by Bruce Pascoe
Colin was awkward in front of Dave for the same reason and took the opportunity, while the rest of the company continued analysing the ingredients of every item on the table, to speak to Dave for the first time that day.
‘Dad said you carried Uncle Albert all the way from the mountain.’
‘Yes,’ Dave replied without meeting the boy’s eyes. He’d already told him this before but this was Colin’s awkward way of apologising.
‘That’s a lot of Ks to carry someone.’
‘It’s just a walking track. Can’t get a car in there. There was no time to wait around … and … he’s me mate.’
Mate, thought Colin, a mate of me uncle’s, mate enough to carry ninety kilograms eleven kilometres in the dark. That’s a decent sort of mate.
‘Come on, you lot,’ Tiger declared, glad to be free of his interrogation. ‘We’ve gotta get Maria down to the river to catch some fish.’
Maria was lifted on to Sparkle again and Dave held the reins to reassure Mrs Coniliopoulos. They couldn’t trust the hero Fair Go, not after a bellyful of peas.
Down by the river Albert showed Maria how to thread worms on a hook and how to cast from the hand reel. Fog sat beside Maria but his restless eyes roved about the riverbank and the camp that Dave had set up to make Mrs Coniliopoulos comfortable.
Brim leant against Albert after he sat down beside Maria and became as absorbed as the humans were by the slow, intricate life of the river: the parrots and pardalotes in the trees; the dragonflies shimmering above the water; and the rainbow birds dashing across the river in their blaze of colour.
Maria had read about them before, all of them, but seeing them was different. Seeing how they behaved told her more about the nature of birds and animals than seeing them in brilliant full colour on a page. Albert told her about each of the birds and had a story, often several, to indicate what moved the bird’s soul. Albert didn’t use the word soul. He’d say things like: ‘Now this little fella, watch how carefully it looks after the younguns.’ ‘See that swan there, always puts herself between us and the cygnets, giddi, we call the babies.’
He told her of the stingless bush bee that was being pushed out of its country by the European bees with their relentless search for new territory. Albert had the knowledge and experience to complement her encyclopedic collection of facts.
Maria pointed out an old kangaroo resting under the shade of a river gum and Albert explained how thin he was, his ribs and breastbone showing through his hide.
‘That ol’ fella, see, he’s been king of the mob in his day but one of the young bucks took him on and now this poor ol’ man is kicked out, on his own. Oh he’ll mooch along like this for a year or two an’ then one frosty morning we’ll find him dead.’ And Albert would have choked off that last word if he’d been quick enough.
‘Like Brim,’ Maria said, ‘when she gets really old.’
‘No, no, not like Brim, she’ll always have a mate to the end. She’s not gunna die cold and alone.’ Gees, I’m thick as a brick, I’ve gone and used the D word again.
When Brim heard her name she squirmed into Albert’s side, looking up at him in adoration, showing the tip of her tongue between her lips. Fog wasn’t going to be outdone and reached down and licked Maria’s hand twice in little dabbing foxy licks. Doxes weren’t demonstrative like dogs, they were wild creatures and set themselves slightly apart. Even Fog, with all his loyalty, spent most of his time avoiding the gaze of people and staring over the river with an aloof stillness. He’d glance back at Albert every minute or so to check on him and had chosen to sit beside Maria because he sensed that’s what Albert wanted. But for all that, he was a dox not a dog.
‘What will happen to Fog?’ Maria asked, stroking the dox between the ears, smoothing the golden fur.
‘Oh, he’ll be all right,’ Albert replied, desperately trying to construct a sentence without the D word in it. ‘He’ll always have a mate.’
‘Yes, but what if he wants a real mate, like a girl fox?’
‘Well, that’s up to him.’
‘But he’s your pet.’
‘No, Fog is a fox, Maria. We call him a dox so that people won’t kill him, but he’s a fox and one day he’ll go.’
‘But you love him and he loves you … He saved your life.’
‘Yes, and I saved his. Under normal circumstances he’d be … He’d never have survived after his mother … got taken. But who’s to say I did the right thing? He’s a feral animal, he’s not supposed to be here.’
‘So why did you?’
‘Because I couldn’t help myself. You should have seen him when he was a cub. Him and his sisters.’
‘Sisters?’
‘Oh, yes, he had two sisters and after they grew up they went back to being foxes, eating baby birds and trying to kill chickens … That’s what foxes do.’
‘So Fog will go one day?’
‘Don’t know. We’ve never spoken about it. You ask him.’
Maria turned the dox’s head so that she could look into his eyes.
‘Is that what you’ll do, Fog, leave all your friends?’
Fog’s eyes were inscrutable. As inscrutable as a fox.
Brim squirmed closer between Albert and Maria and licked the girl’s hand as if to say, I’ll stay, I’ll stay, I’m not a stuck-up fox.
‘I love them both,’ she said, ‘I’d hate to think of one of them not being with you.’
‘Well, that’s the way it is. If it happens, it happens.’
‘Like me,’ she said and tried to catch his eye. But suddenly Albert got busy with the lines.
‘Thought that was a bite for a minute,’ he said before settling again, thinking he’d avoided the question. If it was a question.
‘I might die.’
‘Yes, you told us, first day in the hospital. But you’re on a new treatment now, the doctors said …’
‘It might work.’
‘Yes, and Fog might stay, and might is better than won’t.’
Maria thought about it.
It was unnerving talking to her because she was so intelligent and the threat of her illness, the possibility that she might die, had focused her mind to pinpoint concentration on the fundamentals. Of life. The nature of being alive. She didn’t speak as a child her age would speak.
And yet she was thrilled with the things a child would be thrilled by: the beauty of birds and animals, the hectic glory of the country. To be thrilled was to be alive. And she was thrilled.
Albert was saved from further questioning by catching two lovely perch and a blackfish. Tiger put them in the coals of the fire and told Colin to take Dave and Maria to get some yabbies.
Colin rowed them in silence across the river while the rainbow birds stitched threads of vibrant colour about them.
‘Look,’ Colin said at last. ‘Look, there’s Bunjil looking out for us.’
Maria looked where he pointed and there was a wedge-tailed eagle weaving great lazy circles in the sky.
‘That’s our spirit bird. When we see him everything’s all right.’
Everything? Maria thought to herself, but couldn’t help admiring the huge bird wheeling giant circles around the sun.
On the other side of the river they pulled in the yabby pots and tipped the catch into a bucket. Fog peered into the bucket with obvious distaste for such spiky, clawy, scratchy looking things.
But they tasted terrific. Tiger tipped them into a kerosene tin of boiling water and soon they were eating a meal of fish and yabbies and fresh damper while the orioles and shrike thrushes called about them.
The shrike thrush entered the camp, his head tipped to one side enquiringly while keeping an eye on the dogs and fox.
Albert tipped the bird some crumbs of damper.
‘Yarren, we call that one. He’s a good bird. Lovely to have one around the camp. He’s a good friend of our people. He’ll sing for us later. He’s got a beautiful voice.’
They drank more tea and dozed
in the sun, mesmerised by the fragrant smoke from the red gum wood, deeply satisfied by the food they’d eaten. Queenie Bess was already asleep with her head on Dave’s boot while Fog and Brim were like bookends beside the frail little girl.
‘I’m going to remember this forever,’ Maria declared.
And she did.
The author
Bruce Pascoe is a writer who can’t go to sleep without patting his dogs first. When he wakes up in the morning the first thing he does is walk with his dogs as they investigate the dawn. Bruce has written 26 books, lives at Gipsy Point, Victoria, on the magnificent Genoa (Jinoor) River. He lives with his wife, Lyn, has two children, two grandchildren and two dogs, Yambulla and Wangarabel, named after the mountain and town near where they were born. Bruce’s previous two dogs, Brim the dingo dog and Reg the Independent are now sleeping in sunshine a long way from earth. Bruce has a Bunurong-Tasmanian heritage and the job he enjoyed most was being dog wrangler for the vet at Maningrida, Northern Territory.
