Its suspirations seem
sighs, and its presence melancholy proof of the reality of its
bereavement.
For some time after birth the young is carried under one or other of the
flippers, the dam hugging it affectionately to her side.
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.
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