The Best Australian Stories (29 page)

*

In March the light is tilting into shadow and summer is over. Before the winter comes and the mud bogs the trucks, Tasman Forest orders the logging of strips for wide roadways through the Cradle Mountain, Franklin-Gordon and South-West national parks. ‘Without access, we cannot hope to win this war,' a spokeswoman says, staring unsmiling into the eyes of the TV viewers. ‘God help us if we have to log more.'

Surveillance teams are formed in the autumn. Ultraviolet cameras are imported from the United States and set up at key locations in the forests, mountains, marshes and plains. Satellites are sent up from Woomera. Victorians advertise in the
Examiner
and the
Mercury
– ‘Fine Fat Foxes Fought and Killed', and ‘Seven at One Blow' – and the best Victorian fox killers are flown in by Tasman Forest.

As the hunters head for the hills, Tasman Forest runs community service announcements –
in the event of a fox emergency
. Get Foxed, a fox repellent invented by a feral and tested on devils, is an overnight sensation and spawns a thousand imitations. Prophylactics dominate the stalls at festivals and markets.

The trappers lay fifty thousand neckers of the finest garrotte wire and thirty thousand leggers, and set ten thousand spring traps with stainless-steel teeth and German-made trigger plates. They build five hundred hides of mottled canvas at locations deemed most likely. Covered in Get Foxed, they man them for a week on army rations, Sako 222s sighted for long range cocked and ready. Just in case, they dig five hundred holes with stakes at the bottom and cover them with leaf litter. They lay nearly fifty experimental designs, most coming from the fertile brains of Tasmania's writers, artists and bush philosophers.

The hunters return from the hills with enough meat to feed their dogs and cats for twenty years, but no fox. Not one. The fox is around the same size as nearly all the wildlife on the island and many different heads have fitted into fox-sized nooses. The fox has shown more-than-devilish cunning in its use of natural selection.

Tasman Forest introduces a curfew. Irreverent jokes about fox appetites are no longer seen as funny. A teenager caught sharpening the points of a McDonald's ‘M' with red texta is expelled from school.

The island seethes with rumour and rising terror and the first evacuations begin.

The logging trucks clog both lanes of the Lyell Highway in a seemingly endless convoy, roaring with an excess of horsepower and enthusiasm. Going east laden with the freshly stripped carcasses stacked in the cradle of the horned trucks:
Eucalypti globulus
,
viminalis
,
dalrympleana
,
gunnii
,
delegatensis
,
regnans
and
johnstonii
(and the occasional
Lagarostrobos franklinii
or
Athrotaxis selaginoides
); and going west again, rattling and empty. Squashing enough fleeing wildlife to make the whole highway stink of carrion. They have bumper-stickers saying
The Forest Fights the Fox
. As winter begins the Foxies – a vocal minority of former greenies, assembling under the banned slogan
Better the Fox than the Forest
– become the most despised Tasmanians in recorded history. Prison populations rise to 10 per cent Foxies despite them being 0.001 per cent of the population overall.

The
Mercury
, 2 June:
HUONVILLE SAFE FROM FOX FRIGHT
Huonville can rest easy tonight, knowing that Tuesday's alleged fox sighting was a case of mistaken identity. ‘We did think it was a fox, but it proved to be a Tassie tiger,' a relieved Bastie Turpin said today. And the brave orchardist has the carcass to prove it.

The
Mercury
, 30 August:
FOX CRACKS GORDON DAM
Alarming cracks appearing in the Gordon Dam wall have been linked to the fox disaster, as the State of Emergency enters its terrifying third month. ‘The dam requires daily monitoring, maintenance,' Lieutenant Brett Grunie, Tasman Dams, said. ‘We just can't spare the men to Operation Fox-Fire, but we have had to. It's disaster, whichever way you go.' So far Tasman Dams has no conclusive evidence of alleged Foxie involvement.

The
Australian
, 11 November:
TAS GOES 1080
Tasman Forest has put all its resources into the controversial final attempt to either kill or starve out the fox. The evacuated island will in its entirety be 1080'd and left for an unspecified period. During this time, the island will be off limits, except for specially trained miners, who will be safely underground.

Tasman Forest's Major-General Ippo Vaulter held a press conference this morning from his Melbourne base. ‘Tasmania has lost Tasman Dams altogether. It is imperative that the brave Tasman Mines workers maintain some revenue for our battered forces and for repatriation. There is no scientific evidence of the foxes burrowing more than a metre into the ground.'

Rumour has it that some foolhardy Foxies also remain in hiding in the impenetrable deep south-west, most likely out in the open.

‘These people are all wanted criminals,' the major-general said. ‘We can't hold off the operation because there is an unconfirmed rumour that four or five of them have chosen to stay. There will always be fifth columnists and bleeding hearts. When the going gets tough it is the Forest that gets things done, not these tragically, culpably misguided criminals. They'll have a long wait. Our commandos will enter the zone in January to check for any sign of fox and to check that collateral odour has cleared.'

And if Operation Foxglove doesn't work?

The major-general is reassuring.

‘In the unlikely event that Operation Foxglove is only partially successful, we will do everything we can to safeguard Tasmanians' wealth and preserve our unique way of life.'

He intimates that Tasman Forest would have to strip the fox of habitat. Clearing the south-west would also raise revenue for fox-proofing human environments and rebuilding a mines-based economy.

‘Tasmania, I assure you, will survive,' the major-general guaranteed. ‘It is bigger, older and richer than any of us can imagine.'

La Moustiquaire

Gillian Mears

The girl crouches in front of a fire about the size and circular width of the leaf she intends to wrap around some of the beans that she has stolen from the man. She has his little silver flask too. The veins of the leaf seem to glow with a green fire that's nothing to do with the burning twigs. If I could become very thin, she thinks, thinner even than the man, then I'd slip through this leaf to become its sap. The beans are on a metal spoon, smoothed by the innumerable tongues and fingers of girls who've accompanied the stockman.

This girl has been with the stockman for nearly five years but sometimes they are still such strangers the girl thinks it's as if they've been sealed off from each other in candlewax. On other occasions, there's no separation between them. Being with the man then is like cantering on the smoothest horse imaginable. The man puts his nose against the girl's and holding only one nostril shut breathes out and in so that their breath becomes the breath of one creature – neither girl nor man but the animal whose shape she has seen only in dreams, or in the moving leaves of a tree against the stars. It has a horse's head but its ears are soft and round in a way that reminds the girl of the love poem the stockman once wrote. ‘La moustiquaire', the man said it was called. ‘For you,' he said, reciting, but the girl could understand nothing of it, as it was in the language he'd learned when he went away to the long ago war. Mosquito-net girl, he says it means. Mozzie, he calls her, or Ginny, the name he called the other girls.

Yet not even the night with the rodeo boy on the last full moon in town can equal what the girl feels for the old stockman. The man can't live much longer and although she hates the man more than she has ever hated anything, she also loves the man more than she has ever loved. With the boy she'd pretended to laugh at his jokes about old men but even as his hands were finding her again, she'd felt the pang of her betrayal. Wondering if the stockman was over his sickness, she'd suddenly lost all interest in doing anything more with that rodeo boy. Even as he was throwing his leg over like she was another of his rides for the day, she was wishing she was inside a mosquito net with the stockman, listening to him reading.

*

The girl sighs. Already it's light enough to see a line of trees about fifty horse lengths to the right. Hovering in this way between day and night, the land looks downy, as if old stockmen have multiplied out there and lain down with their finely haired shoulders turned towards the sky. The three horses are tethered near another tree and look over. She waves a hand at them, trying to convey that she won't get to them for ages.

At least there are no mosquitoes here. The girl bows her head. It isn't often when they travel away from the town that she doesn't have to stay up all night with the switch made of wild grass, waving mosquitoes off the man.

The old travelling net rotted about a year ago and although it could've easily been replaced, now the man prefers to call the girl, La Moustiquaire. Or ‘Ginny,' he calls, stretching her out over him as if her skinny limbs are cotton net. He jokes that girls like her are more beautiful when tired, with the purple skin under the eyes deepening in the way of the coast at dusk. ‘Your father must've been one of those really black blackfellas,' he speculates, but she won't ever say who that father might have been or where he got to or if she even remembers him.

*

She mashes the beans into a paste and pinches some salt out. Her hands come together. ‘Thank you beans. Thank you leaf who is a little like me. Thank you God.' She wraps the leaf into a parcel and eats.

For a moment the girl's jaw stops chewing and with alarm she listens. The air has filled with the moaning noise of insects. Then she looks up and grins. For it isn't mosquitoes after all. She's sitting under a tree full of flowers and it's just bees, floating around the yellow blossoms.

Everything seems to be playing with me! she laughs. In a spiderweb there seems to be a heart shape on a string. And look at the sun! The more she stares, the more the sun pokes out its tongue. Even the sun desires me, she thinks, and then worried by the brazenness of this thought, she picks up the hip flask.

The rum almost instantly dries out all extraneous thoughts. So that's why the man has never allowed her any. She tips it into her mouth again and rocks back on her heels. Selfish, selfish, she thinks. Crazy old slutfish. She utters a few more obscene words and suddenly hopes that when she returns to the tent, the man will not want to get up immediately but will order her to take off her clothes and lie down on the square of blue cloth. I will pretend I'm with the boy. I will suck his old so-and-so until it goes foamy like the sea. Although she hasn't seen the boy for a while, she feels he isn't far away and that his face, smiling this way, contains all the haziness of a summer.

As the vision of the boy fades, she drinks all the rum and lies down. Suddenly she feels the mixed animal whose name she doesn't know is very close. It half hops, half runs but no, it is clearly a young bridal veil wallaby, she sees that now. White people are killing wallabies with knives and clubs. It's the time of blood and in the distance she can hear human babies crying. She knows they are babies with skin as black as her own and that like the wallabies, they're going to be harmed.

Oh, but it's too much. White women laugh and show their teeth. Even though they are only watching their men, the girl sees the power that the killing bestows. Under their dresses, she senses their breasts becoming even whiter, like huge dampers rising, threatening to smother the land altogether. She sees that the killing makes them powerful in the same way she feels power over all the mosquitoes she's destined to kill, or the mice in the horse's oats whose tails she sometimes seizes, swinging their heads against a stone with a sharp crack.

When she kills mice the stockman smiles and loves her and says she's like a bloody good dog. Good at anything. His best Ginny ever. And he tousles her hair like it is indeed the ruff of a dog.

The girl sits up and spits. The twig fire's gone out. It's time to creep back to the old man's tent. First she goes across to the horses, who prick their ears hopeful of an early feed. She scratches their tails instead and the favourite spot behind the wither and tells them that probably by this time tomorrow, they'll be back in town. ‘There,' she says, pulling off two bottle ticks, ‘that must feel better.' She licks her horse's neck where the salt from yesterday's sweat has gathered, in the hope that it'll hide the taste of her mouth.

When the girl ducks down into the tent, she sees with horror that the stockman is as if carpeted in mosquitoes. He has come out from his cover, the better it seems to feed the numerous mosquitoes that have been feasting in the tent. Panic-struck, she picks up her switch but it's of utterly no use. It's simply a miracle that the man sleeps on through such moaning. Surely there can only be one explanation. The man has fallen into that which he has always most dreaded. He's in the mosquito fever from which there is no return.

The mosquitoes, at the presence of the girl, rise for a moment like little blood suns, like a multitude of demon spirits with fiery gold wings and red bellies. ‘But I am to die first,' she says. The stockman has always said this. That it's the fate of her race. That if she leaves him she'll end up buried young in a shallow reserve grave the dogs'll dig up. She utters the man's name which even though it is ridiculous and ill-suited is the only one she has to use.

The girl puts her mouth onto the man's but there is no response. The girl slaps the man and shouts that at the very least he could've fallen into a normal fever first. ‘They'll think I killed you and stole your booze and bible.' The girl lets forth a volley of violent words. The man seems deep in his own breath and has tucked his hands into his armpits in the way of a sick bird.