Salt

by Bruce Pascoe

  Coming back down the river I kept a lookout for the fox. She was still there, hunkered down on the sandspit. As I had passed the first time I noticed a plover sitting on eggs on the downstream end of the sand island and thought it typical fox behaviour to sneak out onto the sand and outlast the plover’s indignation. This time, two dotterels were running backward and forwards just metres from the fox’s nose, desperate to distract attention from their young. They must have had a nest there too.

  I watched the fox to see if it would react. I cast a line to make the sinker splash as close to the animal as I could manage. I saw the ears twitch to the sound, but it showed no other reaction. Cunning bastard, I thought, pretending it’s not there. Typical fox.

  So I stepped out of my boat, Nadgee III, and waded to the island. I saw the ears rotate towards the sound of my steps.

  There was a good boondie on the sand and I picked it up, not willing to be attacked by a cornered fox. It got to its feet and faced me, swaying slightly before it tottered and almost fell, still trying to look defiant and strong. But it wasn’t strong; it was a sick fox. If it was fishing for mullet, this was the act of a desperate animal, not the invention of artful adaption. The expenditure of energy in becoming wet and cold could hardly justify the potential catch. No, this was just a sick fox, probably bleeding to death from ingesting a fox bait, which are almost pure warfarin, the haemorrhaging agent with which we poison rats.

  The golden eyes could barely focus, but she knew my intent. She avoided the first swing of the club by the merest turn of her head, but I collected it with the returning pendulum and cracked that fine skull. Blood gushed from its ears and nose. The warfarin was already well into its work.

  I returned to my boat burdened with sorrow. I’d misjudged her with my prejudice, even inclining towards admiration for fox cunning and innovation instead of reading her actions for what they were, dying movements. We’re meant to kill foxes, but are we meant to cause them such slow agony? And her teats were hanging, too. Was there more agony to come? Cubs slowly succumbing to a starving sleep. As I succumbed to my own sleeplessness, estranged from the sleeper beside me.

  So, I bought the old farm where Geoff shot himself. I got rid of the stained carpet and patched the 22-millimetre hole in the ceiling. I now sit beside Geoff’s fire with my two dogs bookending my knees as I dream of foxes, wild red-haired girls, fish and starvation.

  I’m sorry not to visit you more, old mate, sorry to be tardy in the mere return of a phone call, but the river is such a demanding home. She insists you bear witness. As you have just done.

  REAPING SEEDS OF DISCONTENT

  We were stranded on a heathland west of Shipwreck Creek like an unhappy family of arthritic brolgas. Our mission had been to find a rare banksia, and our success had been achieved so quickly we were faced with the prospect of returning before we’d even popped the plugs on our battered vacuum flasks.

  We stood there surveying the scene of our triumph in doleful exhilaration. We were boffins mostly, so the emotion came as easily to us as our woeful choice of tailors.

  One of the thrill-seekers swept his cap across the tops of the grass. He’d received the hat during a Bi-Lo grocery-chain promotion; you can’t look a free cap in the peak, so it had become part of his ensemble.

  ‘What’s this?’ he hooted mournfully as we all looked into his cap, wishing it was us who’d been there the day Bi-Lo went mad with generosity. It was full of seed.

  ‘Themeda triandra,’ another of the thrill-seekers murmured. ‘Kangaroo grass.’

  The brolgas moved on, planning a grand celebration of thermos coffee on the beach. I dawdled behind them, not wanting to get involved too early in the shenanigans, and repeated Bi-Lo’s action with my own cap, found on the river bank after the 2009 flood.

  My hat was full of seed, too, and I looked around at the uniform height of the grass heads. Growing through the heath and banksia was a monoculture of kangaroo grass, all the same height and nearly all maturing its seed at the same time. If twenty of you stretched out in line with, let’s say, coolamons, you could harvest this 200-acre field in three or four days.

  That’s too much seed to eat all at once, but if you milled the grain and stored the flour you could eat it later. Giles and Mitchell had found such stores on their Australian explorations, Gregory had seen fields being sowed and irrigated, and Sturt had witnessed the grinding process.

  I’ve been walking this heath since 1974 looking for orchids, tawny-crowned honeyeaters, banksias, ground parrots and the sort of stuff that interests people who wear second-hand hats. I should have noticed this grass before, should have wondered why it was so predominant, why it was seeding all at once. But I didn’t. I’d been educated in Australia, where we train our minds not to think of stuff like that, preferring instead to be excited by rare sightings of a dull green parrot.

  The white history of Australia is so pervasive, and laden so thoroughly with warm platitudes of self-congratulation, that the image of the Australian as a good-natured knockabout humourist has seeded our literature and society. The effect is so comprehensive that any questioning of the national character is met with incredulity, followed by venom. The letters pages of all national newspapers were whipped into a froth of indignation once when it was suggested in a school curriculum that Australia was invaded rather than settled. We like the word ‘settled’ for its benign passivity.

  I swallowed that history hook, line and sinker, but the gruff teachings and questions of the Elders eroded that confidence. I began to question everything, especially those things Australians claimed to know about Australia. We had just walked through a field of harvest, but a field where the harvesters had been discouraged from their labour 170 years ago. Discouraged by murder.

  The image of the hat full of grain stayed with me. And when at last I began to investigate the real Aboriginal economy so frankly described by the explorers, I remembered the ugly hat. I’d been growing murrnong grass for five years by then, and the Barkindji, Latji Latji and Mutti Mutti had shown me how to make bread from Panicum decompositum in the sand dunes of Lake Mungo.

  I went back to the heathland, eschewing the charms of parrots and obscure banksia, and stripped the heads of the Themeda triandra. I posted the grain to a mate whose edgy glee comes from milling the seed of grasses. I knew the first time I met him that he knew what he was doing because he was still driving his mother-in-law’s 1986 Mercedes that gloried in a dashboard cracked like a surfer’s lips and decorated by enough tartan rugs to keep the Highlands happy for a decade.

  Uncle Mercedes produced 500 grams of wholemeal flour and 200 of more refined flour from three kilograms of seed heads. The flour was dark but smelt like a late summer field at dusk, earthy and warm, and tasted rich and fruity. But this old man was of such natural innocence that he spread it on a coffee table and began to separate it with a pencil. I looked about for the narcotics police, but old Mercedes was lost in concentration as he marvelled at what had been elicited from unfashionable grain. Too crude, too small, too Australian.

  Next day, my wife, Lyn, the only orchid boffin I know who can walk into a bush paddock looking like Shelley Ware from The Marngrook Footy Show, blended the Themeda flour with white flour and combined them with her starter yeast and baked a loaf of bread. I was nervous. I chewed a corner off the loaf, and my heart leapt. It was beautiful and had the unmistakable perfume and flavour of the kangaroo grass.

  We had bread of exceptional taste, and even considering the proportion of conventional flour with which it was combined, it meant that a new agricultural industry could be created on the back of a grass that needs no more water or fertility than our climate and soils provide naturally. A plant domesticated and acclimatised for the land – why had we spent 220 years refusing to eat what the First Australians ate? Spleen or ignorance?

  In the future, millionaires are going to be made by growing and merchandising murrnong and kangaroo grass, but I hope some of them are Aboriginal. Mick Dodso
n assures me that Monsanto makes it impossible for Indigenous people to take advantage of the intellectual property invested in their foods, but the tiny second-hand hatman of my soul believes that maybe Australians are ready to acknowledge the whole history of their country. After all, it can’t be as hard to achieve as Richmond winning a premiership. The local South Coast Aboriginal food communities plan to harvest Themeda and market flour under their own brand.

  Please, God, let Australia remember who domesticated this grain and invented bread 50,000 years before anyone else on the earth. We won’t get many better chances to come together in friendship.

  But remember that you can’t eat our food if you can’t swallow our history.

  THYLACINE

  In the Australian bush at night, you could find a lost sixpence or the feldspar in a piece of quartz; you could find the buckle from a dog’s collar or a sooty owl in a tree. But you’d never find a pound note or an ant, and you’d never find an old sepia photograph, or why things are the way they are, although men will look for it there, some of them all of their lives.

  And so Douglas was looking again, even though he’d told his brother he was going to check on the chooks. That cold winter luminescence shone with such a fierce white light. Ah, it’s a cold star – a cold star bearing the steely light of a cold moon, bearing that light without blinking, allowing it to reveal old sixpences and feldspar, dog’s buckles and sooty owls, but very little else. More than enough light for some things, but not enough for vision. Old iron shines like new milled steel, a shovel blade glints sharp from the work in gravelly soil, trees shimmer like chandeliers, the dam like a disc of stamped plate. All these old things gleam anew. The barbed wire’s rusty knots glisten with frost, spider’s webs are jewelled like the most precious things hung from the pale necks of the world’s most desirable women.

  Douglas checked the chooks and they stared back at him. Stupid chooks. He closed his fingers around the neck of a hen, and it blinked one eye but didn’t move.

  He checked the wire where he’d made the repair; it was still intact. Six chooks they’d lost, and not a murmur. No feathers. No wild cackles. No fox dashing about in panic and blood lust. Just a chook off the roost and a neat hole in the wire. Douglas didn’t know this animal. Clarrie said a dingo or a native cat, but Douglas knew he didn’t believe it himself. Clarrie knew the bush better than that, but he was the sort of bloke who always needed to propose a solution even if he knew it was wrong; anything to fill a gap.

  When they’d found the human skulls, Clarrie had said it was just old-timers caught in a fire, even though he must have seen the strangeness of the sockets. Old Pearson had died out in the bush, killed by a tree that slipped back off its stump and drove his leg into the ground. Pinned him there. The bull ants stripped him clean. Clarrie had seen Pearson’s skull and must have seen the difference in these others, but he just rolled them away with his boot and said it must have been two old-timers. Clarrie was like that.

  Douglas saw the stones but didn’t bother to tell Clarrie; he’d only argue back. So he’d returned later and picked them up and seen how the long one matched the hollow in the flat one. Douglas placed them in the crook of a tree near where the skulls had been found. Where he could put his hands on them again.

  The two brothers got on alright. They could put in a row of fence posts in a day and say no more than was needed to accomplish the task – and to put in a row of stringybark posts you don’t need to say a lot. There’s holes and posts and a straight line. If the posts ram tight, and the eye slips along the flat faces of each post, the job’s done.

  Douglas didn’t need people. He sold the tickets at the local dance because it meant you could stand out on the verandah and listen to the blokes yarn and maybe add your piece about the last flood, but it was a way of meeting people without going through the bother of trying to balance a noisy china cup on a saucer and think of something to say at the same time.

  And the women always made him nervous. And dancing. Dancing was plain impossible. He watched other blokes dance, blokes like him, bush workers, timber millers, cow cockies, and yet they could get around; some of them just glided about.

  He watched the women’s bodies like the other men, but he’d never really seen one he wanted. During national service the boys had played up a bit, and that time he’d gone up to Candelo with the cricket team he didn’t come back for three days. But not anyone you’d want to marry, stay with always; and anyway, who’d have him? Short, freckly bloke on a broken-down dry ridge farm. Women round here knew where the gravel pits were.

  He’d never asked Clarrie. He’d never asked Clarrie anything much. Clarrie wasn’t the sort of bloke you asked anything of. He guessed that Clarrie had knocked about a bit. Those trips to Bombala to sell cows sometimes took a while, but Clarrie never seemed … never seemed lonely or anything. Clarrie always had everything worked out. Douglas thought he’d know if anything worried his brother. When the old man had died, Douglas had watched, stunned, as tears dropped from his brother’s eyes. Clarrie had wiped his face with a rag and said, ‘Dad taught me everything. All I know about the bush and that. That’s all,’ and again he had plunged his spade into the broken clay of the grave.

  They got on alright, but there were times when Douglas liked to get away. The nights at the dances, the other blokes and the music, watching the women – it was just something different. And nights like this, with the cold moonlight.

  He didn’t tell Clarrie, you couldn’t, but he knew some poems by heart. All the schoolbooks were still on the shelf. Probably never occurred to Clarrie to throw them out. The sixth-grade reader, Modern Short Stories and that book of French poems that came with their lounge suite at the clearing sale.

  He didn’t feel like it tonight, but sometimes he’d said those poems looking over the dam and down to the river: ‘Slowly, silently, now the moon / walks the night in her silver shoon …’ Shoon, shoon. He’d worked out that it must be shoes. Their teacher had just expected them to know, but then she was the sort of jackass who’d never seen the paws of a sleeping dog in the frosty moonlight. How many people had?

  He’d worked out how to say some of the French poems, too. He’d looked in amazement at the sheet music while cleaning up after a dance one night as a folded page fell from the back of a book, with the words ‘non, je ne regrette rien’. He wondered what it meant, but he found ‘alouette, gentille alouette’, and suddenly the words and the song snapped to the front of his brain and he turned back to ‘non, je ne regrette rien’, and he worked out how most of the words must sound; but he’d never told Clarrie. Clarrie wasn’t the sort of bloke you could.

  What was that?

  He didn’t move. He didn’t even let his heart beat any differently after its initial hesitation. He could feel the hair on his shoulders and across his neck edging upwards, but he didn’t move.

  There it was again. A growl like he’d never heard before. He didn’t move his head, but his eyes swivelled and saw it almost straightaway. After all, he was a bushman, and this was his yard, and so his eyes found the strange object in it instantly. And look at it! What an animal!

  The beast had been looking at the house but felt the man’s eyes find his own, and they looked at each other, and the barbs of glance hooked in eye flesh. Memories and visions are made thus.

  The animal was gone in the next instant, and Douglas knew he’d be off, but he followed him to the edge of the timber and stopped by the fence. Douglas spoke and his voice, clear and hard in the sharp air, chased and found the beast. Je vous regarde – I saw you, dog, or … wolf. That’s what you are. I saw you, tiger dog. Thylacine.’ What a word to pitch into the moonlight.

  Even as it ran, the animal heard the yelling and the strange word that was its name, and the sound would stay. Thylacine! It stood on the dry ridge among the shards of quartz and swung its heavy head to look down into the valley, knowing it was safe. Surely nothing could spirit itself through time so quickly. But a voice could,
and did again.

  ‘I know you’re up there, tiger. I saw you.’

  The two knew each other. The wolf would remember the voice and the man would never forget the beast. In this universe of beings, these two were fused by the light of a silver moon. Both hearts beat; the tiger on the ridge, the man in the valley.

  ‘I saw you, tiger.’

  There are some things, the man knew, that could never be denied. A man’s spirit is built thus.

  But animals are as logical as men, and Douglas had stood out in the bush where he knew the tiger must pass. The feldspar shone in the shafts of moonlight, the eucalypt leaves hung like small, bright scimitars of snipped tin, and the dog was there. Douglas could feel its presence by the way his hair crept beneath his collar.

  ‘I know you’re there, dog.’

  At the first word, before the muscles of the legs had flung the bones into flight, the animal’s eyes had seen the other’s eyes above where the voice had come out of the moonshine.

  ‘I saw you, Thylacine. You can’t deny that.’

  Some nights, man’s logic and beast’s logic diverged. The man knew he’d keep seeing it, although not so close to the house again. Chickens weren’t that attractive. Not to a wild animal. Foxes and chickens were built for each other, but Tasmanian tigers – well, they could take chickens or leave them, and when men were around, they left them.

  But some nights, out of the bush came that quiet sound. No chase, no guns, just the sound. You looked out for things like that. You didn’t get too close to snakes, you kept out of the way of eagles, and, especially, you kept out of the way of men. But this one kept on being there. You never heard it; it was always where you couldn’t smell it. And then, just that noise, not growling, just the same quiet sounds. No harm came, but you avoided things like that, if you could. It was better without the moon. The man wasn’t there without the moon.