by Justin D'Ath
It didn’t turn out quite as I expected. In my prepared speech about Michi’s and my adventures, I forgot one very important detail: the big ocean-going launch with no lights that had ploughed into us then left us for dead in the middle of the Coral Sea. I remembered it as soon as I stepped out of the forest.
A tent was pitched beneath some palm trees, and a small aluminium dinghy had been dragged up onto the beach nearby. But that’s not what stopped me in my tracks. Anchored in the middle of the narrow bay was a big blue-and-grey ocean-going launch with Sharee painted on its bow. I stared at it of a few seconds. The Sharee’s three powerful outboard motors and the shape of its flying deck looked strikingly familiar.
Something else looked familiar, too.
My brother Nathan has a friend who’s a pig hunter, and he has four of the ugliest, meanest dogs you’re ever likely to meet. The ugliest and meanest by far is a stocky black, brown and white pit bull terrier called Tyson. I’ve seen a video of Tyson attacking a wild boar nearly ten times his size, and the poor pig didn’t stand a chance.
The dog I saw as I stepped out of the trees was a dead ringer for Tyson. But this one wasn’t hunting pigs, it was hunting me.
15
GET RID OF HIM
The pit bull came stalking forward like a squat, boxy-headed tiger. Or like a tiger shark that’s grown legs. If I’d never met Tyson, I might have stood there and hoped for the best. That’s what you’re supposed to do if a dog comes at you – stay still, don’t make eye contact and, most important of all, don’t run away. But I knew Tyson, I’d seen what he could do to a two-hundred-kilogram wild boar. I turned and ran.
A piercing whistle came from the direction of the tent. A man shouted: ‘Bruce, get back here!’
It was a chilling coincidence: a dog with a shark’s name.
‘Bruce!’ the man bellowed again.
But Bruce wasn’t listening. He was in fight mode. Pit bulls are bred to fight and Bruce was listening to his instincts, not the shouting man.
I was listening to my instincts, too. Or my legs were. But my two legs were no match for Bruce’s four. By the time I was twenty metres into the forest, the pit bull had narrowed the distance between us from about forty metres to less than twenty-five. I could hear him behind me, his thrumming paws, his panting breath, but otherwise he was silent. Dogs that are serious about fighting don’t bother with barking, they save their energy for the important stuff: chasing, attacking, killing.
I was running flat out. But the twenty-five metres were down to fifteen.
Fourteenthirteentwelve…
Climb a tree! my panicked brain was telling me.
Already I’d run past lots, but none that looked suitable to climb – not in a hurry, anyway. I was in a big hurry, but so was Bruce behind me. He was right behind me now.
Nineeightsevensixfive…
I hurtled out into the open. I was in a clearing. Directly ahead of me, on the other side of the clearing, was a heavy thicket covered with fishing net. I charged towards it. I didn’t pause to wonder about the net, I simply flung myself at the thicket, jumping as I did so. Clang! I hit something solid that rattled like iron, and there was a huge commotion of flapping wings, but all that concerned me was getting away from the pit bull. My fingers grabbed hold and up I went. Snap! went Bruce’s jaws, spraying a mist of warm saliva on my bare heels as I swung my feet up and away. There was a yowl of frustration when the dog realised I’d escaped.
I found myself on a wobbly, two-metre-high platform. It wasn’t a thicket at all, but a man-made structure of iron mesh covered with fishing net and palm fronds and snapped branches. There were dozens of birds below me, and they seemed to be trapped. They fluttered about in panic as I crawled across the creaking iron mesh above them. Slowly my mind put the details together.
Netting + mesh + trapped birds = birdcage!
I was on top of a birdcage. A whole pile of them, in fact. The cages were stacked three or four high and lined up in a row about two metres wide and ten metres long. It didn’t make sense. Why would anyone keep caged birds on a deserted island ninety kilometres from the Australian mainland? And why would they hide them under fishing nets and leafy branches?
There wasn’t time to puzzle over it. A bald man wearing just a pair of shorts and thongs came pounding up through the trees from the same direction I had come. When he saw me, his face turned as mean as Bruce’s.
‘Get down from there!’ he roared.
‘But the dog…’
The bald man grabbed Bruce roughly by the collar and dragged him back from the cages. ‘Climb down slowly,’ he said to me. ‘Don’t scare the birds.’
I tried my best, but the frightened birds went crashing about in their cages like big, brightly coloured pinballs. Most of them were parrots. Down the far end was a single large cage containing something much bigger than a parrot. I couldn’t see through all the mesh and branches, but whatever was in there was going right off – slamming into the sides of its cage with such force that the whole structure rattled and clanged and shook.
‘Are they wild or something?’ I asked when I reached the ground.
‘Shut up and get away from the cages!’ Baldy snapped. ‘And don’t try to run away, or I’ll set the dog on you.’
Why would I run away? Baldy seemed really mad at me for upsetting the birds, but I wasn’t scared of him. I was scared of Bruce, though. His nasty yellow eyes were fixed hungrily on me, and his whole body quivered with the excitement of the hunt.
‘Where did you come from?’ Baldy asked.
‘I got washed off the reef on Utopia Island.’
He gave me a disbelieving look. ‘You swam all the way here?’
‘Kind of,’ I said. I thought about telling him the story I’d been rehearsing but decided not to. Something very weird was going on here. ‘There was a current – it carried me along.’
‘So no one’s with you?’
‘No, there’s just me,’ I lied. I didn’t want to get Michi mixed up in this – whatever this was. ‘I’m sorry for scaring your birds.’
Most of them had settled down, but not the big thing in the end cage. It was making a horrible grunting sound now, like a wild pig or a gorilla, and was still trying to bash its way out.
‘Who’s this?’ a voice asked behind me.
A second man came pushing through the shrubs and trees from the direction of the bay. He was dressed like Steve Irwin and wore a leather hat with the brim turned down at the front.
‘He reckons he got swept off the other island,’ Baldy said.
Leather-hat had a piece of cloth tied around his face, like a bank robber in an old cowboy movie. Only his eyes were visible and they swung in my direction.
‘Where’s your mate?’ he asked.
How did he know about Michi? He must have seen us, I realised, when their launch nearly ran us down last night.
I lied again: ‘He drowned.’
Leather-hat studied me for a moment. His eyes were icy blue and they seemed to bore right into me. ‘That’s too bad,’ he said finally.
He turned to Baldy. ‘Get rid of him.’
16
DORIS
I stood there in shock. It was like a very bad dream. Did getting rid of me mean what I thought it did?
‘We’re not murderers,’ Baldy said. He had to speak loudly because of all the noise coming from the end cage.
‘Have you got a better suggestion?’ asked Leather-hat. ‘He’s seen the birds, he’s seen your face, he could blow our whole operation.’
The bald man shrugged. ‘With the money we made from the last couple of consignments, plus what we’re getting tonight, we could be sitting pretty for quite a few years.’
‘They’d track us down.’
‘He doesn’t know who we are,’ Baldy said.
‘He’s seen your face,’ the masked man reminded him. ‘He’s probably seen the boat as well.’
‘What boat?’ I asked, acting dumb.
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nbsp; They both looked at me. Bruce tugged against Baldy’s restraining hand, growling at me and baring his teeth.
‘What’s your name?’ Leather-hat asked.
‘Sam Fox.’
‘Fox, eh?’ The corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement. ‘Then I guess you won’t mind sharing a cage with Doris.’
It must have been a joke, because he and Baldy started laughing.
‘Who’s Doris?’ I asked.
‘A great big chook,’ Leather-hat said, with a smirk in his voice.
I felt relieved. They were going to lock me in one of the birdcages rather than get rid of me. I didn’t care who or what Doris was. Obviously she wasn’t a chook, otherwise why would they be laughing? But she had to be a bird of some kind, and I wasn’t scared of birds.
Until I met Doris.
She was the creature in the end cage. The one kicking up such a ruckus that it was hard to hear what people were saying. She stopped attacking the wire and retreated into the far corner of her tall, narrow cage when Leather-hat lifted the netting to unlock the door.
‘Meet your new cell mate,’ he said.
Doris was huge. She took up half the cage. She was so big she couldn’t stand up straight, and her cage was nearly two metres high. She glowered at us through the wire with such a mean look that even Bruce backed away a little.
‘You can’t put me in there!’ I said.
‘Would you rather play chasey with the dog?’ Leather-hat asked.
I looked at Bruce. I looked at Doris. It was almost too close to call. ‘Open the door,’ I said hoarsely.
I edged into the cage and heard the padlock snick closed behind me. I was terrified. Cassowaries are the world’s most dangerous birds. They look like a cross between an emu and a giant turkey, with a narrow bony horn on top of their naked blue heads, and huge clawed feet. There are three claws on each foot, but the centre one is the most dangerous. Known as the dagger claw, it’s as long as a butcher’s knife and has three razor-sharp edges. One kick and you’re slit open from your chest to your bellybutton. People have been killed by them.
‘You two get to know each other,’ Leather-hat said, dropping the fishing net back into place over the cage door.
I wanted to ask how long they were going to leave me there, but I was too scared to speak in case it antagonised the cassowary. With my back pressed to the wire, I listened to the two men walk away. It was just Doris and me now, standing beak-to-nose in a cage that was barely big enough for both of us.
You aren’t meant to make eye contact with savage dogs, and I wondered if it was the same with cassowaries. I carefully lowered my eyes until I was staring at the giant bird’s feet. Or, to be specific, at the two wicked-looking dagger claws.
One false move, I thought, and I’ll lose my guts. Literally.
17
LADIES FIRST
I don’t know how long Doris and I stood like that. Maybe it was only five or ten minutes. Maybe it was half an hour. I was dead on my feet – dead tired, that is. I had hardly slept in twenty-four hours, and I’d been swimming or treading water for most of the night. But I was too scared to move. Every so often, Doris fluffed her wispy black feathers and made a rumbling noise deep in her wrinkly blue neck, otherwise she didn’t move either. There was barely room to move. We were squashed into opposite corners of the cage, with only twenty centimetres separating us. All I could do was stand there. And think.
Even thinking was difficult. I’d had so little sleep that my brain wasn’t functioning properly. But slowly, everything began to make sense.
Baldy and Leather-hat were smugglers. They caught wild birds on the Australian mainland and brought them out to Cowrie Island under cover of darkness in the Sharee – the same launch that had nearly run Michi and me down. Then someone in another boat came to collect the birds from the island and take them overseas. The other boat must be big – a large yacht or a converted fishing trawler – because there were a lot of birds. More than would fit on the Sharee. Leather-hat must have made several overnight trips from the mainland, while Baldy camped on the island to look after the birds.
It was obviously a big operation. A lot of money was involved. According to my brother, collectors in some countries paid as much as twenty thousand dollars for a single Australian cockatoo. I wondered how much they would pay for a cassowary. The whole consignment must have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. No wonder Leather-hat and Baldy had been so annoyed when I showed up. No wonder they wanted to get rid of me. They were probably hoping Doris would do the job for them.
But so far the cassowary hadn’t done anything. Both of us stood there, waiting for the other to make the first move.
It was Doris’s drinking water that finally broke our stalemate. Her rectangular plastic water dish was hooked to the wire mesh down near my feet. Even after all Doris’s banging and crashing earlier, there was still some water in it. Looking at the water, I realised how thirsty I was. I was parched. But I was too scared to move. Doris fluffed her feathers again and this time I couldn’t help myself – nervously I raised my eyes. And saw that Doris was looking down at the water just as intently as I had been.
Then it dawned on me: the cassowary wanted a drink as badly as I did, but like me she was too scared to move.
‘Would you like some water, Doris?’ I said softly.
Very slowly, moving just a centimetre at a time, I bent my knees and slid my back down the wire until I was sitting on the cage floor. Doris towered over me, blocking out half the daylight. Her legs looked like tree trunks. Her feet, with those two terrible dagger claws, were like the feet of some dinosaur bird long extinct. One kick and I’d be extinct, too. Don’t make any sudden moves, I cautioned myself. Doris glared as I reached slowly for the water dish.
This was the critical moment. I was crouching directly in front of the cassowary’s dagger claws. If she thought I was stealing her water, she might let fly with a kick to my head. A drop of sweat rolled into one of my eyes as I unhooked the dish carefully from the wire. Above me, Doris made a low booming sound deep in her neck – it sounded like a warning – but her feet stayed put. With shaking hands, I lifted the water dish slowly past my mouth (Torture! I was dying for a sip!), past my nose, past my eyes and offered it to the cassowary standing over me.
‘Here, Doris,’ I said softly. My mouth was so dry I could hardly talk. ‘Ladies first.’
The huge bird didn’t move. She towered over me, threatening, watchful, suspicious. Not just my hands, but my arms and upper body were shaking now – so badly that I was worried I was going to spill the water. But I was more worried about Doris attacking me. With both my hands above my head, I was offering her a wide-open target. A free kick. And if she kicked, I had no chance. It would all be over in a second.
‘I’m your friend, Doris,’ I whispered.
She blinked. Slowly she lowered her big blue head towards the water dish. Then stopped halfway. I held my breath. My whole body trembled with a combination of fear and exhaustion. If I had to wait much longer, I was going to pass out. A fly buzzed around my face and I closed my eyes. The moment they were closed, I felt a gentle vibration through the plastic sides of the water dish. I opened my eyes. Doris was drinking!
You two get to know each other, Leather-hat had said when he locked me in with the big, wild cassowary. But he’d been joking. He thought Doris wouldn’t let anyone get to know her at such close quarters. Now she was drinking out of my hands. But I wanted her to stop. I didn’t want her to drink all the water.
Please leave some for me! I begged her in my mind.
I got my wish. Doris lifted her head and looked down at me over the rim of the dish. Your turn, she seemed to be saying. There was about a centimetre left. The water was cloudy with dirt and grit and bits of floating leaves and twigs and even an ant or two, but I drank it down to the very last drop.
It was the most delicious drink I’d ever tasted.
18
TUG-OF-WAR
I blinked my eyes open, surprised to find myself curled up in a corner of the cage. And even more surprised to find Doris sitting on the floor beside me. We both scrambled to our feet when Baldy lifted a section of camouflaged fishing net clear of the wire mesh and Bruce the pit bull pressed his ugly nose against it.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked, still half-asleep.
‘It’s feeding time,’ Baldy said. He was wearing a khaki shirt and carried two green plastic buckets filled with seeds and chopped fruit. ‘Care for some lunch?’
I was ravenously hungry, but I didn’t feel like eating bird food. A glance at my watch told me it was 1.15. I’d been locked in the cage for nearly five hours. ‘How much longer are you going to keep me here?’
‘We’ll let you out tonight,’ Baldy said. ‘When we leave.’
I watched him shuffling through a big bunch of keys. He and Leather-hat would have to take me out of Doris’s cage when the boat from overseas came to pick up the birds. But what would they do with me then?
‘Let me out now,’ I said. ‘I’ll go over to the other side of the island and I won’t bother you again.’
‘It’s more complicated than that,’ Baldy said, unlocking one of the small cages further along. It contained two scared-looking red-and-green parrots. ‘There are planes and boats out looking for you.’
‘I’ll stay out of sight until tomorrow.’
‘We can’t take that risk,’ he said.
I was thinking fast. Baldy was my only hope. I knew what Leather-hat wanted to do with me. ‘If they ever catch up with you, I’ll speak in your defence,’ I promised. ‘I’ll tell them you let me go and the judge will give you a lighter sentence.’
