“Poked in a bit too close for our fancy while we were at supper,” he explained, “so we slung sticks at him to turn him back to the mob, and the next minute was making for trees, but as there was only saplings handy, it would have been a bit awkward for the heavy weights if there hadn’t have been enough of us to divide his attentions up a bit.” (Dan was a good six feet, and well set up at that.) “Climbing saplings to get away from a stag isn’t much of a game,” he added, with a reminiscent chuckle; “they’re too good at the bending trick.  The farther up the sapling you climb, the nearer you get to the ground.”

Then he favoured us with one of his word-pictures:  “There was the sapling bending like a weeping willow,” he said, “and there was the stag underneath it, looking up at me and asking if he could do anything for me, taking a poke at me boot now and then, just to show nothing would be no bother, and there was me, hanging on to the sapling, and leaning lovingly over him, telling him not to go hanging round, tiring himself out on my account; and there was the other chaps—­all light weights—­laughing fit to split, safe in their saplings.  ’Twasn’t as funny as it looked, though,” he assured us, finding us unsympathetic, “and nobody was exactly sorry when one of the lads on duty came along to hear the fun, and stock-whipped the old poker back to the mob.”

The Maluka and the Dandy soon proved it was nothing to be “treed.”  “Happens every time a beast’s hauled out of a bog, from all accounts, that being the only thanks you get for hauling ’em out of the mess.”  Then Dan varied the recital with an account of a chap getting skied once who forgot to choose a tree before beginning the hauling business, and immediately after froze us into horror again with the details of two chaps “lying against an old rotten log with a mob of a thousand going over ’em “; and we were not surprised to hear that when they felt well enough to sit up they hadn’t enough arithmetic left between ’em to count their bruises.

After an evening of ghost stories, a creaking door is enough to set teeth chattering; and after an evening of cattle-yarns, told in a cattle camp, a snapping twig is enough to set hair lifting; and just as the most fitting place for ghost stories is an old ruined castle, full of eerie noises, so there is no place more suited to cattle-camp yarns than a cattle camp.  They need the reality of the camp-fire, the litter of camp baggage, the rumbling mob of shadowy cattle near at hand, and the possibilities of the near future—­possibilities brought home by the sight of tethered horses standing saddled and bridled ready “in case of accidents.”

Fit surroundings add intensity to all tales, just as it added intensity to my feelings when Dan advised the Maluka to swing our net near a low-branched tree, pointing out that it would “come in handy for the missus if she needed it in a hurry.”

I favoured climbing the tree at once, and spending the night in it, but the men-folk assuring me that I would be “bound to hear them coming,” I turned in, sure only of one thing, that death may come to the bush-folk in any form but ennui.  Yet so adaptable are we bush-folk to circumstances that most of that night was oblivion.