George chanted the legend of Mooragetaghee, the Echidna (or Porkypine to ignoramuses):
Burragin ga burragin
Widji getigheenya Mooragetaghee, Mooragetaghee,
Wudda baddah, wudda, baddah, wudda baddah . . .
Prindy joined in with a version of his own, despite the scolding of his mother and the mockery of his aunt Queeny:
Ol’ Mooragetaghee, minji long o’ water he.
Brolga come an’ up him bum shove him spear . . . he he!
Proper minji bugger dat one Mooragetaghee — ee-ee!
The legend told of how Mooragetaghee was camped on a waterhole in dry country, when along came the Brolga People, very thirsty. Too mean to share the water, Mooragetaghee got on top of the hole and covered himself with mud, to make it look as if the hole were dry. The Brolgas said, ‘There may be water down below. Let’s try with our spears.’ They all dug their spears into Mooragetaghee, who leapt out and fled, with the spears still sticking in him. He was crying to himself about the spears, when Wanjin the Dingo came along and offered to pull them out. But Mooragetaghee didn’t like the way Wanjin was slobbering, and said, ‘No thank you. I’d rather have spears in my back than myself in your belly.’ Thereupon he dug himself into the ground; and the spears grew into the quills his descendants carry to this day. Likewise to this day do porkypines dig themselves in with amazing facility to avoid others creatures. Mt Mooragetaghee, or Finish, is where the Old Porkypine dug himself in for the last time, piling up a great heap of dirt and rock to mark the spot.
All that day they had glimpses of the fabulous mountain, seeming by their round-about-going to get no nearer, so that Queeny, toiling on stump and crutch, trying not to leave tracks, in extremes of thirst and fatigue and complicated belief, got the idea that she was being led a dance by what she called no-goot blackfeller bijnitch, and yelled about it. Through Prindy, King George replied that those who didn’t like it could go back. She tried an old blackfellow trick of shortening hard travel by Singing the destination nearer, but did it to the tune of Jesus Loves Me and in Jesus’ name: ‘Jesus bring him dat place close, ’fore I knock-up, Jesus, please . . .’ Nell might have been in it too, the way her lips moved. George whooped with merriment in telling Prindy how much notice that Old Mooragetaghee was going to take of Jesus Bijnitch.
Still, it was as if by magic of some sort that, in the vermilion and silver evening, from seeming to have lost Mooragetaghee altogether since the Sun went down behind a high intervening ridge, they topped the ridge to find him right before them, no more just a bit of peeping blue, but a mass, deep green and silver, very much like the bulk of a sleeping giant animal. The magic of it, like an emanation of its moon-silvered scales of rock, warm and iridescent, enveloped them as they went on down to the dark foot of it, causing Queeny to cry out that she wasn’t going any closer. But George had been telling Prindy of the sweet sweet water they would find tumbling from those rocks. She stopped only long enough to utter a fervent prayer: ‘You look out me, Jesus . . . I you goot girl, Queeny.’
The Shade of Mooragetaghee led them straight to water, to a winking pool fed by a streamlet tinkling out of granite that seemed to glow. Sweet sweet water! They sank sighing onto silky couch-grown sand. It was George said they were under the patronage of the Old One, directed by another, the Master, at the moment staring out of one red eye, as if he, Tchamala, were leaning over the silver wall of rock towering above them. Queeny must have her say, exhausted or not: ‘Don’ you believe dat, boy. Dat one heye belong Bible God. He lookin’ out for you and me and my tchister . . . but no-more lookin’ out rubbitch blackfeller.’
‘Dis blackfeller country,’ said George to Prindy. ‘Too much moah for whiteman dis place. Anybody talk whitefeller way here get sick.’
‘Yuuuurh!’ commented Queeny, but nevertheless shut up.
According to knowledgeable whitemen, the red eye would be the planet Mars. George, the ignorant blackman, called up to it in lingo, while the others stared. Surely the eye winked in reply! George told Prindy that he had informed the Master that they would be climbing to the top tomorrow and would be wanting a couple of rock wallabies.
‘You no goin’ up dere,’ said Nell to Prindy. He ignored her.
That the place abounded with brush-tails was made evident when they had their fire going and the creatures, bold in their magical advantage over common intruders, came leaping down over the rocks to take a look, not to be seen, since they were silver-grey like the rocks themselves, but to be heard, bounding, slithering, sending the small stones scattering. ‘Cheeky bugger,’ said George to Prindy. ‘He don’ savvy me-two-feller Tchineke Man.’
‘My boy not Tchineke Man,’ snapped Nell.
George chanted a bit of Snake Man stuff; and Prindy echoed him.
Poor Mungus, tied up, was squeaking with excitement, and not only because of the wallabies. There was scuffling and squeaking and rustling all around them. A particular sound, a sort of sighing and clicking, made, so George said, by porkypines. They would leave them till tomorrow night, when they would have a rock oven prepared for cooking them: ‘Aw mek’m spit come out!’
For supper they had bread and beef and tea. Then they settled down to sleep — while smirking Igulgul sailed towards the wall of rock behind which the Eye of Tchamala had vanished. Igulgul had just taken his last look and slipped behind the mountain, leaving a weirdly glowing darkening world behind, when Prindy began to sing La Golondrina. It was rather different from any other of these odd outburstings of his spirit, probably by reason of the conditions of the moment. Queeny and Nell reached for each other and lay tense while it lasted; and Mungus lifted up his head and sobbed quietly in chorus. A hush fell even on the scuffling creatures. Only George seemed to be undisturbed.
George and Prindy were up at dawn. The women just took a quick look at things in the ruddy twilight, then buried their heads in their sacking bedding. Drinking tea with bread and beef, George remarked on the abundance of vegetable food thereabouts, yams amongst the rocks, some tall palms with hearts the length of your arm, cycad nuts for making nut-bread; stuff for women to collect, unless they wanted the men who hunted meat for them to do what Gurrawirrilyuma, the Butcher Bird, did to his lazy-bone mob. No response from the sacking. But when George said that they would be off up the mountain, Nell sat up, saying sharply, ‘You stop here, boy!’
Prindy looked at George, who looked aloft, saying that he was an old and broken-winded man who might die up there; and who then would lead the party to the Beatrice; and if he didn’t go up, how were they to know who might not be following them or plotting to waylay them? Then turning his back completely, as a brother should when forced to address his sister directly, growled, ‘Spone you no more let him my boy do it properly way long o’ him huncle . . . den, all right, I leave him you . . . bugger you . . . you look out yo’self!’
Nell was silent, George waited a moment, then reached for his hunting gear leaning against a tree, and said to Prindy, ‘All right, Kokanjinni . . . you come.’ Prindy leapt to his own small weapons.
The only one to express any more concern about their going was Mungus, still tied up, and sobbing broken-hearted. As George had said, if he went with them he would run straight into the jaws of a python.
Prindy would have gone up over those shiny grey rocks like the brush-tails who kept them polished, and indeed did so till the waste of energy dawned on him after several trips back to sit with George while he recovered breath or to take his gear while he scrambled up pinches needing the strength of both his old hands. There was no sign of the riotous life of the night before. The wallabies would be in their nests asleep now, in nooks and crannies in sheer rock faces inaccessible even to the rock pythons, who would have to depend on the wind spirits to locate the sleepy beasts for them so that they might lie in wait when they emerged heavy with sleep in the cool of the afternoon.
It all went back to the magic dispensed by Tchamala and Mooragetaghee. The pythons were keeping out
of sight, too, not because they were sleepy, their kind getting that way only after a huge meal, but from fear of Old Watagarra, the Wedge-tail, sailing up there in the violet, so easily, so peacefully and minding his own business, it would seem but all ready to drop out of the sky like a stone and strike dead with a blow of his mighty shoulder anything worth his while that moved. One thing did move, disturbed by the intruders, that must have filled the eagle with chagrin enough to come down to take it out on them, only for their spears. It was a large python, the best of twenty feet in length, with a couple of bulges in its middle that wouldn’t have gone into a bran-sack. As it went sliding awkwardly down a steep slope of rock, George called to it, ‘No-more fright, Jullungall . . . me-two-feller Tchineke Man!’ The huge snake, with blue tongue flickering to pick up the sound, looked back as if in acknowledgement, then slid over the lip of the rock, the last of him running in a cleft between two rocks, like a sluggish stream of oil-streaked water, rainbow-hewed in the blaze of the Sun. George remarked, ‘Spone dat old feller Watagarra up top dere been gitchim dis one, he can call up all-lot him mate, mek him properly beeeg tucker.’
It was a good thousand feet to the top. At last there they were, with the Wind Spirits jostling them and whispering around them, and with all the world laid out before them, northwest, southeast, as a blackfellow counts, needing but two points to his compass, those from which blow the prevailing winds. Northwest a serpentine silver ribbon wound through emerald vegetation to the silver sea that stretched away to China. That was what the kuttabah called the Finish River, but was really the track made by Mooragetaghee when he came up from that hole he’d made when the Brolgas had filled him with spears. The hole was that bay of mud where they had been shipwrecked. So George informed Prindy as they looked around the world. Away west-west of North lay their ultimate destination, the Alice River Country. East-east of South was a shimmer of silver below the blazing blue, which was reflexion of the waters of Port Palmeston. South-south-south of East they followed a line of dust that obliterated the horizon that was the continent. George reckoned the dust was raised by the whitemen building the new road. As they watched they saw a pillar of the dust rising like a willy-willy, but was not made by frolicsome spirits of Tchamala’s mob, as true willy-willies are, instead by whitemen, as evidence the faint poom! they soon heard from it. ‘Dynamite,’ said George. ‘Whitefeller he don’ like nutching in way. He got ’o blow-him-up.’ Prindy asked could the kuttabah blow up Mooragetaghee. ‘Can’t do dat,’ said George. ‘Too-much moah, dis place. Whitefeller fright’. Das wha’ for he call-yim Finish, I reckon.’
George listened to the Wind Spirits, and said they told him no one was following them, but they got to look out more far dat-a-way — he indicated due South: ‘Might be trouble sumpin’ . . . we got ’o look out. Come on, we go now. Wind him tell him which way we gitchim brush-tail.’
Ostensibly under occult direction then, George found the spot, one so obvious that anyone less conversant with the Laws of Nature might well have done it alone. It was about halfway down. Two huge bulbous boulders, joined to look like a giant’s buttocks, lay beneath a sheer wall in which, some fifteen feet above the gluteal humps, just a nice hop-up for a rock wallaby, was a ledge so well polished as to betray for certainty the cubby holes behind it. Likewise was the giant’s posterior polished. As it was impossible from below to see anything behind the ledge, so was it from above to see anything below that didn’t stand well clear of the base of the humps. Not that that would trouble a brush-tail, which dropping down into a dangerous situation, could as easily bounce up out of it. Hence the need for magical assistance. The next step was to sit under cover and out of range of super-sharp hearing and scenting, Singing Marmaroo out to do the silly things he must to die on the end of a spear.
Blue shadow rolled down the mountainside, to fill the gully below and rise up to the further ridge. The sou’easter swept up against it, as wind over contrary tide, tossing the grass and scrub and a cloud of finches, and bringing with it the hint of smoke from the camp below. Everything to suit the strategy. Now was the time, said George, in response to windy advice giving in little moans and whines and whispers. They came out crawling to the base of the boulders, there to part, Prindy to go on hugging the rock to the windward side, George to stay. George had said that when the wallabies dropped down they would turn windward because of the smell of smoke and would pick up that of Prindy, and go warily to that side to take a look. They wouldn’t be able to see him, but would know he was there. Bold as they were, one would try jumping over him to the rock beyond. He was to be ready with his spear to hit it in the belly as it went. No matter if he missed. The others would come the other way, and must land on a great flat slab where they would be sitting targets.
Thus it turned out. Soon half a dozen blackish heads were seen peeping down. Then as many furry forms flying through the air. A few minutes of tense waiting. Then a whitish belly flying over Prindy — phwit! The spear flew, struck with an audible thud. The little grey beast, woolly with winter coat, landed on a big sloping rock, tangled with the protruding spear, fell, to go skidding and clattering out of sight. Prindy stood. Then a call: ‘Tu!’ He ran out, saw George going towards a thrashing bundle on the slab on his side, and other grey forms high-leaping far away. Then he ran round the other side of the big sloping rock. There lay the other victim of magic and primitive coordination of human hand and eye, killed by itself, in fact, through falling on the small spear that could have done little more with a boy’s strength behind it than penetrate its hide, so that it was driven clean through. The stricken little animal lay on its side, with stream of blood pouring from the creamy belly, quivering, blue tongue licking at the sand. It raised its head slightly, to regard the boy with great dark eyes that seemed full of astonishment at his nearness. A tiny struggle. Then the eyes glazed, the head fell back. ‘Poor bugger,’ murmured the hunter, and bent and heaved it up, hooked an arm under its haunches, and with the head dragging on the ground, went back round the rock. George, looking, cried, ‘Yakkarai . . . number-one strong womera-man!’
With string torn from a little hibiscus bush they tied each of their victims, hind foot to tail tip, thus making a loop to go over the shoulder. Then they went down. The Sun was down, Igulgul halfway up the sky, floating like a silver boat in a sea of vermilion. Butcher birds were singing at the camp for their expected breakfast. The air was sweet with the savour of roasting yams. Nell greeted the hunters with a tirade of abuse that surely expressed the anxiety she had been feeling for one of them, to be silenced by that one himself, flinging his share of the spoils at her feet, sayings ‘Liver . . . you wan’ him, eh, Mumma?’
They had grilled liver and roast yams to sustain them till the anticipated feast of porkypines became a reality.
Preparation for the feast had to be made with the firing of a ground oven, and for the hunting with the gathering of small termites’ citadels and scraps of grub-ridden wood. These latter were scattered in a cleared space just off rocks where judging by last night’s sounds echidnas abounded. Saplings were also cut for what were called crow-bars, which would be the only weapons used. It was truly night by the time everything was ready, and the porkypines on the move again. Then the entire party went to the clearing, to squat on the edge remote from the rocks. George, Prindy, and Nell had crow-bars. Queeny sat with Mungus on a lead. All that was required of them was to step lightly.
The echidna, invulnerable to all predators but man, evidently lives in constant fear of his single enemy, listening always for his tread, upon hearing which he freezes into what looks and feels like a lump of stone — if you’re smart enough to get to feel him before he does that disappearing trick of his. He never moves in the open if he can help it except where the earth is soft and he can utilise his almost magic facility for digging himself into it. Digging under himself like a machine and with the strength of a machine, he can vanish before one’s eyes and make a day’s work for anyone fool enough to let things
go to such a pass that he has to be dug out. Only a man can dig him out. Only on account of a man will he dig himself in. Only a man knows that his is the sweetest of all meats — a man and those creatures wise enough to wait on men’s scraps, like those butcher birds clucking in anticipation up in the trees.
It wasn’t long before the long snouts in amongst the rocks picked up the scents of termites and wood-grubs, and the weird sighings and clickings were converging on the little clearing. Then one appeared, an old-man who’d take up the best part of the space of a 70-pound sugar-sack, looking like a round antbed, black as shadow, save for a glint struck by the moonlight from his myriad little flat-lain spines. He waited, snuffling and clicking, full of suspicion for the moment. Mungus, in Queeny’s powerful grip, nearly had a fit with stifled excitement. One yap escaped him, but apparently made no difference to the old fellow, who came on, shuffle-snuffle, following his nose. It must have been his assault on the bait that brought the others, the sound of his crunching, the odour of those delicacies that, although surrounded by them in profusion, they were limited in partaking of because of their suspicion of open spaces. There were seven of them on the pile when George gave the sign to get ready.
Poor Fellow My Country Page 73
