They were going up the creek, not down. They knew that the creek ran into the Kakadua at Jerry’s Town that way, and, of course, as explorers, they wanted to go where they had not been before. So they shipped their stores, and untied the painter—it was twisted round an old gum tree on the creek-side—and pushed off from the bank, and began to try to pull up stream. But they could not row nearly so well as they could ride, and at first they made the cot spin round like a cockchafer on a pin. They were sharp little fellows, however, and soon got under way, only catching crabs when they tried to feather.
By the time they got abreast of Three-Mile Flat, though, their arms ached; and Harry stopped pulling, as he made out, to tell Donald again about Warrigal, and Donald stopped pulling, as _he_ made out, to listen to Harry, although he knew the story by heart. Then they gave a spurt, and then they stopped pulling again, and hoisted their blanket on one oar, and tried to steer with the other; but it was a long time before they could manage this properly. The sail was for ever flapping against the mast—taken aback, as the sailors say—or else the cot was poking her nose into the tea-tree scrub on one side of the creek or the other, as if she wanted to get out of the hot sunlight into the moist shade. Still, it would have been very pleasant, if there had not been quite so many mosquitoes; but they hummed over the water in restless clouds like fountain-spray. However there were native vines, with grapes like yellow currants, twining round the lanky tea trees and lacing them together; and the bell-birds kept on dropping down into the scrub, and flying up into the gum trees, and calling _ting-ting_, _ting-ting_. It sounded like a dinner-bell, and the boys determined to take an early dinner. They ate up almost all their damper, and all their sardines, and picked their dessert off the wild vines.
On they went again; but they had not gone far before they came to what is called in Australia a “chain of ponds.” The creek had partly dried up, and they had to pull and push the cot from one pond to another. This was hard work, and not very pleasant work either, for the sand-flies got into the corners of their eyes as if they wanted to give them the blight, and the leeches crawled up their trousers and turned their white socks red with blood. Their heads throbbed so that they could hardly bear to hear the locusts—thousands of them—clattering on the trees like iron-ship wrights hammering, and they felt quite angry when the long-tailed, brown coach-whip bird flew by, making a noise just like a slavedriver cracking his lash. At last, however, they got into clear water again—clear except for the grey snags and sawyers—and paddled lazily along; listening to the twittering wood-swallows as they dipped their blue wings into the water, and the great, black, sharp-winged swifts screaming for joy as they tacked high overhead. Harry and Donald could not help wishing that the cot (which they had christened the _Endeavour_, in honour of Captain Cook) would dart along of herself like the swifts.