d not hope to gain their friendship
we were resolved to brook no longer the sight of their burning brands and
other gestures of hostility; still less were we inclined to give
tomahawks on demand, since our presents had not been received with that
sense of obligation which might have been shown by any class of human
beings, however savage. I therefore now determined to avoid the natives
wherever I could and, if they came near the party, to encourage their
approach as little as possible.

THEIR HABITS.

August 6.

We continued along our old route, but at about seven miles we cut off a
considerable angle in that point of it where we formerly saw the Puppy
tribe, and were thus enabled to pass two miles beyond our former ground,
and to pitch our tents near the river. At this encampment we perceived
smoke arising from the same native bivouac which I visited in my journey
on horseback before the party left Fort Bourke. From this smoke and other
circumstances it would appear that some of the tribes on the Darling are
not migratory, but remain, in part at least, the gins and children
possibly, at some particular portion of the river. This seems probable
too, considering how much better they must thus become acquainted with
the haunts of the fishes which are here their chief food. The ground we
now occupied was upon the whole the best piece of country, in point of
soil, that I had seen upon the Darling. Dunlop's range was just behind,
an extremity of it extending to the river, at three miles west from our
camp. Three miles further eastward our old route was crossed by a hollow
which appeared to be the outlet of an extensive watercourse coming from
the south-east, along the base of Dunlop's range, or the low country
between it and D'Urban's group. We had scarcely started this morning when
the dogs killed another emu, and in the course of the day we passed and
recognised the spot where our first emu was killed. Thus in one day on
our outward journey we had traversed the country in which all the emus we
had ever killed on the Darling, three in number, had been found.

The hill which we crossed in our route consisted of a different sort of
rock from any of those that we had seen further down the Darling, being a
splintery quartz in which the grains of sand or quartz are firmly
embedded in the siliceous cement.

HINTS TO AUSTRALIAN SPORTSMEN.

August 7.

The morning was calm and sultry but we continued the homeward route along