The First Voyage

by Allan Baillie

  But Stone didn’t want to go. She sat by Shufflewing’s grave with Waterlily, sifting sand with her hands, while the rest of us walked away. In the end, Fast Fish picked them up with his canoe and brought them to us while we were walking.

  Eagle Eye has chosen the path to Angry River against the path along the coast through the Crab tribe area, because he doesn’t want to give the Crab trouble with the Crocodiles. The Crocodiles are always chasing us, and if we go into Crab country, they may attack the Crab tribe as well as us. So we settle on walking along Angry River. It is not angry now though.

  I have seen that river roaring in the Wet, when you can stand on a distant rock and feel the power of the water through your feet. Then, the river churns between the long banks, with grey waves crashing into each other, and trees floating on its surface. But now, it is nothing more than lots of little waterholes, which the children love.

  Well, most of them.

  Waterlily splashes around in a little pool but never takes her eyes off Stone. Stone is working with the other gatherers on the rocks, but she keeps looking back towards the Snake River.

  The Wind strokes her necklace while watching Waterlily, then she looks at me, shrugs, and puts it on the little girl. Waterlily doesn’t look at them but, after a while, she touches the small shells.

  There are crab-eating monkeys around some of the pools, but the children and monkeys ignore each other. Except for one moment: a young monkey catches a crab, but then the crab catches the monkey’s long tail in its claw and they twirl around in the water as the children squeal with delight and clap their hands. Even Waterlily smiles. The other monkeys are watching the young monkey whirl around. Then the monkey lets go of the crab, and the crab immediately lets go of the monkey’s tail and drops on the rock. But it doesn’t move. The monkey looks around and sniffs the air with a bony frown. It moves away, defeated, and the crab shuffles under a rock.

  Fast Fish leaves his canoe on the sandy riverside and joins the hunters chopping light trees – Eagle Eye still wants to try to make a raft, but with different wood. I help.

  We start to make a raft with the trees, but it won’t work. Oh, they are better than the sinking black bamboos, but we have to use three layers of logs to support just two people, who are still wet all the time.

  And there is a problem with the tree-chopping. Fast Fish’s axe quickly goes blunt, and often the axe falls apart so he has to stop chopping to build it up again. Often he needs a new, sharp stone, which means finding a new, sharp stone. The other hunters’ axes are even worse.

  All of this can be tolerated; but other troubles cannot . . .

  The crash of the chopping axes rings through the brown stone around us, and the hills echo the sound to the mountains, and soon we hear a blare of the Buffalo Horn as an echo to the axes. Eagle Eye stops the chopping, but the damage is done – the Crocodiles know where we are.

  I try to work out from the sound how far away they are. It is a long way, but every time the Horn sounds it seems to get closer. I don’t want to shout about that, but I stare at Eagle Eye as though I am trying to force the words into his head.

  And then Eagle Eye sighs. ‘Maybe it is better that the Crocodiles have the Horn. At least we know where they are. We have to move into the mountains.’

  ‘The mountains now?,’ Fast Fish says. ‘What about those logs?’

  ‘We must leave them.’

  ‘What about my canoe?’

  Eagle Eye doesn’t say anything.

  ‘We can fight!’ Fast Fish is angry.

  Eagle Eye shakes his head. ‘We have children and we are so small in number. We have to move.’

  ‘And move and move. All the time.’

  ‘Yes. There is no other way.’

  Fast Fish points at the monkeys, ‘They are better fighters than us.’

  Fast Fish heaves rocks into his canoe until it sinks – he does not want the Crocodile warriors to have it – and we shuffle into the hills as the sound of the Horn gets closer to the beach.

  * * *

  We move towards the Sleeping Turtle Mountain while the Horn echoes in the hills, but the mountains are poor for food. Just a few yams, nuts and a mountain deer – which was a lucky shot with Burnt Earth’s spear. But even that gives us little food. It was only about as big as a pelican, but Burnt Earth is cocky as anything. The old wounded hunters eat like sharks, but Stone only nibbles. She is getting weak.

  We continue to climb around Sleeping Turtle Mountain, and find a spot where the sea can be seen through the trees. The waves on the beach look like ripples on a pond, and beyond that, the light shadows move across the water. And then there is the end of the world – nothing but white clouds touching the horizon.

  Eagle Eye looks at it for a long time. ‘It’s there. It’s there,’ he says.

  And then he decides we should go to Bird Lake.

  So we climb down Sleeping Turtle Mountain and pick our way through the Flying Lizards Forest. In the forest are big lizards with wings like a huge butterfly between their legs. We can see the wings flicker in the darkness of the forest, on the highest leaves. Waterlily is frightened by them – nobody likes them. Old Tortoise says that they are the spirits of dead Crocodile warriors.

  We are happy when we are at the end of the Flying Lizards Forest.

  * * *

  We cross the dry Monkey River – no water and no monkeys now – and move towards Climbing Perch Mountain. Old Tortoise and I see something like a giant rat drinking at a waterhole. It is very big – if it lifted up its body, its head would be at the same level as my head! I don’t want to think about that.

  Old Tortoise waves me sideways and we move silently towards the rat, but it looks at me. It blinks, and then it’s charging at me! Old Tortoise and I throw our spears together. And that is it.

  Back at camp, Old Tortoise tells everyone that my spear had got it, but Burnt Earth and Fast Fish don’t believe it. I don’t care. I’m just happy that huge rat was stopped before it got me. And I’m glad that Stone has got some meat.

  Rat meat is not as good as deer for taste – it’s tough like an old seagull – but there’s more of the rat and so the entire Yam tribe will be able to eat from it for two days.

  Waterlily keeps feeding Stone, and Stone is being helped along by Brown Moss and The Wind as she is too weak to walk alone. I keep thinking she will die soon.

  But suddenly, she changes. We move into the swamp on Bird Lake, and she starts to eat by herself and look around. She stares far away, to where Shufflewing’s grave is, and then turns to Waterlily.

  ‘Watch for the crocodiles, girl. The real ones,’ she says.

  I think they are her first words since the death of Shufflewing.

  There are a few crocodiles in the swamp, but they are frightened of us, a big group.

  We arrive at the lake at dusk. The only birds here are little ones that flit across the shallows.

  But we have finally stopped.

  ‘Where are the birds now?’ asks Burnt Earth the following morning.

  ‘And where is the lake?’ I say.

  We are looking at the Bird Lake and it isn’t much. Tiny birds shimmer like grasshoppers across the flat plain and the muddy hole that it has become. The lake seems to be sleeping in a long stretch of grey mud as a creek drips from it. We could catch mudskipper and climbing perch – a fish with little legs – from the creek, but that’s all. There are a few crocodiles lying in the mud like logs. They seem to be dead, but when a lizard comes over to the water, a fat crocodile begins to slide towards it.

  But Old Tortoise is ignoring the crocodiles. He is squatting on a rock over the black lake with a fat cockroach on his hook, which he carefully lowers with a small pebble tied to it to get the hook down to the bottom of the lake. That hook is his prize, better than Fast Fish’s axe, and even the canoe. Old Tortoise got his hook from working at a fish skeleton with pebbles until it was the right shape. And the line is plaited grass.

  Burnt Earth
stares at Old Tortoise’s dead line and the still water. ‘It is a lousy place.’

  ‘Wait,’ Eagle Eye says.

  ‘Wait for the Wet . . .’ Old Tortoise says.

  ‘The Wet . . .’ Burnt Earth frowns.

  Old Tortoise shakes his head. ‘There is no mystery in the Wet, the mystery is in how Eagle Eye knows when it comes.’ And he points at the dark clouds over the mountains.

  His hook catches a mudskipper.

  * * *

  The first thunder boom is so violent that a crocodile lifts its huge tail and crashes it down in the mud. Lightning flashes across the swelling clouds over the sullen mountains. Suddenly, I can smell dry earth, as if the ground is lifting to the storm, ready for the rain. The mountains shiver and disappear, the grass in the plain is flattened by cold wind, and then, the rain comes.

  The Yam become shadows. Burnt Earth turns into a shimmering ghost as water pours over me, everywhere. My hair, my face, my eyes, my back, my legs . . . I stand like a crane on a swamp and let the rain wash over me.

  But Stone has a better idea. She grabs Waterlily and dances with her on the yellow grass with her shell necklace clinking wildly.

  Then The Wind pulls me around, smiles at me and wobbles her body, so I wobble back. Old Tortoise gets a couple of dead sticks and clicks them with a rhythm that gets Burnt Earth dancing like a crab. I see Fast Fish’s wife, Moonlight, whisper in his ear. Fast Fish looks at her in shock, then amazement, grinning and dancing like a fat river fish with a spear in it.

  He stops and cocks an eyebrow at Eagle Eye. I thought Eagle Eye would shake his head at the silly display – after all, he is the Elder – but he becomes a crocodile with a swinging tail and terrible teeth. Waterlily does the right thing – she screams and hides from Eagle Eye between Stone’s legs – but she giggles.

  Old Tortoise slows down his beat and I look at the swelling lake and see a small bamboo raft drifting in the reeds. It is one of two yellow rafts that my pa and Shufflewing’s pa had built, although now it is grey. I can remember, though, my pa sprawled on his yellow raft . . .

  But I shake my head to get that out of my mind.

  I can hear the rhythm of Old Tortoise’s sticks softly beating. We haven’t heard the Horn since crossing the Monkey River, and so maybe this is a good spot to stay for a while.

  This is now, not then.

  I can’t stop the memories flooding back of Bird Lake back then – not when the Crocodile warriors were here at the Lake, but before that. When more birds were here.

  Yam tribe came over from Long Island to Bird Island and found a high cave with a skeleton of a huge rat. We didn’t touch the rat, but we lived in its cave for three moons. Pa painted a mountain spirit on the rocky wall in white ochre. ‘A great spirit for the cave,’ said Eagle Eye. I thought that spirit looked annoyed.

  We moved from Rat Cave to the Bird Lake, and it looked then like it did yesterday – low and muddy. And so Eagle Eye was thinking of calling it Leech Lake. But then the Wet came.

  I had experienced heavy rain many times before, but this was special. And so maybe, we thought, this place was special too.

  * * *

  The storm finally stops and we can see the distant Lizard Mountain so clearly that it feels like you could touch its peak. The rain has finished but the water hasn’t. The ripple of the water filters through the grass to find another ripple and another, forming many streams that flow to the lake.

  The lake water mixes with black soil, brown soil, yellow soil and streaks of red, and it is beginning to rise. Fast Fish is being watched by a crocodile as he rescues the bamboo raft. The crocodile doesn’t move; I think it is frightened by his angry glare.

  Another storm rolls in, and the lake is churning and lapping into the grass. Now we move as the lake fills and drowns some trees. But we get wet anyway.

  With the fourth storm come the birds . . . There are cormorants, snakebirds – called that because they swim like a snake – egrets, night herons, jacana, rails, wood sandpiper and ducks – lovely delicious ducks. Fast Fish paddles the bamboo raft over to them. The birds are hardly troubled by him, but suddenly the fish in the lake are alive, as if the rushing water has woken the perchlet, giant mottled eel, dusky sleeper, silver grunter and the guppy.

  Next come the birds from the ocean, as if they could smell the water from a place on the other side of the horizon. There are yellow, black and red cockatoos, long-toed stints, bowerbirds, greywaders, tiny blue wrens, channel-billed cuckoos, magpie-larks and the black-faced cuckoo shrikes – a flap of Shufflewings.

  Waterlily and her ma race after the blue wrens in the grass edge near the shallows of the lake. The wrens, with their bright cobalt-blue tails, explode from the grass as Waterlily tries to catch one of them. There is no reason for that – a wren is only a mouthful of feathers. But then I see the black-faced cuckoo shrike flop in the grass nearby, and I remember that Shufflewing had said The Wind was a blue wren.

  I start to tell Shufflewing that she is more like flying lizards when Eagle Eye catches me talking with the bird.

  He says, ‘Back, is he?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Good. It is a good place.’ He smiles. ‘Maybe Moonlight and Fast Fish can see their baby born here.’

  I grin back; I had worked it out before.

  ‘Maybe,’ I say.

  * * *

  Now the lake is drowning the grass and lapping into the swamp. I wade through the swamp and I feel my head tapped lightly. I touch my hair as I look up to see The Wind sprawled on a high branch in a tree that is covered in fungus, like giant butterflies clinging on to the trunk and branches. She is near the tree hollow, which holds a nest of yellow-crested cockatoos. I start to call to her but she shakes her head and pushes her hand against her mouth, so I shut up. She waves for me to climb up the tree.

  I think to myself, She always has a problem for the day. All the other gatherers are plucking eggs from the reed nests in the swamp, but she has to go and get eggs from a tall rotten tree, which could fall at any time. And now she wants me to see the cute chicks . . .

  But I put my spear against the tree and I climb to her.

  ‘What?’ I’m panting.

  I see there are two white eggs, hardly worth the climb. But The Wind points away from the nest to a dip in the flat area around the lake. There are Crocodile warriors in the dip. Many of them.

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  They have stopped blowing the Horn. Because they have broken it? Or because they are trying to sneak up to Yam tribe?

  Their Elder is getting them to hurl their spears at some trees, and he seems to dance when the spears hit.

  ‘They are practising,’ The Wind says.

  ‘They are aiming for us. We better tell Eagle Eye.’ I start to climb down, but The Wind grabs my arm.

  ‘Look!’

  Stone and Waterlily are wandering through the grass, looking for eggs, but they can’t see the Crocodile warriors over the rise. And they are getting closer . . .

  ‘What can we do?’

  I shout, ‘Stone!’

  She turns but it is too late.

  Waterlily runs up the rise and sees the warriors. She races back towards Stone, but the warriors have seen her and they hurry after her. Stone turns, sees her frightened daughter running, and quickly snatches her from the grass. She runs away from the rise – even though she can’t see the warriors, she knows something bad is coming.

  The Wind clutches my arm.

  The warriors reach the rise, wave their spears and run after Stone and Waterlily. Stone looks back and tries to speed up, but it is hopeless. The warriors have almost reached her. She puts Waterlily on the ground, pushes her to get her running, and then she hurls herself against the warriors. For a moment, the warriors move back from that wild woman, but it could not stay like that.

  The Wind doesn’t watch anymore and rushes down the dying tree.

  But I stay. I see a warrior jab his spear into Stone. I see
her fall in the grass. I can’t see anything more of her, only the other warriors thrusting their spears into the grass.

  I feel sick. I climb down, going over the fungus that is like giant butterflies, sucking the life of the tree.

  I think, Why are the Crocodiles doing this? Why?

  I kick the fungus all the way down.

  The Wind does better than me. As I jump from the tree, she catches Waterlily and gets her to me as the Crocodile warriors hunt for her. I grab my spear from the bottom of the tree and we move to the bushes.

  When two of the warriors get close, The Wind holds her hand against Waterlily’s mouth and presses the other against the jingling shell necklace. I raise my spear.

  The Crocodile Elder calls the warriors back, and we slip away.

  But Waterlily asks, ‘Where is my mother?’

  The Wind stares at me with eyes full of desperation.

  I say, ‘Ah, I don’t know . . .’

  The Wind says, ‘We’ll talk about it later.’

  And Waterlily slowly shakes her head. ‘Oh,’ she says with deep sadness.

  We find Fast Fish with Eagle Eye, a speared black duck tied around his waist. Brown Moss sees us and hurries from the shallows. She takes Waterlily away, talking very quietly to her.

  Eagle Eye watches Waterlily being led away and looks at The Wind’s eyes before he turns to me. ‘Crocodile?’

  I blink at him. He can’t already know what happened . . . But then I realise that he is talking about a real crocodile. ‘No, no, the Crocodile warriors.’

  ‘Here? Where?’

  I point back to the rise and I tell him and Fast Fish what I saw with Stone.

  Eagle Eye closes his eyes.

  ‘We have to fight!’ Fast Fish hisses.

  ‘Don’t you think I want to fight them? Take a few Yam hunters in the swamp at night and make them frightened of us,’ Eagle Eye says.

  ‘Yes, yes, now you are talking!’

  ‘Kill a few, get the Horn and chase them across the Island . . .’