Man has to be fed, and therefore game has to be shot and fish has to be caught. The animal life of Australia had little rest when the blacks roamed over the country, but it has still less, now that the white man is in possession. The kangaroo hunt varies from a necessary slaughter of the blue and red kangaroos of the plains, to an exciting run and desperate fight for life at the finish of it, when the game is the big dark forester living in the timber belts that line most of the Australian streams. The battue of kangaroos is often rendered imperative by the rapid increase of the marsupials after the disappearance of their old enemies, the aborigines and the dingo. As regards the kangaroo, matters are apt to become very serious for the grazier. On an average, these animals consume as much grass as a sheep, and where a few score originally existed there soon come to be a thousand. In some places they have threatened to jostle the sheep and his master out of the land; and, in consequence, energetic and costly steps have to be taken to reduce their numbers. In a battue of this description a whole neighbourhood joins. It may seem hard that this aboriginal should be ruthlessly destroyed in favour of the sheep, because he has no wool; but then, if he could reflect, he would see that, fed and cared for as the merino is, yet his fate would usually be the butcher at last. The battue is not so welcome to the sportsman as the chase of the forester. The 'old man,' when finally run down, backs like a stag into a convenient corner, perhaps the hollow of a great gum-tree, the trunk of which has been partly burned away with a bush fire, and there, with a calm no-surrender expression in his mute face, and just the merest blaze in the big deer-like eyes, waits for the enemy like the splendidly resolute old veteran he is. If he can find a water-pool or river in which to 'stick up,' so much the better for him and the worse for those who attack him. He wades in until only his nervous fore-arms and head are above water, and in this position can keep even a half-dozen dogs from coming to quarters. The forester, standing six feet high, has the advantage over the dogs that, while he stands upon his hind-legs, they must swim.