A Few Years Before I Had Been One
Of The Gazers At The Zoolus, And The Aztecs In London.
Now the
tables were turned upon me, for I was to these people a new and
strange variety of man, and had the honour of affording to them,
in my own person, an attractive exhibition, gratis.
All the men and boys of Aru are expert archers, never stirring
without their bows and arrows. They shoot all sorts of birds, as
well as pigs and kangaroos occasionally, and thus have a
tolerably good supply of meat to eat with their vegetables. The
result of this better living is superior healthiness, well-made
bodies, and generally clear skins. They brought me numbers of
small birds in exchange for beads or tobacco, but mauled them
terribly, notwithstanding my repeated instructions. When they got
a bird alive they would often tie a string to its leg, and keep
it a day or two, till its plumage was so draggled and dirtied as
to be almost worthless. One of the first things I got from there
was a living specimen of the curious and beautiful racquet-tailed
kingfisher. Seeing how much I admired it, they afterwards brought
me several more, which wore all caught before daybreak, sleeping
in cavities of the rocky banks of the stream. My hunters also
shot a few specimens, and almost all of them had the red bill
more or less clogged with mud and earth. This indicates the
habits of the bird, which, though popularly a king-fisher, never
catches fish, but lives on insects and minute shells, which it
picks up in the forest, darting down upon them from its perch on
some low branch.
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