FL661399

I shall now give you a
description of their way of living, their subsistence
and the irregularity to which from various circum-
stances, often from want & necessity, they have become
habituated. The country is extremely poor in
its natural [indecipherable] [indecipherable] productions. The
oppossum, the wallabi, the kangeroo & the kangaroo
rat, nearly all very coarse & rarely fat, form their
principal animal food. At the same time they
eat all manner of creeping things, not even the
snake exempted, which they catch with much care
lest he should bite himself & render his flesh
poisonous. When [word crossed out] they can catch fish they
are some what better off. They also eat various
birds. But they being naturally [word crossd out] indolent
and with out any for thought for the morrow,
they often are subject to the most scanty subsistence
[margin: and make no great effort a search for food]
until hunger stimulates them; then, if successful
in their hunting excursion they eat most voraciously,
[word crossed out] often an enormous quantity at once. I may
illustrate this by a occurrence where they give
proof, as indeed often they did, how much they can
devour at once. They one afternoon asked
me whether I would allow them to kill a certain
cow to whom an accident had occurred from which
she was not likely to recover. I[word crossed out] gave
them permission. There were at the utmost
50 Blacks, old & young & the cow weighed
at least from 4-500.
so that from 7-8 thought to have [indecipherable] for every one's share.
The next morning