The Nargun and the Stars

by Patricia Wrightson

  As it turned out, there was nothing he could do except pass a tool and sometimes hold the end of a wire, but Charlie seemed to find this very helpful. ‘Say the word when you’ve had enough,’ he said, ‘and I’ll put the saddle back on Pet for you. She’ll take you home and glad of the chance.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ grunted Simon. He knew ‘thank you’ would have been better, so he added, ‘Which is your land?’

  ‘This is one boundary,’ said Charlie, patting a post. ‘It takes you down to the road. But up by the swamp the road’s got Wongadilla on both sides of it. To the top of the range and a bit down the other side, about five thousand acres. Not enough, and most of it standing on end.’ He looked down the mountain with exasperated pride and then sideways at Simon. His lined brown cheeks became blotched with pink. He made a sort of noise and said quickly, ‘It’ll be yours some day if you want it.’

  Simon was terrified. To own this plunging country with its blue heights and cream-coloured flanks and green depths – and the swamp. He headed off up the slope to recover.

  He found he had started to climb the forehead of the mountain, and it was such hard work that he kept on. Sometimes he went up sideways by narrow ledges, sometimes climbing rocks and using hands as well as feet. Sometimes he could reach up to a hold on a bush or tree and pull himself higher. Once the shouting of the bulldozer stopped, and he planted himself against a rock to look down. The mountain sheltered him from the wind, though he could still hear it.

  The bulldozer was hidden by the ledge where Charlie was working, but he saw two men come from the forest and run back out of sight. Silence – then that hard, flat boom! - and very slowly a tall treetop began to sway over. It made a great sweep across the forest that crowded behind it: slowly, down and down. There seemed to be no force in it, no reason for the cracking of branches and crying of leaves. The crash at the end seemed to go on for seconds while branches bounced and sprang. It was something to see and remember, the felling of a big tree. Simon hardly noticed himself climbing again till he found himself standing upright on humpy ground fringed with trees.

  The wind leapt at him again and took away the little breath he had. This was the top, the very highest place on the mountain; he was standing on the top of Wongadilla. He would have liked to shout to it: ‘I’m up here! I’m on top of you!’ But something in the silence of the ridges and spurs all around – a great quiet, like a roomful of giants thinking – kept him quiet too.

  He walked across the hump, clambered down and around it a bit, and found that it dropped into a gully. He remembered the track snaking up the mountain between fence and gully: that was this gully, lower down where it was shallower. Climbing down into it he thought that he was getting to know the place a bit, and was pleased with himself. He went down the gully to what he guessed was about Charlie’s level. It was sheltered and quiet; he sat down to rest beside a great boulder that wore a blue-green lichen like a round lace mat.

  Charlie must know every bit of Wongadilla, all the part that Simon had never seen. Even Edie. She had lived here all her life, though she never seemed to leave the house now. They must know where the creek started. Ages ago they must have played in the swamp. He picked up a stick and scratched his name in the lichen on the big rock: simon. There was no room for any more, so he scratched brent in another lichen on a small stone near the rock.

  Suddenly he felt that this was something he should not have done – to scratch his name on the rocks of Wongadilla. Now the gully called to him silently: simon brent! He got up quickly and climbed out into the wind. The bulldozer had stopped, and it was Charlie who was calling.

  ‘Simey!’

  He was supposed to be helping Charlie! He climbed round the mountain as fast as he could – but it was only time for a cup of tea. Charlie had taken a large flask from a bag strapped to his saddle and was pouring tea into mugs. Down on the ridge the bulldozer men were also sitting in the shade with mugs.

  ‘Had a good scramble?’ said Charlie. ‘Better have one of Edie’s coconut biscuits, she’ll be hurt if we take them home.’

  After that Simon stayed on duty, wordlessly holding wire and passing tools, keeping an eye on the bulldozer. When they stopped for the lunch that Edie had packed the other men stopped too, as if there were some rule about everyone stopping at once. Even when the fence was finished early, and Charlie was leading the way down the mountain with the sack of tools in front of him on the saddle, the bulldozer stopped too. Simon heard again the waiting silence.

  It was much worse riding down the mountain than up. At every turn of the track it was like stepping down from the sky. Charlie said it was hard on the horses too. It was good to reach easier slopes where you could see the ground in front and where, as the track came close to the fence, Simon saw the bulldozer parked for the night. Its driver, a blunt young man in a navy singlet and shorts, called out to them.

  ‘Knock-off time?’ shouted the bulldozer man. Leaning on the top wire of the fence he added, ‘Bit windy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Getting up,’ roared Charlie in reply. ‘Be a bit rough tonight.’

  ‘A bit rough last night too!’

  Charlie looked surprised and reined in. Pet stopped obediently behind. ‘Eh?’ said Charlie. ‘A bit of a breeze, that’s all.’ There was a pause during which Charlie and the bulldozer man eyed each other in grave surprise like well-bred dogs. Simon took this chance to have a close look at the bulldozer.

  Those two things like brakes were really the steering, of course; one of them for each track. And those were the hydraulics, like gears, on the right. The chimney sticking up in front was really the exhaust, with the breadth of the muffler interrupting it. What would she sound like if the exhaust broke off under the muffler? Maybe it would, with luck; it looked a bit rusty. He remembered the shouting of the engine while it was still muffled, with the thin demon shrieking of the metal tracks (for lack of oil) rising above it; and he tried to imagine the monstrous din of the same engine without its muffler.

  ‘Thought it was blowing hard,’ the bulldozer man was saying to Charlie. ‘The old ’dozer was covered in rubbish this morning – took me ten minutes to clean her out.’

  ‘That right?’ said Charlie politely.

  ‘Twigs, dead wood, branches – all small stuff. I thought, “There’s been a bit of wind”’

  ‘We never noticed any,’ said Charlie. ‘Nothing else disturbed?’

  ‘Just the ’dozer. Funny, that.’

  They exchanged nods, and Charlie and Simon rode on. ‘Possums,’ Charlie confided to Simon. ‘He’s left it under a tree full of possums.’

  When they reached the house Edie was taking washing in. She had chained the clothes hoist to a post like a dog, to keep it from whirling round and swinging her off her feet. Even so, it tugged at the chain and jerked her to and fro. She looked like a ruffled hen with its feathers blown the wrong way. A pillow slip flapped off into a bush and Simon had to chase it and bring it back.

  ‘Thanks, Simey,’ she said, breathing hard. ‘That’s the last. The kettle’s boiling and we could all do with a cup.’

  She was surprised that the fence was finished, and Charlie said that an extra man made the difference and it was a change having company. Simon turned pink, knowing he had not deserved this praise; so after the tea he went out again and passed things wordlessly while all the animals were fed.

  As darkness came the wind grew stronger. It came leaping from the western ridge and across the gully to shove at the house and spill past. It pushed at windows, cried in telephone wires, and blew sirens round the roof. It got into the ceiling and under the floor and drew the fire up the chimney like a corkscrew. It made the mat in Simon’s room rise stealthily and creep about the floor. And whenever it paused for breath there was another sound: the sad, high howling of last night, much clearer now; high over the house and all around, everywhere and nowhere. It made Edie restless. She put down her knitting and shuffled her knobbly feet until Charlie lowered yeste
rday’s paper and looked at her over its edge.

  All that night the wind blew. Simon lay in the dark and listened: to the sirens in the roof, and the stealthy slither of the mat along his floor, and the crying of the pine outside the window. Now and then in the night he woke and heard them still.

  Towards morning the flood of wind ebbed away. The mat lay crumpled and still. The crying of the pine softened to a tall whisper against the stars. But that other sound, the howling like wild animals calling far away, swept over and round the house till dawn. The moon had set, but spindly shadows went flickering against the stars. One of them sprang from the top of the pine and was lost in the bulk of an ironbark thirty feet away.

  From tree to tree the shadows went, leaping like sugar-gliders. They sprang from the highest branches, spreading their sticklike arms wide. Their long straggling beards streamed as they floated down to the trunks of farther trees, and the howling went with them. The spindly shadows swept over and round the house while Simon slept: the ancient Turongs of the fallen forest, looking for new homes.

  Perhaps Simon heard them in his sleep, for he woke late again when Charlie was already away ‘around the sheep’. At breakfast he remarked rather awkwardly that he thought he would go to the swamp.

  Edie observed that he would like to take his lunch and have a decent day, and produced a lunch already cut from the refrigerator. She added that he would find old Pet saddled by the shed.

  Simon turned pink.

  ‘What if I – can’t manage her?’

  ‘Then you’ll be no worse off,’ said Edie calmly. ‘You can knot the reins so they won’t dangle and turn her loose. She’ll come home.’

  ‘But what if I fall off?

  ‘You’ll have your work cut out – unless you stand on your head in the saddle. Suit yourself – no need to take her if you’d rather not. But she’ll stand for you all day if you throw the reins over a stump.’

  Simon rode old Pet, with his lunch in a bag buckled to the saddle. Edie showed him a useful stump to mount by and handed him a stick from a sapling near the gate.

  ‘You won’t have Surprise to keep her going today,’ she said. ‘She won’t move at all if you don’t have a stick.’

  She started Pet off with a slap on the rump and Simon aimed her in a general way up the ridge. It was stupid, he grumbled to himself, having to take Pet when it was such a short way. Why couldn’t they just let him walk? He liked walking.

  The wind was up again, but only in gusts. The bulldozer was shouting on the mountain, sometimes mixed with the screaming of the chain-saw and the long-drawn crack, swish, thud of falling timber. The sounds were blown away and came sweeping back like sheets on a clothesline. Pet went very slowly, sometimes stopping altogether till Simon switched at her rump with a stick. After a while it felt high and free to be riding alone to the swamp. The outlines of windswept hills were hard and clear and the sky behind them had a crystal shine. Shadows were sharp, and every leaf and twig exact. At the swamp the water was like rippled glass in the clear places. You could see the shape of the wind on it, in the windblown lines of moss and weed.

  Simon scrambled down on to a log, dropped Pet’s reins over a dead branch of it, and took off his shoes. He went straight to the bank at the far end, where dead purple-top rattled like castanets when the wind blew. He broke off a thick stalk of it and went down the bank to prod in the water.

  The deep hole was still out of reach. He stepped into the water at the edge, swishing in front with his stick until he could lean forward and reach into the hole. The stick was instantly twitched out of his hand and disappeared. He waited, watching for it to float to the surface. It didn’t.

  He went back to the bank for another stalk and tried all over again, watching closely for just one glimpse of whatever it was that had taken his stick. Nothing happened. He prodded and swished for some time, first in the water and then at dead flower-heads on the reeds fringing the hole. He teased a water-boatman with the tip of his stick till it paddled off in a frantic zig-zag. He trailed his stick towards another – and it was twitched out of his hand again and disappeared. The twitch was so forceful and sudden that it made him jump, but he saw nothing.

  He tried skittering a stick over the place as he had last time, but nothing happened. The creature in the swamp was not to be tricked; it preferred to trick Simon. ‘I don’t care, anyhow!’ he shouted, and went stamping back to the shallow end to look for specimens, and perhaps to think.

  The swamp-creature felt more alive and tricky than it had for a long time. Its yellow-green skin gleamed as it slid through the swamp, and its throat bulged with silent chuckles. A boy who thought he could trick a Potkoorok!

  When Simon was hungry he took his lunch up into the scrub. It was full of green-shadowed light and the sound of trees conversing with the wind. He sat on a wide terrace between roots, and was at once showered with falling twigs and leaves. ‘Hey!’ he said crossly, and brushed them off. Bulldozer noises were blown away and came billowing back. Whenever they were blown away a different sound was blown to him from the opposite direction, a distant grumbling and clanking that seemed familiar. He puzzled about that between eating Edie’s sandwiches and puzzling about the swamp-creature.

  From time to time another shower of leaves and twigs rained down. He thought it was from the wind. They only stung a little, so he didn’t bother to move. From time to time, too, there were rustlings of small paws scampering among leaves, but he could never see what made them.

  The last thing in his lunch-box was an apple. He had taken one bite of it when two ideas clicked into his mind. One was that the odd sound coming and going on the wind was a grader; there must be one working along the road somewhere. The moment he recognised it he was able to stop thinking about that, and the second idea took over: a creature that could not be tricked might be coaxed. He gathered up his things at once, and took his apple back to the far end of the swamp.

  He laid the apple delicately on a tuft of broken reeds just under water at the edge of the deep hole. Standing a little way back, he kept his eyes on the apple.

  Nothing happened. The wind blew and the weeds swung along its path. Now it blew the bulldozer noises to him, and now the clanking of the grader. It made a green surf of the forest on the mountain. Glancing at the forest, and from there along the mountain, Simon wondered if he could go by himself on old Pet to watch the bulldozer again … Not up the steep part, of course, but just below it; the bulldozer must be nearly through to there by now … Guiltily he looked down to the apple.

  It was gone. He had been tricked again. While he stared with his mouth open something was thrown that hit his shirt, splashed back into the water, and floated there. The apple-core.

  ‘You want to watch it!’ Simon shouted angrily – and then he saw it. Just for a second something large and yellow-green shone as it turned through the water, and a golden eye winked. Clearly he heard the swamp’s deep chuckle.

  The Potkoorok loved an apple.

  Simon pounced on the core. There were little tooth-marks on it. He was suddenly charmed and full of wonder. He sat on the bank for a long time, but he didn’t see it again.

  Instead, with a great deal of grumbling and clanking and fussing, round a corner and along the road came the grader.

  four

  The grader was a homely thing to see on the lonely loop of road below the scrub. Like every grader Simon had ever seen it was orange-yellow, long and lanky, slow, noisy and fussy. It fumbled along, blade clanking and grating on the gravel, and Simon ran round the swamp to the nearest point to watch.

  The grader also came to the nearest point. The driver, who had a long narrow face with a bristly chin, lifted two fingers in the greeting of country drivers. Then, instead of following the road around the loop, he began to turn the machine. It backed clumsily, crept around, backed again, with a lot more grumbling and clanking, to go back over the section of road it had just done. Simon was not surprised; he knew the habits of graders.
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  He was delighted to see that this one carried a warning sign on the end of its blade: grader. He grinned, wondering how you were supposed to think it could be anything else. It was a joke to share … with someone who would grin too, and not bother to explain that the sign really meant ‘Wide Load’ … with someone who wasn’t a stranger …

  The grader went away round the corner, fussing and fumbling out of sight round the hillside – and there it stopped. There was only the wind calling across the silence, bringing a chorus of bleating voices that must be sheep. Even the bulldozer had stopped, Simon realised. He supposed that the grader man too went back to town each night, leaving his grader parked somewhere off the road. He had just decided this when he heard a car start up and drive away: the soberfaced whiskery driver going home. When the sound of the car had faded Simon went walking along the road.

  He didn’t have to go very far. As he followed the road round the mountain’s curve the grader soon came in sight, tucked safely into the mouth of a shallow gully. Anyone driving past at night would hardly even see it. Simon admired its rakish leanness, and the sober way it wore its cabin roof. It had none of the blunt, hard strength of the bulldozer.

  He walked back looking at wheel-tracks in the gravel it had spread, and the ridge in the centre of the road that marked the end of the blade. In one of the wheel-tracks was a little grey-green shape with arms and legs stretched out like a swimmer’s. He bent over it: a small green swimmer from the swamp. The grader had run over a frog.

  The little cries of a thousand frogs came shrilling from the swamp. Simon picked this one up by a leg and carried it there. Killed on the road … the swamp could have it back. He placed it in the midst of a bull-grass tussock and drew the grass together above it. When he stood up something was there. Golden eyes, watching him. He knew what it was.

  The Potkoorok rose up slowly, water sliding off its green skin while it watched the boy. It stood about two feet tall with its webbed feet hidden in the swamp and its legs bent at the knee. Its golden eyes were old like the eyes of lizards, and its froglike face was sad for the dead frog. Because it was the face of a joker it looked comical with the wide mouth turned down. The Potkoorok had played its tricks on fishermen, men and boys, when the tribes were young; and in earlier times that the tribes had forgotten. It knew boys. For every ripple that glinted on the swamp the Potkoorok had known ten boys; but never one who returned a dead frog so gently to the swamp. It spoke to him with a sound like lapping water.