t take a poisoned bait, and had an unpleasant trick of biting off the
tails of very young calves, especially if the mother was separated with
her calf from a mob of cattle.

At daylight I rose to boil a billy of tea. My feet were icy cold, and
I saw that there had been a black frost in the night I also discovered
that my string of fish for breakfast was gone. I had hung them up to a
low branch not thirty yards from where I had slept. C------'s black
boy told me with a grin that the dogs had taken them, and showed me the
tracks of three or four through the frosty grass. _He_ had slept like a
pig all night, and all the dingoes in Australia would not awaken a black
fellow with a full stomach of beef, damper and tea. C------
laughed at my chagrin, and told me that native dogs, when game is
scarce, will catch fish if they are hungry, and can get nothing else.
He had once seen, he told me, two native dogs acting in a very curious
manner in a waterhole on the Etheridge River. There had been a rather
long drought, and for miles the bed of the river was dry, except for
intermittent waterholes. These were all full of fish, many of which had
died, owing to the water in the shallower pools becoming too hot for
them to exist Dismounting, he laid himself down on the bank, and soon
saw that the dogs were catching fish, which they chased to the edge of
the pool, seized them and carried them up on the sand to devour. They
made a full meal; then the pair trotted across the river bed, and lay
down under a Leichhardt tree to sleep it off. The Etheridge and Gilbert
Rivers aboriginals also assured C------ that their own dogs--bred from
dingoes--were very keen on catching fish, and sometimes were badly
wounded in their mouths by the serrated spur or back fin of catfish.
C------ and his party went off after breakfast, and returned in the
afternoon with a small mob of cattle, and my mates, picking out an
eighteen months' old heifer, shot her, and set to work, and we soon
had the animal skinned, cleaned and hung up, ready for cutting up and
salting early on the following morning. We carefully burnt the offal,
hide and head, on account of the dingoes, and finished up a good day's
work by a necessary bathe in the clear, but too cold water of the creek.
We turned in early, tired out, and scarcely had we rolled ourselves in
our blankets when a dismal howl made us "say things," and in half an
hour all the dingoes in North Queensland seemed to have gat