As Soon As
The Moon Rose, I Went With Charley To Bring Him On; But When We Came To
The Place Where They Had Left Him, He Was Gone.
It was impossible even
for Charley to track him in the uncertain moonlight; and, as the night
was very cold and foggy along the flats and hollows of the river, we made
a fire, to wait for daylight.
By a most unfortunate accident, my hat
caught fire, and was consumed in an instant; it was a great loss to me in
such a climate, and under daily exposure to a most powerful sun. I had to
make shift with a small bag made of strong canvass, the long end of which
I turned over my face to shade it. When the sun rose, we resumed our
search, and succeeded in finding the poor beast, after tracking him for
six miles across the country; he had evidently rambled in search of
water, and had generally been attracted by shady hollows, in which any
one would have reasonably expected to find it. He had, however, been
completely unsuccessful; the hollows appeared to have been dry for a very
long time; he travelled tolerably well to our camp, where he was
immediately killed, skinned, quartered, and cut up. His meat was not
quite so flaccid and watery as that of our last bullock; but it was by no
means good. He was an old, and a heavy beast, and the experience we had
of him strongly corroborates my observations, that such beasts can
neither bear the fatigues of a long journey, nor travel with a load,
unless regularly well fed and watered.
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