HUMAN BLOODHOUNDS.

Auckland Star, Volume L, Issue 200, 23 August 1919, Page 19

HUMAN BLOODHOUNDS.

AUSTRALIA'S BLACK TRACKERS. In the police stations of th e Australian outlauds black trackers are empioved to run down thieves and other criminals. According to Mr. Norman Duncan, the author of -Australian Byways," it is largely ou account of these black fellows, that the fear of the law remains alive in the more remote parts of the country. The best trackers arc brought straight from liie bush from the ha'f-suvag.e tribes on tho other side of the frontiers—arriving young, fresh, eager, proud of the distinction and savagely delighted in the prospects of manhunting. <">ne tracker led bis trouper a remarkable chase arter a stealer who had escaped from jrnoj in New South Wales to the north-western wilds. They had Mv real rest night or day. It was a country of wild and stony ground that took mi-agrc impressions of the passage of a traveller, and confusing rnins foil. Occasionally the tracker was almost on the heels of the fugitive. At times ho lagged. Rallied, a week and more behind. For days in the ranjres Hie ground was so difllcult for the tracker that he could not make a mile an hour. When the tracks were lost the blacK fellow ran the country like a bloodhound until he had picked them up. Once the fugitive himself came to desperate straits ror water: the tracker made out that he was lost and exhausted, that he had stumbled, fallen, and scraped moist mud from a dried-np spring with which to rub himself and coo! his skin in that extremity of thirst and weariness. At tlie end of a chase of 50 days, during which the black fellow bad tracked the man every yard of tho way, they captured the fugitive.