Atondido Stories
dead. He saw her heart move and cry again "Bougoodoogahdah"
and as it cried, out came a little bird from it. This little bird runs
on the moorillahs and calls at night "Bougoodoogahdah." All day
it stays in one place, and only at night comes out. It is a little
greyish bird, something like a weedah. The blacks call it a rain-
maker, for if any one steals its eggs it cries out incessantly
"Bougoodoogahdah" until in answer to its call the rain falls. And
when the country is stricken with a drought, the blacks look for
one of these little birds, and finding it, chase it, until it cries
aloud "Bougoodoogahdah, Bougoodoogahdah" and when they
hear its cry in the daytime they know the rain will soon fall.
As the little bird flew from the heart of the woman, all the dead
dingoes were changed into snakes, many different kinds, all poi-
sonous. The two little dogs were changed into dayall minyah, a
very small kind of carpet snake, non-poisonous, for these two
little dogs had never bitten the blacks as the other dogs had
done. At the points of the Moorillahs where Bougoodoogahdah
and her dingoes used to slay the blacks, are heaps of white
stones, which are supposed to be the fossilised bones of the mas-
sacred men.
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