HUMAN BLOODHOUNDS.

Taranaki Daily News, 13 September 1919, Page 12

HUMAN BLOODHOUNDS.

AUSTRALIA'S BLACK TRACKERS. In the police stations of the Australian outlands black trackers are employed to run down thieves and other criminals. According to Mr. Norman Duncan, the author of Australian Byways, it is largely on account of these black fellows that the fear of the law remains alive in the more remote parts of the country. The best trackers are brought straight from the bush from the half-savage tribes on the other side of the frontiers '—arriving young, fresh, eager, proud of the distinction and savagely delighted in the prospects of man-hunting. One tracker led his trooper a remarkable chaße after a horse stealer who hod escaped from gaol in New South Wales to the north-western wilds. They had no real rest night or day. It was a country of wild and stony ground that took meagre impressions of the passage of a traveller, and confusing rains fell. Occasionally the tracker was almost on the heels of the fugitive. At times he lagged, baffled, a week and more behind. For days in the ranges the ground was so difficult 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 lie had picked them up. Once the fugitive himself came to desperate straits for water; the tracker made out that he was lost and exhausted, that he had stumbled, fallen, and sensed moist mud from a dried-up spring with which to rub himself and cool his skin in that extremity of thirst and weariness. At the end of a chase of 50 days, during which the black fellow had tracked the man every yard of the way, they captured the fugitive.