As the calf grows, it leaves its mother’s embrace, but swims close beside, following with automatic precision every twist and lurch of her body, its own helplessness and its implicit faith in the wisdom and protective influence of its parent being exemplified in every movement.

Blacks harpoon dugong as they do turtle, but the sport demands greater patience and dexterity, for the dugong is a wary animal and shy, to be approached only with the exercise of artful caution.  An inadvertent splash of the paddle or a miss with the harpoon, and the game is away with a torpedo-like swirl.  To be successful in the sport the black must be familiar with the life-history of the creature to a certain extent—­understanding its peregrinations and the reason for them—­the strength and trend of currents and the locality of favourite feeding-grounds.  Fragments of floating grass sometimes tell where the animal is feeding.  An oily appearance on the surface of the sea shows its course, and if the wind sits in the right quarter the keen-scented black detects its presence when the animal has risen to breathe at a point invisible to him.  He must know also of the affection of the female for her calf, and be prepared to play upon it implacably.  In some localities the blacks were wont to manufacture nets for the capture of dugong, and nets are still employed by them under the direction of white men; for the flesh of the dugong is worthily esteemed, and oil from the blubber—­sweet, and limpid as distilled water—­is said to possess qualities far superior to that obtained from the decaying livers of cod fish in the restoration of health and vigour to constitutions enfeebled and wasted by disease,

Using a barbless point attached to a long and strong line, and fitted into a socket in the heavy end of the harpoon shaft, the black waits and watches.  With the utmost caution and in absolute silence he follows in his canoe the dugong as it feeds, and strikes as it rises to breathe.  A mad splash, a wild rush!  The canoe bounces over the water as the line tightens.  Its occupant sits back and steers with flippers of bark, until as the game weakens he is able to approach and plunge another harpoon into it.  Sometimes the end of the line is made fast to a buoy of light wood which the creature tows until exhausted.

So contractible and tough is the skin, that once the point of the harpoon is embedded in it, nothing but a strong and direct tug will release it.  Some blacks substitute for the barbless point four pieces of thin fencing wire—­each about 4 inches long, bound tightly together at one end, the loose ends being sharpened and slightly diverged.  This is fastened to the line and inserted in the socket of the haft, and when it hits it holds to the death, though the animal may weigh three-quarters of a ton.

It is stated that the blacks towards Cape York having secured the animal with a line attached to a dart insufficient in length to penetrate the hide and the true skin, seize it by the nose, and plug the nostrils with their fingers until it drowns.  Here, too, the natives have discovered that the nose is the vulnerable part of the dugong, and having first harpooned it in any part of the body, await an opportunity of spearing it there, with almost invariably speedy fatal effects.