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I also made the fatal mistake of trying to bring my offspring up differently from the other savage children. But I must relate here an incident that happened on our journey north. Yamba came to me one day positively quivering with excitement and terror, and said she had found some strange tracks, apparently of some enormous beast a monster so fearful as to be quite beyond her knowledge.
I also wanted to make the acquaintance of the bats or flying foxes I had seen rising in clouds every evening at sunset. I required the skins of these curious creatures for sandals. This would perhaps be a year after my advent amongst the blacks. As usual, Yamba was my only companion, and we soon reached a likely island.
Had I only left my faithful natives behind all might have been well. Yamba and I kept the canoe well ahead, and we reached the neighbourhood of the ship first. As we approached, the excitement of the girls was painful to witness.
In all my wanderings amongst the blacks I never came across anything that interested them so much as a whale. Soon after the loss of the boat, Yamba made me a small bark canoe about fifteen feet long, but not more than fourteen inches wide, and in this we undertook various little excursions together to the various islands that studded the bay.
Yamba instantly agreed to accompany me, and a few weeks after the loss of the girls we started out once more on our wanderings, accompanied by my ever faithful dog. Bruno also missed his young mistresses. He would moan and cry pitifully, and run aimlessly up and down the beach looking out to sea. Ah! had I only taken Bruno on that fatal day, he would not have let my dear ones drown!
They even offered Yamba a passage along with me; but, to my amazement and bitter disappointment, she said she did not wish to go with them. She trembled as though with fear. She was afraid that when once we were on board, the Malays would kill me and keep her.
It was late in the afternoon when she took her departure; and I lay there hour after hour, sometimes frantically delirious, and at others in a state of semi-consciousness, fancying she was by my side with shells brimming over with delicious water. I would rouse myself with a start from time to time, but, alas! my Yamba was not near me.
But you, my readers, shall judge of my feelings. We landed on an island at the mouth of the gulf, and Yamba made smoke- signals to her friends on the mainland, telling them of our return. We resolved it would never do to confess we had been driven back.
The phenomenon was evidently known to Yamba, and she went on to explain that these creatures were migrating from the lowlands to the mountains, knowing by instinct that the season of the great floods was at hand. That weird and extraordinary sight will live in my memory for ever.
But being totally unused to carrying anything but their own weapons, they proved deplorably inefficient as porters, and after a time, so intolerable to them did the labour become, the work of carrying the girls devolved upon Yamba and myself. Gladys, the younger girl, suffered most, but both were weak and footsore and generally incapable of much exertion.
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