splashing and "shooing" and the complications of the weir, we had had
the mortification of seeing hosts escape.

Then George changed his tactics. Abandoning his faith in the weir, he
converted it into what he called, in his enthusiastic excitement, "a
bed." He laid branches of the weir so that the leaves and twigs
interlaced and crossed, buttressing the structure with another row of
palisades. His theory was that the fish, as the water became shallower,
would cease their efforts to wriggle through, and, leaping high, would
land on the bed and be easily captured. No preliminary shouting and
splashing affected the solidity of that determined array. Mullet knew all
about blackfellows' weirs and their beds. Some slid through. Many leaped,
and, curving gracefully in the air, struck the "bed" at such an angle
that it offered no more resistance to them than a sheet of damp
tissue-paper. They sniggered as they went through it, and splashed wildly
to the sea. They were grand fish--undaunted, afraid of no man or his
paltry obstacles to liberty, up to every cunning manoeuvre.

Were we to be beaten by a lot of silly, slippery fish in a shallow
stream? Never! January's unsheltered sun played upon my tanned, wet, and
shameless back; the salt sweat coursed down my shoulders and dripped from
my face. The scrub fowl babbled and chuckled, cockatoos jeered from the
topmost branches of giant milkwood trees and nodded with yellow crests
grave approval of the deeds of the besieged; fleet white pigeons flew
from a banquet of blue fruits to a diet of crude seeds, and not a single
one of the canons of the gentle art of fishing but was scandalously
violated. It was a coarse and unmanly encounter--the wit, strategy,
finesse, and boldness of fish pitted against the empty noise and bluster
of inferior man and the flimsiness of his despicable barriers.