The First Voyage

by Allan Baillie

  I look at Brown Moss and we grin at each other like babies for a moment before tackling another. There will be time to mourn for Eagle Eye, but not now.

  The others join us and the rocks sound like a landslide. The Wind holds one hand under her shell so she can catch the liquid. The slimy meat is almost as good as a puddle for a drink, but the liquid is also great, and so I copy her. But Old Tortoise is better than us.

  He starts off like the rest of us but then he leaves the rocks and comes back with a splintered bamboo from the beach. Then he uses that to prise the shells from the rocks and build a small mountain of shells in the water. Everyone follows him then and brings their shells to the beach. We find a flat rock and crack the shells with a heavy stone. The Wind puts one of the open shells on the lips of Waterlily to wake her. Finally we slowly look around.

  There is the rock that we are hitting and parts of the raft washing around in the shallows. There is the boulder in the deep water that wrecked the raft, there is another rock ridge nearby, and there are long grasses whispering behind us. And that is it. And Eagle Eye.

  ‘We’re here,’ says Moonlight with a touch of uncertainty.

  ‘Some of us.’ Old Tortoise is looking at Eagle Eye.

  ‘Yes . . .’ Fast Fish waves his arm around our small group. ‘Yes, this is all of Yam tribe now. Just us.’ He is looking at the body grimly.

  Old Tortoise sees the blackness of his face, glances at Brown Moss and quickly says, ‘We shouldn’t think about that now. We must do things now.’

  Moonlight touches her belly and her face twinges.

  Fast Fish looks at her. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘He is moving . . .’

  He stares at her and then nods, ‘All right, we have to move.’

  First Fast Fish wants to get all the wreckage from the raft and gather it onto the beach. Not only fragments in the shallows, but the pieces on the edges of the waves.

  Burnt Earth shrugs, ‘Maybe he wants to fix it and paddle back to the island.’

  We throw everything on the dry sand, building a pile without knowing why. But Fast Fish takes the bigger pieces from the pile for us to bring when he selects a small dune. Then he and Old Tortoise carry Eagle Eye to the dune, and bamboo pieces are put on Eagle Eye’s body. We start to place small bits of brush onto the bamboos when Moonlight jerks and runs into the long grass. Fast Fish begins to follow her but Brown Moss stops him. She picks up a broken oyster shell and walks after her.

  The Wind looks at me. ‘For cutting the cord from the baby and Moonlight.’

  We stop covering Eagle Eye and listen for sounds in the long grass. For a while, Moonlight seems to be wrestling with a horrible monster in that grass, and Fast Fish starts to move towards her but The Wind stops him.

  Then he sees Old Tortoise smiling and says, ‘You can get a fire going, right?’

  ‘A fire?’

  ‘Yes, a fire.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Right there.’ Fast Fish points near the pile of bamboo.

  Old Tortoise nods and gathers dry grass and sticks around the beach with The Wind helping, but she keeps on looking back to where Moonlight has disappeared.

  Burnt Earth and I place some brush over Eagle Eye’s head together and I guess we think together that he isn’t here now. This is just a dead body. Old Tortoise catches a spark from his sticks in the dry grass. Almost as soon as he blows the smoke and the grass flares into fire, there is a great squall from the long grass where Moonlight went.

  Fast Fish looks at Old Tortoise with panic on his face.

  Old Tortoise smiles at him. ‘It’s all right. Maybe your boy doesn’t like this place.’ He shrugs and continues building his fire.

  Eventually Brown Moss leads Moonlight and her baby out of the long grass. Moonlight shows Fast Fish the baby and he looks stunned, then she takes the baby to the shallows and washes him – no, her. Brown Moss helps Moonlight to clean herself up, and they go to Eagle Eye. No, I still can’t see that it’s just a body.

  Fast Fish stands before Eagle Eye and glances across at Old Tortoise, who is looking worried, and Brown Moss, who is slightly hunched. He stares at Eagle Eye and says, ‘You thought that this land was here and you got us here . . . It has been a hard journey and some of us are not here. But we are. So . . .’

  He steps away and pushes the fire into the pile of bamboos and he watches pieces crackle and explode. ‘We are here now, and we will never go into the ocean again.’

  We leave the beach to go into the long grass, with me carrying the firestick. A light breeze comes in and the grass whispers around us, making us nervous. We know nothing about this land, but we spread out a little. Burnt Earth is near some black rocks and yells. Everyone looks at him but nobody rushes to him, so he picks something up and wobbles towards us.

  ‘Look, look!’ he pants and shows us what he has. He is holding it like Moonlight is holding her baby, and it is about the size of the baby. It looks like a smooth, light-green rock. But it isn’t. It is an egg.

  ‘We can eat it for three days!’ he says.

  ‘Um,’ says Old Tortoise. ‘Where is the mother?’

  Burnt Earth blinks. ‘Mother . . .?’ And looks back.

  Waterlily screams.

  A head is poking out from the top of the rock. A big head. A head as big as Fast Fish’s head, even bigger. It has large eyes like oysters, and it has a great beak. But now it is moving from the rocks.

  Old Tortoise hisses. ‘Oh!’

  Fast Fish’s fist is clenched, as though he is carrying a spear.

  It is a bird, but it is nothing like any bird I have ever seen before. Its feet are bigger than mullets and it has three massive toes on each foot – the longest one of them could slice my belly. The bird’s legs are long, and as thick as Fast Fish’s legs, and there is an enormous body on those legs. There are little wings on the body, as if somebody had shoved seagull wings on it. Those funny wings could not ever get that bird off the ground.

  Then there’s the neck. It is as solid as a crocodile’s leg, and it is as long as the bird’s legs. This bird is the tallest thing I have ever seen in my life. If Fast Fish stood before it and reached up, he could just touch its terrible beak.

  And now it is moving towards us.

  Waterlily closes her eyes and squeezes The Wind’s hand. Everyone freezes, like dead rats. The bird shambles close to us, stops, and the long neck moves the massive head around to look at us. The beak – like a duck beak but far bigger and solid – is marked with blood.

  ‘It is going to attack!’ Moonlight turns away to protect her baby.

  I think of the firestick I am carrying and I wave it at the bird, but it is useless. The firestick is only a black stick with a touch of smoke. The bird looks at the stick then looks at its egg in Burnt Earth’s arms. It moves closer and its eyes are hollows; looking into them is like looking into a deep chasm.

  But those eyes shift and suddenly the bird scurries away with its silly little wings beating against its body.

  ‘Thunderbird,’ Burnt Earth mumbles.

  Old Tortoise turns away from the bird. ‘But what frightened it? It wasn’t us . . .’

  Moonlight shrieks.

  My eyes catch hers as I turn and see the grass shivering as if a wild gale has come. And then I see what is causing it. It is far more terrible than the thunderbird.

  It has stopped. It is looking at Moonlight and the rest of us. We only see part of the thing from the grass, but that is enough. It is a lizard, but it is a lizard like the thunderbird is a bird. From its legs to its head, it is taller than Fast Fish. Those legs look like tree stumps and that head like an old turtle shell.

  And now it puts a long black tongue out from its mouth to lick the air. That mouth looks as though it could eat all of us in a moment. And maybe it is indeed working out whether to eat us.

  But it decides to stay with the thunderbird and turns away from us. Those tree-stump legs move the body so it sways through the grass. And we
see that the lizard has a massive tail. From the end of its tail to the tip of its black tongue, it is as big as a white shark. It is a lizard, but it is a nightmare.

  The tree stumps skim on the gravel, making the thunderbird look motionless even though it is running. The lizard catches up to the thunderbird, rears its head, opens its mouth, bites the bird’s long neck and pulls it down.

  ‘It didn’t think that we were good tucker,’ says Burnt Earth weakly.

  ‘We have to get spears,’ says Fast Fish.

  The Wind sees Waterlily’s eyes screwed up and nudges her. ‘It’s gone.’

  Moonlight looks at Burnt Earth. ‘You called the big bird a thunderbird . . .’ She looks down at her baby. ‘It will do. Hi, Thunderbird, yes you.’

  ‘But it’s a girl!’ Fast Fish protests.

  ‘I don’t care. And she doesn’t mind either.’

  Fast Fish doesn’t argue and leads us to the rock where the thunderbird had popped up. Burnt Earth shows us where he got the egg from and we pick up four more. Fast Fish thinks out loud for a moment about camping in the rocks, but it is too close to the eating lizard, and maybe there are more thunderbirds around here. So we decide to go somewhere perhaps nearer to the water.

  Then Old Tortoise points at some dusty trees between a red ridge and the whispering grass. ‘I think there’s something there.’

  Those trees are greener than the trees around us and they seem to be bigger. We set off with a long stick that Fast Fish has found. It isn’t a spear but it’s something. About halfway from the rocks and the green trees, Burnt Earth stops.

  ‘I can hear something.’

  Fast Fish swings his long stick and stares at the grass. ‘Where?’

  ‘No, no, it’s not here. It’s in the trees. It’s water moving.’

  ‘I can hear it.’ Moonlight nods and smiles.

  We walk on as the sun lowers. The trees are thick and tall, some of them are almost white. From there we can see through the trees to a river. We hardly talk, as though we could frighten the river away, and then we hurry, almost running.

  And that panics the big birds drinking in the river – for a moment I think they are young thunderbirds, but their heads are different – and they run through us with their long legs. We are shaken by them, but they go away and we slip past the white trees and look at the murmuring river. We place the eggs, the firestick and the stick down carefully, charge into the water and shout with joy. A lot of birds flap from the river and the trees, but nobody cares.

  I am washing the salt off and watching Thunderbird splash in the arms of Moonlight when I see Old Tortoise has become still. He is staring at the river bank.

  He turns and says quietly, ‘Crocodiles.’

  The splashing and shouting immediately stop, and Fast Fish spins around towards the trees.

  ‘No,’ Old Tortoise says. ‘Not the tribe, the real ones.’ He points at the marks on the mud.

  ‘All right, get out of the river,’ Fast Fish says quietly. ‘Slowly, slowly.’

  I see something like a big log slithering on the other side of the river. I point. It is very big, and two others also slide into the river. Fast Fish hurries as he wades out into the river after Brown Moss gives him his long stick. The Wind helps Moonlight out of the water, with Old Tortoise, Burnt Earth and I retreating behind them. I see a shadow in the water moving towards me, but Fast Fish’s stick slices past me and thumps it. The crocodile moves away.

  We slip away from the river and settle down amid the white trees, around a big tree with speckled bark. We are surrounded by green brushes and spike ferns, which will alert us that crocodiles are moving towards us. I start a fire with the firestick and Brown Moss puts one egg on the ashes, and maybe now we are not worried about crocodiles.

  But there is something coming.

  The trees shiver near us as dusk creeps up on us. Another giant grey thing. This one is ripping leaves from a sapling with its powerful large claws, but it is ignoring us – for the moment. It is taller than the thunderbird, and heavier. It has an enormous rat head with pointy ears, tremendous legs and a tail. And there is another small head on the lower part of its body.

  ‘There is no end?’ Brown Moss whispers softly.

  Its ears swivel and it looks at us.

  I swallow.

  It blinks as if it is wondering what we would taste like. But it shoves leaves into its mouth, drops its claws from the tree to the ground and bounds away.

  ‘Maybe it was frightened by us,’ says Burnt Earth, but he says it with doubt in his voice.

  ‘Maybe.’ Fast Fish waves his long stick.

  ‘Well that one isn’t.’ The Wind points into the dusk as another giant trundles towards us. This one is not as tall – about the height of Fast Fish – but it is long and solid. It moves like a boulder, with feet like big clams and terrible claws on its two front feet. The head is ugly, with beady eyes and a hairy nose that looks like a thousand wasp stings, and it has two flat front teeth – each one the size of a man’s fist.

  ‘Is it after us?’ Moonlight hisses.

  Fast Fish leaps up and waves his long stick and yells, ‘Get away!’

  Old Tortoise looks at him in shock. Fast Fish is a butterfly trying to battle with a terrible monster.

  I want to bolt away.

  The giant blinks its beady eyes at the stick, looks at Fast Fish and shows its two terrible teeth – they would rip his arm away. For a long moment Fast Fish stands with his stick pointed at the giant and the giant looking at him. And then the giant moves slowly away.

  Fast Fish lowers his stick and his arm is trembling.

  Old Tortoise looks at his arm. ‘We must leave here . . .’

  Fast Fish nods slowly. ‘Yes.’ His voice is thick.

  Old Tortoise points at a ridge above the trees. ‘Maybe there?’

  ‘Yes, it’s good. We have to go,’ says Fast Fish.

  ‘Now?’ Burnt Earth says.

  ‘Yes, now!’ Moonlight quickly stands up.

  We take the eggs and kill the campfire by the river. We move away from the monsters and find a sandbar which divides the river in two so we can cross quickly as we watch for the crocodiles. We creep across the river under the full moon. The moon guides us to a track that takes us to the top of the ridge.

  I get another fire going. Brown Moss puts her egg on the edge of the fire for a few moments, and then she cracks it open with a rock. We eat the white and yellow yolk with our fingers. It tastes like a duck’s egg with a touch of salt. We can hear desperate sounds – shrieks and snarls from down where the river is – and those sounds are affecting us.

  I put my arm around The Wind’s shoulder and feel her shivering. I keep seeing those two shining teeth of the monster and I wonder what she is seeing. Through the flickering fire I can see Moonlight rocking her baby as she talks softy to her, and Waterlily trying to hide her eyes in Brown Moss’s right arm.

  Old Tortoise snaps a twig. ‘I wish . . .’

  Brown Moss says. ‘We are here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Burnt Earth looks at Waterlily and says, ‘We should have names for all those things.’

  Fast Fish is examining a flint stone. ‘They are things from the bottom of the pit,’ he says.

  ‘Maybe we should name them.’ Brown Moss says as she hugs Waterlily. ‘To get away from the size of them. And their fangs and claws.’

  ‘And we are the people who first saw them . . .’ Burnt Earth says.

  Fast Fish and Brown Moss look at each other with hunted eyes. But Fast Fish prods Old Tortoise with his stick. ‘All right. Give us a name for those galloping birds.’

  ‘Galloping. Fast-footed. What about calling them emu?’

  ‘Emu. Fine, now the –’

  Old Tortoise interrupts. ‘Maybe change thunderbirds to giant emu – mihirung?’

  Moonlight looks down at her baby, ‘Well, we know what the real name is, right, Thunderbird?’ The baby blows bubbles.

  Fast Fish shrugs
. ‘Right, give us the name of the giant thing that munched the trees and bounded away.’

  Moonlight looks at the stars. ‘It had a grey coat. Kangaroo.’

  ‘Kangaroo? All right.’ Fast Fish nods at me this time. ‘The slow giant with the huge teeth?’

  I think a bit and can’t get away from that hairy nose. ‘Wombat,’ I say.

  Next, it’s The Wind’s turn. ‘The thing that killed the mihirung?’

  The Wind shrugs. ‘It was just a large lizard. Goanna.’

  ‘Fine. That takes enough fear out of them to hunt them.’ Fast Fish takes another flint, and chips at the stone he found by the light of the fire.

  The rest of us sleep.

  * * *

  The Wind wakes me before the rest, and leads me to stand on a high point on the ridge. We look out.

  ‘Oh,’ she whispers.

  ‘Yes.’

  There is an eagle soaring in the crisp air. We can see many kangaroos wandering across the grass; we see a couple of mihirungs and a lot of emus, and a tree full of those white birds with yellow crests – the same as we saw at Bird Lake.

  ‘Cockatoos,’ says The Wind.

  We can see the river slicing into the land across the country, and a vast green wilderness stretching from the red ridge to the hazy horizon. We stare at the wilderness and the others join us.

  Fast Fish plants his flint spear, looks across the land and sucks his lips.

  ‘We will never get over there,’ I say.

  We watch a goanna charge after one of the emus. The emu streaks away, startling the white birds. They erupt from a tree, so many that the tree seems to disintegrate, and a lone, black-headed bird flies from a bush.