A KANGAROO-STORY.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.'I SIR,—As any uncommon fact regarding animals seems to find a ready place in your columns, I have thought it worth while to send you an account of a battle I had the rare fortune to witness some years ago between two old men kangaroos, for although this method of settling their differences may possibly be common enough amongst our marsupials, I have known but very few, even amongst those who have spent their whole lives in the bush of Australia, and who have seen kangaroos hundreds of times under ordinary conditions, that have been actual eye-witnesses to a stand-up fight between two of them. On the occasion to which I refer, I was riding along one evening near sundown when the black boy who accompanied me, and who happened to be a few yards ahead of me at the time, suddenly pulled up his horse just as he topped the crest of the ridge we were rising, held up his hand in warning, and then beckoned to me to join him. As we were on a cattle-mustering expedition at the time, I thought he had caught sight of a rowdy mob, but when I had crept quietly up alongside him and could look down into the gully below, I stared in amazement at the scene before me, for there, grouped in a circle of about a hundred yards or so across, stood some fifty or sixty forest kangaroos, every one of them erect and looking on with evident interest at the spectacle of two immense "old men," who, in the middle of the ring, were engaged in deadly combat Clasping in fierce embrace with their short muscular arms, they swayed to and fro in their efforts to force each other to the ground, every now and again dealing ferocious kicks at each other's stomachs with the long knife-like toe of their hind feet, kicks which they avoided with wonderful agility by a sort of back- ward jump without, however, releasing their grip of each other's bodies for a moment. The whole scene, the two combatants with their upright figures gripping and swaying in the centre exactly as two wrestlers might have done, with the ring of erect grey-bodied onlookers, was singularly interesting, and for some ten minutes or more we stood and watched them until a snort from one of our horses gave them the alarm, and they were off in all directions in a. moment. On riding up to examine the spot we found tufts of far and blood-marks upon the grass in several places, and the state of the ground for some yards round about showed very plainly that the struggle had been a fierce one. Neither of the com- batants, however, had been disabled, for they bounded away amongst the others, and we saw them no more.—I am, Sir, itc.,
Westwood, Maryboro', Queensland. R. MAITLAND.
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