Walkabout (12 page)

They had gone first to the lagoons: to the chain of looping billabongs, fed by underground springs, that lay like a string of sapphires spilt into the hollow of the valley. At first they'd had eyes for nothing but the water: the clear-blue, longed-for water, that in a few wonderful moments took the harshness out of their voices, the aching out of their throats, and the fear out of their hearts.

Then they had noticed the birds.

They were everywhere: in water and reeds, trees and sky; and they were quite fearless. The children stared at them, wandered among them, watched and
observed them with a wonderment that increased with every hour of every day.

They saw the wood-ducks; the ducks that nest in trees; that carry their young to water by the scruff of their necks, as a cat carries her kittens. They saw the tail-less swamp coots, nibbling wild celery as they floated by on self-made rafts. They saw the snake-birds, with their long rubbery necks and pointed-dagger bills. And the jacaras – the legendary Jesus-birds – walking the water on their long, disproportionate toes (that use the fragile underwater lily-leaves as stepping-stones). They saw dabchicks and zebra-ducks: marsh-bitterns and pelicans. And late one evening they saw the dance of the brolgas.

They were looking for a place to camp when Peter saw them: a cluster of eight or nine long-billed, stalk-like birds, slim, silver-grey, and elegant, standing one-legged on the water's edge. As the children watched them they saw no sign; but suddenly – as if at a clearly understood command – the brolgas came to life, moved gracefully into a circle. One bird took up position in the centre. He was the leader: the leader of the ritual dance. Opening wide his wings, he began a stately pirouette, a slow-motion quadrille. The others followed his lead; in stylized step they pranced solemnly around the circle, their feet moving in perfect time, their wings rising and falling to the beat of unheard music. The dance went on for several minutes – more than five, less than ten – then, quite suddenly, it ended. As if at another command the brolgas broke circle, moved into a random duster, and
took up their original one-legged stance gazing peacefully across the lagoon. The children passed within six feet of them, but they never turned their heads.

And the birds of the forest were as strange and wonderful as the birds of the lagoons.

The children never tired of watching them. They saw the mistletoe birds planting their crops: plastering tree trunks with the reeds of the parasites that would later provide them with food. They saw the hawks fanning their nests, bringing their eggs to the requisite temperature for hatching; the butcher-birds stocking their larders, impaling live beetles, moths, and fledgelings on the thorns of the iron-bark; and the rifle-birds, gilding their basin-like nests with the cast-off skins of snakes.

Every sunrise and every sunset the bird songs were near-deafening: a diurnal cacophony of notes clear and limpid, bizarre and unmelodious. The soft cadences of pilot-birds, the wolf-wail of soldiers; the croon of yellow-bellies and the sandpapery scour of scissor-grinders. While at night even stranger sounds echoed among the moon-white trees. The cow-like moo of the bittern, the yap of the barking owl, the coo-ee of the brain-fever bird, and rising above them all the nightmarish scream of the channel-bill: a maniacal shriek which terrified the water rodents into scurrying flight, making them betray their presence to the hovering bird.

No less wonderful than the birds were the trees of the forest with their parasitic flowers and vines.

The children had been a little afraid of the forest at
first; it was so enormous; so dark and earthy-smelling, with tree trunks soaring skyward, and strange, evilly-fashioned plants choking each other to death in a slime of decomposing vegetation. To start with they had stayed on its edges, among maiden-blush of reddish brown and heartswood of emerald green. Then, becoming bolder, they ventured a little way in: to where sycamore vied with tulip-wood, and the cassias dug their quinine-producing roots deep into the fertile soil. And at last they dared the centre: the heart of the primeval wonderland.

Here they found a fantastic battleground of tree and creeper, parasite and vine; with the bodies of the vanquished decomposing in the humid soil. The trees soared skyward, slim and straight, seeking the life-giving sun. But around them, choking them to death, coiled the dodders – the predatory vines, sucking the nutriment out of their roots, gripping the trees with tentacles like tightening tourniquets. And intertwined with the dodders were the jikkas: headless, tail-less, rootless, vegetable snakes; growing on and on, from either end, wrapping their vampire arms around anything they touched.

But, as the children were quick to see, even such a charnel-house as the forest centre was not devoid of beauty – the staghorns, their leaves rearing skyward like the antlers of mating deer; the rock lilies, their bells as white as virgin snow; and the orchids, dangling like gossamer clouds out of the dark trees. They wandered through twisting tunnels, arcaded with vegetation through which the sun had never penetrated,
they smelt the rich humid soil which had never felt the stir of a drying wind. At first they were filled with awe and amazement, but eventually, after three or four days of exploration, they became as much at home in the forest as they had been in the desert.

Together they watched the ant-lion lying in wait for his prey, lurking at the base of his self-dug trap, waiting for a victim to come plunging in to his death. Together they watched the fisherman-spider, lowering his single thread baited with sweet-scented adhesive saliva; then when the bait was taken, hauling the thread in, hand over hand. They saw the stick-like praying-mantis, the blue-skinned, red-capped cassowary, and - on their third day in the valley – they saw the koala.

They were on the fringe of the forest, collecting hips from the bush-roses which grew in banks among the eucalyptus trees, the day Mary lost her dress.

‘Look!'

She pointed to one of the trees. Half-way down its smooth-grained trunk was a moving ball of silver-grey: a koala, shifting from tree to tree, from one supply of gum leaves to the next. Quietly the children crept to the foot of the eucalyptus. Slowly, steadily, one leg at a time, the koala descended.

It was a mother koala, and clinging to its back was a cub: a harmless, fist-sized teddy bear: fat, tufted-eared, button-eyed, and covered in smooth sheening fur.

When the bears were about three feet from the
ground, Peter darted suddenly round the trunk. He grabbed the cub by the scruff of its neck, jerked it off its mother's back, and thrust it into Mary's arms.

‘Bet you never had a doll as nice as that!' he grinned.

The mother bear was far too slow-witted to defend her offspring. But she didn't run away. She hung on to the eucalyptus, blinking her eyes in surprise. Then she started to moan: a low, pathetic, sobbing moan.

Mary's heart went out to her.

‘Peter, you beast! She wants her baby.'

She tried to hand the cub back; but its tiny claws were hooked tight on to her dress. The thin material, already rent and worn, gave way. There was a long ripping tear. The dress slid to her feet. The koala sobbed and moaned.

A week ago nothing more calamitous could have happened to the girl. But now, after her initial shock, she felt strangely unembarrassed: more concerned with the cub than with her nakedness. Kicking the remnants of her dress aside, she bent down and very gently returned the baby to its mother's back. Instantly the sobbing ceased. The mother koala looked round, blinked her eyes, licked her cub, climbed down the last three feet of trunk, and waddled off to another eucalyptus.

‘Poor thing 1' Mary said. ‘You oughta known better, Pete.'

When, after a fashion, the reed hut had been completed, the children moved on. Mary would have been happy to stay; but Peter was eager to explore the rest of the valley.

That evening they came to a bend in the lagoon, and rounding this, saw ahead of them the valley-end: a sheer precipice of granite, and at its base a dark tunnel out of which an underground river flowed in a smooth pouring torrent. About a mile from the end of the valley the river broadened out, forming a shallow reed-fringed lake, three-quarters of a mile across.

Here the children made camp beside the water's edge. They camped early, close to a patch of pink-tinted pipe-clay, agreeing to explore the precipice the following morning. Well before sundown they were eating rose hips and bauble nuts beside a blazing fire.

Then Peter discovered the clay. Discovered that, when moistened, it could be used for drawing; for drawing faces on the smooth lakeside rocks. He called Mary, and together brother and sister experimented with pieces of moistened clay. They found that it drew like chalk on a blackboard; and soon the lakeside rocks were covered with drawings: crude but evocative drawings: drawings that would have been a psychologist's delight.

After a few experimental dabs and smudges, the children settled down to their respective works of art. Peter drew koalas, lizards, and Jesus-birds: symbols of the new life. But Mary drew girls' faces framed with glamorous hair styles, dress designs that might have come out of Vogue, and strings of jewels like the
Fifth Avenue advertisements: symbols of the life that was past. And after a while she drew something else: something even more revealing: a house. A simple outline: one door; one window; one chimney; one pathway lined with flowers. Symbol of subconscious hopes and nightly dreams.

The sun dipped under the rim of the hills. The children left their drawings; they stretched out, side by side, in front of the fire. Darkness on velvet wings came flooding into the valley.

‘Coo-ee, coo-ee!' sang the brain-fever bird. Over and over again.

Down by the lake a bittern moo-ed among the reeds. A crescent moon lifted clear of the hills. The valley slept.

Next morning they smoothed out the ash of their fire. They were just starting off to explore the head of the valley when they saw the smoke. A thin spiral of wood-smoke, pencilling the skyline above the opposite shore of the lake.

T
HE
smoke rose lazily: a slender, blue-grey column, pencil straight. For a long time the children looked at it in silence.

Suddenly the column broke, changed to a succession of puffs: in sequences of three; one large, one medium, one small.

‘They're signalling, Pete.'

‘Yes.'

The boy looked first at the smoke then at his sister; he saw that her eyes were shining, her lips parted. In the ashes he traced a pattern with the toe of his foot.

‘You reckon we oughta answer ?'

She nodded, silently, with eyes for nothing but the smoke.

They raked over the ash, pushed in kindling wood, and soon there rose from beside the bed of pipe-day an answering column of bluish-grey, a misty spear stabbing the azure sky.

‘Fetch a branch, Mary. A big 'un, with lots of leaves.'

The girl knew what was wanted: something light enough to lift, but bulky enough to block off the smoke. Soon their column too was broken into a sequence of irregular puffs.

While the boy signalled, the girl watched; watched the farther shore of the lake. Suddenly she saw movement. She strained her eyes; but the figures she had momentarily caught sight of merged chameleon-like into the background of lush-growing reeds. For a while everything was very still. Then the figures appeared again; three ill-defined pin-points leaving the column of wood-smoke, coming down to the lagoon. The sunlight glinted on three fountains of spray, as the strangers dived into the lake. A second later three arrow-heads of white were moving slowly towards them across the sunlit water.

‘They're coming, Pete.'

The boy left the fire. Came and stood by his sister. Saw she was trembling. Took her hand.

‘Don't worry, Mary. I'll look after you.'

She squeezed his hand: gratefully.

‘You reckon they're white men, Pete? Or black, like the darkie?'