"Merakon!”

Cannibal and Bird Shooter

By Our Thursday Island Correspondent.

“Birds,” the bird of paradise shooter, was up one of his most profitable rivers in Dutch New Guinea, looking for his particular quarry, when he fell in with a certain hard-faced cannibal, who told him of four or five likely places to visit.

As additional proof of his sincerity the native threw up a handful of leaves into the air, to indicate how numerous were the birds in one lo cality.

“Birds” was intrigued. He ques tioned the man over and over again, drew maps in the sand, and put him through the third degree on the sub ject of bird-hunting grounds gener ally.

“Well, now, tell us some more places,” he went on, when the location of sev eral bird haunts had been satisfactorily settled.

“Ain’t that enough?” said the Pap uan.

“No, I want more—I want all I can get.”

The heathen looked a little disgus ted. “Well,” he said, “there’s one other place, called Merakon, where you’ll get more birds than you ever saw be lore.”

Then he vanished into the scrub.

“Now,” said “Birds” to himself, “I mustn’t forget that name. I’ll get a big haul there.”

To every native he met he put the same question: “Where’s Merakon?”

But he always got the same answer.

First a puzzled look, a repetition of the name and, finally, a roar of laughter, when “Birds” explained.

“Birds,” becoming more mystified, made no progress in his quest.

He asked some native women. They merely put their fingers to their lips and looked shocked. At last, one plucked up courage and told that the place he had been recommended to visit was “where the bad men went to when they died.”

In other words the untutored savage had told the hunter to “go to hell!”