.

In the lives of blacks, or rather in their deaths, the Gooweera, or
poison sticks or bones, play a great part.

A Gooweera is a stick about six inches long and half an inch through,
pointed at both ends. This