by Bruce Pascoe
‘They … they’re crows … scavengers, peck the eyes out of lambs.’
‘But they’ve got white on them.’
‘Well, they’re still scavengers, waltzing about, think they own the place. Anyway it’s about time you finished the China assignment so I can take it up to the school. I don’t want you falling behind. When you get well and go back …’
Maria stopped listening and clicked the Google icon on her computer. Birds, she typed, of Australia. Crow. She looked at the picture of the very bad crow. Her birds were not crows. Not ravens, either, or currawongs, or friar birds, or … Choughs, that’s what they were, choughs. How were you supposed to say that? She scrolled down. Happy family birds. The chough is a sociable bird that lives in close family groups and all members help …
‘Maria, that’s not China,’ her mother accused, looking over her shoulder, ‘that’s those crows.’
‘They’re choughs,’ Maria said.
‘Oh, Maria, please concentrate, I’m not doing this to be mean, darling, you know I just want …’
Mrs Coniliopoulos began wringing her hands and Maria knew from experience that the wringing would squeeze tears from her mother’s eyes.
Maria looked out the window. Happy family birds.
Mrs Coniliopoulos stared at the top of her daughter’s head where the hair was thin, sick looking, from the chemotherapy. What can I do, what can I do? The woman wailed within her own heart, I’m a single mother and my daughter is …
‘Maria, please, I’m begging you to finish the assignment, please, because when you get …’
Maria turned and looked squarely at her mother’s face. She knew her mother was trying to do the right thing, trying to be the kind of mother that solved things, but instinctively she knew that her mother had only the vaguest idea what to do in most circumstances and since the illness had arrived she could only think about getting Maria to work. That’s all the woman had ever done, that was the only solution she could think of to any difficulty in life. Work.
When Albert got back to the hut Brim was looking up at him, the hair standing up on the back of her neck at the smell of fox.
‘Now, now, Brim, don’t look at me like that, old girl, these is little baby foxes, pads as pink as geraniums, just like your own little babies. How would you like it if I grabbed up your own little pups and killed them?’
He sat on the chair and appealed to Brim. ‘I pulled them outta the hole and soon as I saw ’em, that was it, couldn’t raise a hand against them, their little hearts goin’ pumpity pump, drumpity drump, bursting with the will to live … like all of us.’
He reached into his pocket and held the cubs in his own huge paw and they went as still as … well, as still as fox cubs terrified by the smell of man and dog and the dark ticking of a thing they’d never heard before. Albert’s clock. Well, Albert’s grandmother’s clock really.
Brim looked up at Albert and sniffed the awful scent of fox and ducked her head down to nuzzle her pups to check that they had not been harmed by the dreadful presence of foxes. How many foxes? Lotsa foxes. She was too annoyed to count them, there was lotsa foxes and she didn’t care for them one bit.
‘Now, now, Brim, don’t be like that, I’ve made a blue and now you’ve gotta help me. You’re me dog and you’ve gotta help me, that’s what mates do.’
He went down on his knee before his little ginger mate and held the cubs out to her. Her lip curled involuntarily but Albert beseeched her and she tried, she really did, she stretched forward to sniff the cubs but recoiled with her nostrils quivering, such an ugly, wild, unholy smell.
Unholy! What’s unholy? Some living thing that is strange to you?
‘Come on, Brim, you can see how little they are, you can see they’re not weaned, they’re starvin’, poor little devils.’
Albert held a cub toward one of Brim’s spare teats, while Brim’s own pups were tumbled in dog sleep, all pink tummy and silken ear, all milky breath and mother warm.
The cub’s nostrils quivered suddenly at the smell of milk. Wild milk, unholy milk, dog milk, but milk for all that and she hadn’t been fed for four days, and her mother gone and her brother gone and now this big creature burying her in his pocket and this dog glaring at her … but the milk, the milk, the lovely warm slippery milk. Her tongue made little darts from her lips, hungry for dog milk despite herself.
Albert lowered the little creature to the teat and Brim flinched as it took hold, her eyes widening with panic, fearful of the little foreigner, hating its ugly, narrow little head, not at all like her own babies with their blunt loveable faces, the most beautiful creatures to ever live.
What are you doing to me, Albert? Brim’s eyes pleaded, because even though she could count she couldn’t talk, it’s a fox, Albert, a fox. One fox is one too many.
Albert watched the cub attach itself greedily, the pups too full of milk and sleep to notice, their fat pink tummies fit to burst. Albert brought out another cub and placed it beside its sister.
That’s two foxes, Albert, two, Brim appealed, but Albert took no notice, bringing the last cub from his capacious pocket.
That’s another one, Brim’s eyes signalled alarm, that’s … that’s lotsa foxes.
But the foxes just suckled ferociously while Albert squatted down beside Brim and reassured her with a calming hand repeatedly following the curve of her brow to the base of her neck, strong, sure strokes pressing calm and acceptance into her heart. If Albert thought it was all right for a bitch to suckle a fox, lotsa foxes, then it must be all right. Why, even Rome was built by human babies suckled by a wolf. Dogs didn’t learn much history but paid particular attention to the bits where dogs and wolves were involved.
DOGS AND DOXES
I’m forty-one years old, Vera Coniliopoulos thought as she watched the tortured breath of her daughter, groping through the suffocation of the hard chemicals sent to kill her cells, the good and the bad. Forty-one and my daughter is dying and no-one loves me.
It’s not hard to be maudlin in the stifled light of a sick person’s room, but in her heart Vera knew it was close enough to the truth to crush her spirit.
Vera was almost right but not quite because Maria loved her mother. She admired her selflessness, a mother’s great gift for uncompromised love. Even when it was needy love. She could admire that love, respect it, even if it smothered her like wads of cotton wool. The way they pack dolls in a toy shop. All satin and padding, like a coffin.
Vera struggled with her gloom. She knew she could slip in to it like a hand in a warm glove. She was aware of it, even allowed the word for it, self-pity, to rise in her mind like a bubble of gas in a swamp. But she is my life. And she knew that was wrong too. You can’t bind your children to you so they have to love you, but the two can get confused. It can’t be wrong to love your daughter so entirely and it can’t be very wrong to want some in return.
What can I do? the woman asked herself. Nothing more than you can, God replied. Or Vera thought he did anyway. And it was some comfort. A little, because even inside the religion she’d known all her life Mrs Coniliopoulos had doubts. Grave doubts.
Soon the pups and cubs were old enough to stay in the hut while Brim resumed her supervision of Albert’s work in the bush.
Each night when they returned from the ridge the pups would yip and squeal until Brim slumped onto the bag and they jostled each other to reach a teat, the three fox cubs slinking in behind them, already sensitive to their rank in the litter.
Brim was a good, healthy mother and all the pups and cubs flourished and became so boisterous in their tumbling fights that the more lightly built foxes had to be alert and nimble to avoid being squashed.
It was a strange sight to see them all snuggle into Brim at night, the four blunt-faced pups and the three arrow-headed cubs, each of them being given a good cleaning: ears, nose, eyes, bottoms, feet and last of all tummies, just for fun.
When they had grown strong and agile enough to get bored, Albert
allowed them to follow their mother up the hill, lest he return one night to find the bedding all torn to bits and the kitchen pots upset.
They need not worry about the yellow-eyed goshawk because Brim prowled about the splitting camp, shadowing the pups and cubs, bristling if even a currawong got too close.
Albert chuckled to himself about the strangeness of it, seeing the little foxes who thought they were dogs tumbling about the clearing, sometimes spilling into the ashes at the edge of the fire and having their whiskers and ears dusted ash grey, as comical as anything he’d ever seen.
They were good hunters too. While the pups couldn’t contain their enthusiasm, dashing after crickets and butterflies, making crazy leaping bounds at the taunting swallows, the fox cubs were sly little creepers and hiders, using the bracken and grasses to camouflage their outlines, only leaping out when they felt sure they could catch their prey.
But really, what could you do with a butterfly whose lightness and bouncing flight made it seem like hunting air? And the crickets who were easily caught but could make you leap a metre in the air with their sudden and frightening crick-it, crick-it? Or even worse the bug-eyed cicadas whose glistening, transparent wings tasted like cellophane and were most terrifying when they crook crook cricked into voice and soon set up such a drumming and insistent alarm that a fox’s eyes might pop right out of its head?
Albert found himself laughing under his breath and Brim would glance up at him with mild reproof, burdened with her relentless vigil of looking after one, two … ah … and another one, two pups and one, two … ah … well, who cares, lotsa foxes. Do you know what it’s like, Albert, she seemed to say, having eyes in the back of your head? Watching this one tumbling around the fire and upsetting the billy? This one chasing butterflies and falling off a log? That one with its head stuck in a jam tin? That one, no two, trying to gang up on the choughs? It’s exhausting, that’s what, so you look after them if you think it’s that funny.
But Albert had his own work to do, and plenty of it. Hard yakka. Splitting out the green posts, heavy and slippery with sap. But he had to admit the frivolous antics of the pups and cubs made the day go quickly.
He was aware that other people might think him strange, being so fond of his animals and the bush creatures. All very well to go all dreamy and sooky watching the cubs being cleaned before bed, but what would other bushmen think? Foxes? The enemy. Some of them didn’t look at Brim very kindly, either, despite the fact she was the best dog from Combienbar to Wangarabell. No, what some of them saw was the dingo in her, the enemy. Some people could find enemies everywhere. All Albert saw were living creatures, little animals of innocence.
He’d have to be careful when they got older and bolder, have to make sure they kept away from the other bushmen’s camps. The pups would be all right because there were plenty who knew Brim’s worth and any pup from her was sure to be sought after.
Her first litter had hardly been weaned before rough-bearded bushmen and practical country women came to stand about Albert’s campfire to watch the pups, making their claim for one or the other depending on which they perceived would best meet their needs.
Some wanted a good watchdog and so they looked for a bright eye and a keen bark; some wanted a bold dog who would be good around sheep and cows; the women often wanted a trainable dog, a pup that you could teach to leave the chooks alone and to let babies pull their ears and inspect their teeth.
Mrs Carbone had a baby boy who, thinking the goat was his brother, wanted to see why he was wearing a ridiculous false beard, and, of course, ended up being butted head over heels into the chicken poo. Mrs Carbone knew any dog she brought home would have to tolerate close inspection with gentle patience.
One of the bushmen kept his requirements to himself but chose the fattest and laziest pup out of Brim’s first litter. Cranky Dave kept himself to himself and his opinions were his own. People thought he was a grumpy old coot but in truth he was a shy man, and if he grunted at you when you said good morning it was because he flushed so red with embarrassment his lips were as useful for speech as an earthworm for a tent peg.
‘That one,’ he told Albert at last.
‘That one?’ Albert said, ‘well, that’s lucky isn’t it, Dave?’ Albert never used his nickname out of politeness and, to be honest, decency, because Dave wasn’t a bad bloke, just a bit quiet and serious. ‘That’s lucky indeed, old mate, because that’s the only one left.’
‘I knew that,’ Dave grumbled, ‘but it’s the one I want.’ So he went off a happy man because he’d chosen a fat and happy pup. He figured that a fat pup would be the warmest and warmest was what he wanted. He secretly christened her Queenie, well Queenie Bush Bess Lovelock to be exact. He’d have to keep the full name a secret because Lovelock was Dave’s surname, and you’d have to keep that secret wouldn’t you? No-one knew about Lovelock, not even Albert who Dave considered a friend.
You didn’t get far in the bush world of cattlemen and splitters with a name like Lovelock. Especially if you weren’t a slap-on-the-back sort of mate, a few-quick-beers-before-the-missus-finds-out sort of fellow. No, that sort of bloke would laugh in the face of a man called Lovelock.
Better to be called Carbone or Mirrabella. Even the Ah Mats got away with their foreign-sounding name most of the time. No-one bothered the publican, Plowman; the postman, Goodchild, survived all right; and even Mrs Cartright-Sellers escaped much ribbing, but that was because she had a black cat and rumour had it that she was a witch, a rumour much assisted by the prominent mole on her nose and her habit of sweeping the veranda with a broom made of willow wands.
Little Gordon Baldock received his most attentive audience ever when he told people he’d seen her flying across the sky in front of the moon. But Gordon was the sort of kid who just liked to see other people in trouble. A shame about that but there you are.
Yes, people left Mrs Cartright-Sellers to herself but Dave wasn’t going to risk people finding out about the Lovelock bit. He got his mail delivered to Dave, Boulder Creek Camp, near Narkoonjee.
Dave wanted a fat, warm pup because he was a soft sort of man, which no-one knew, and a lonely man, about which no-one cared, or so it seemed to Dave. He wanted a fat, warm pup to climb in under his old army blanket and settle itself behind the small of his back because his hut could be fearful cold in winter and his arthritis was beginning to give him gyp. He also wanted the company of a fellow living creature. Someone to talk to while he rubbed her little fat silken ears with his rough timber cutter’s fingers.
Yes, Dave had the right dog. When he stroked the perfect dome of her little head he marvelled at the perfection of creation. He’d lift her baby-pink feet, smell the warm nuttiness of them and kiss her between the eyes when she went all dozy in front of the fire.
He found something strange in his chest one lunch time when she paddled up to him in her tumbly clumsy puppy way and crawled onto his lap. Very strange sort of feeling in his chest. He was chuckling. Laughing at the ridiculous little dog. What a strange sensation laughing is, especially if you haven’t been able to do it for a while.
Oh, he loved that Queenie Bess and she loved him. And kept him warm. And loved. And everyone needs that, someone to think they’re really special.
Now the men and women of the forest gathered around Brim’s second litter and the pups gradually left: one to mind sheep; another to look after little Gabby Arnold because he was stuck in a wheelchair, poor blighter; another to keep an old dog company; one just to be an ordinary sort of dog; and the last to get run over by a truck because no-one in the Howard house had time or love enough to stop it chasing cars.
And so there were only fox cubs left. One, two … er … oh, you know how many foxes were left, lotsa the silly little coots.
Like any mother, Brim was distraught when the pups were taken from her, but Albert was the boss in her world and she was reassured by his love. To say that she was a reluctant mother of the remaining fox cubs is not quite correct.
The foxes loved her and believed she was their mother; they thought of themselves as dogs. And while Brim was conscientious, she seemed slightly alarmed by them, unnerved by their foxy behaviour.
The look of bewilderment never left her face. She would let them drink and dutifully clean their faces and fur with a thoroughness that was out of her control, but whenever they gave their strange little fox yips and whines the poor dingo flinched in alarm.
Nevertheless she grew them up and tried to teach them how to be good dogs. The foxes loved their mother and tried to be just like her, but they weren’t.
Brim liked to give her territory a good sniff every morning and the foxes followed suit, but the urge to hunt anything that moved was irresistible. They ate grasshoppers and worms, quail chicks and lizards, anything they could sniff out with their sharp little noses. Brim looked on amazed and at times seemed a little repulsed.
All baby animals grow up and their most endearing traits – their clumsiness, their playfulness and their ability to fall asleep in the most unlikely places – were replaced by stealth and wariness, latent aggression and an altogether more serious outlook on life.
Gradually the foxes extended their range and the time they spent away from Brim and each other. The two females in particular seemed to be itching to explore as far as they could, sometimes not returning to the hut until dusk was well advanced. Soon they’d be hunting in the dark. As foxes do.
But not Fog. The boy had all the slinky stealth and hunting lust of his sisters but he was always the first to seek out Brim and rest in the shade with her or find Albert’s coat and try to get back in the pocket to sleep, even though he was now far too big.
The smell of the coat was important to Fog, almost as if he remembered being bundled in there by the old man’s hands all those months ago. Whenever Albert wore the coat Fog would try to climb onto his lap. If he took the coat off Fog would sleep on it. Brim was never far from the coat either. She knew her job was to guard Albert first and his things second. If Albert didn’t want her under his feet while he split timber Brim would always go back to sit beside his coat or the lunch things. The vixens would get bored almost immediately and slope off into the forest, but when Albert looked around from his work Brim was always watching him as she lay with jaw resting on paws … And more often than not Fog was asleep on his coat.
