by Claire Dunn
Chastened, I’m happy to follow Shaun as he guides us in on our bellies, under a shrub to a vantage point metres from the main stage, where hundreds of young bodies splattered with psychedelic patterns convulse and writhe to the unrelenting beat. I feel like an owl, watching the human creatures, with bemused indifference, from an invisible perch. It’s good to be one of the midnight observers, the watchful rather than the watched. There’s no need to fear the dark when I’m one of its shadows.
I follow the movements of one young woman, her long dreadlocks flying, eyes closed, body pulsing as if in a trance. Years ago it would have been a fire and drum that she danced around. Under our civilised skin, there is still a pull to the forest, a desire for wild abandon. I wonder whether she can find it within the generator’s electrified beat. With my painted costume dried and cracking, I feel like I’m entering a trance myself as I lie here. The musk-scented earth is so warm, so soft, so inviting, not just below me but all over. I shift slightly just to reassure myself that I’m not actually sinking into it; to remind me there is a distinction between this body and the larger one under me. I feel so safe that I could curl up and sleep here, except I’m not at all tired. Even Shaun, usually so restless, lies next to me still and silent.
When we finally rise to leave, my limbs are coffin-stiff but quickly find fluidity again. A mist has descended on the creek trail. Entering it, I feel as if I’m half flying, my feet barely touching the earth. I look back to see Shaun stepping exactly into my prints, mimicking the direct registering gait of a fox, with me as the front paws and he the rear. I move fast, but, for once, I’m not rushing. The doof noise fades in and out, gradually overtaken by the swell of the crickets. We break our silence with a screeching splash into the waterhole.
*
As I fall into my swag, the sky is clearer than I ever remember seeing it, the stars bolt-holes of pure light. Strange sounds punctuate the quiet, creating glorious mysteries. I want to unwrap them, one by one, if only I could stay awake. I rub my eyes with oncoming sleep, while the furry and feathered creatures of the dark blink theirs awake, meeting me at the dream junction. As the soft underbelly of night takes wing, I let my heart yield to the whispers, the secrets that crawl into my bed and curl up next to me, warm and beating next to my still body. Sleep transports me gently, as if I’m being carried by the current of a wide river, snaking its way further into the forest, drifting deeper into the darkening night.
7.
The writhing snake nailed to the kitchen pole, blood dripping from its mouth, snaps me out of my dreaminess following a spell at my sit spot. What the …? Ryan raises his eyebrows, mirroring my sentiment, and reports flatly, “Dan killed a snake at his sit spot this morning.”
“Killed – are you sure? Looks more like a crucifixion to me!” The diamond python is at least three metres long, the golden geometric patterns on its back stretching and contracting as its body contorts wildly.
“Trust me, we bashed it so many times that it can’t possibly be alive. It’s just its muscles twitching.”
I can’t take my eyes from it, magnetised by the same macabre curiosity that has me staring at car accidents as I pass, shocked out of my everyday illusion of immortality by the reminder that death is everywhere and could come at any time.
Dan must be having a very different experience from mine at his sit spot to want to bring one of his neighbours home in a body bag. My morning sit-spot visitor was also reptilian – a gecko, fingers as fine as the spokes of a spiderweb.
Vegetarian Chloe is next to arrive. “What the fuck?”
Dan, having retrieved his hunting knife, marches in looking both defensive and incredibly nervous. We stare at him, waiting.
“Look, it was just there sitting next to me, and I warned it three times that if it didn’t move I was going to eat it. I figured it must be meant for me, so I picked up a stick and killed it, or tried to kill it, but it just kept on wriggling.”
Silence.
“Well, we’re here to learn to survive off the land, aren’t we?” he says, trying to convince himself as much as anyone. “Or are we just pretending?”
Dan lunges in to take hold of the snake’s neck, as if also in doubt of its dead status. Unhooked, it drops to the ground, continuing to spin out in short spasms. Dan bursts into tears. Watching on from the shade, with a frozen grin of shock and bemusement, Shaun walks over and leans one foot on the snake’s spine to help anchor it, as Dan plunges the knife into its neck. I turn away, hearing a groan as I imagine blood spurting onto his hands.
Hunting, survival, food: these issues had to come up at some point, but I wasn’t expecting them to be shoved in my face quite so soon. And not at breakfast.
The bush telegraph is fast. Hundreds of flies descend on the exposed flesh, and then spread to me and the mung-bean sprouts I am rinsing. As I contemplate who I will enlist to help me light a fire to repel them, I see Dan rush over to the fireplace and strike a match. What? He’s got to be joking. The hypocrisy almost makes me laugh.
I stomp out of the kitchen, grab a handful of kindling, prop it together a few metres away and begin furiously spinning a hand-drill stalk in protest.
“There’s one going already,” Ryan says wryly.
I channel my silent reply into fierce spins of the firestick, producing more smoke than I ever have before. For a moment I think I might actually get it, but, as usual, my forearms shudder and give out, tears springing to my eyes as I throw the kit on the ground.
Nikki, Chloe and I have been successfully spinning fire together over the last couple of weeks, but alone I don’t yet have the oomph. I hate the position this puts me in – desperate to maintain my primitive-fire stance and yet still dependent on others. I find myself bustling to the communal area on dusk in a bid to manipulate proceedings towards real fire lighting, batting my eyelashes at Shaun to persuade him to help me. If the fire is already alight, I eye it menacingly, trying to deduce from the quality of flames the origins of its life, trying not to sound desperate as I say, “Hey, Chloe – success on the sticks tonight?” and wait with bated breath for the answer that has me either loving or hating everyone. I stalk the camp like a stern schoolmarm, trying to dissuade talk of town trips and matches, a little horrified at myself. Without some rules, though, this could easily slide into a lame hippie camp.
I tried to enlist Kate’s help but she was unmoved.
“It’s up to each individual,” she said sagely. “Whatever they feel called to do. Just follow your own heart.”
Just do your own thing, girl! I wrote in my journal last night. But here I am again. This is precisely why I need to get on with building my real shelter, I remind myself, trying not to look at the butchering behind me.
The naked snake looks like a giant earthworm, white and slippery. Dan slices it into chunks the size of bread rolls and drops them into a camp oven along with some garlic and spuds. Ryan and Shaun skewer some onto sticks and hold them over the fire. My mouth waters as they begin sizzling.
Dan holds up the skin. “It’s a man-bag,” he says, folding it over and parading around the fire.
All I can think of is a moose head mounted on a hunting lodge wall.
Ryan’s gaze shifts and I follow it to where it rests with satisfaction on an approaching Nikki, with the injured lorikeet she found a few days earlier perched on one shoulder. She looks a bit like one of her chooks this morning, barefoot and skinny-legged, her hair ruffled. Finding a seat next to Ryan, she lets him lean in close to explain the snake situation. Looking at Dan in silent shock, Nikki continues feeding the hungry lorry, chewing birdseed into pulp and leaving it on her bottom lip for the bird to grab. “Ow,” she says, as it nips her lip, Ryan laughing with her when she taps its beak in mock punishment.
“Want one?” Shaun smiles, extending a snake kebab in my direction.
“No, thanks,” I say, desp
ite the saliva gathering under my tongue. I’ve been craving meat. My vegetarian phase years ago was disastrous, my iron levels hovering around anemia no matter how many lentils I consumed. The few cans of tuna I’ve eaten here have only taken the edge off, but I’m not eating that snake.
Catching my look of disdain, Dan looks hurt.
“I can’t do it, Dan …” I trail off. “It just doesn’t feel right to eat it. I don’t know … I guess I don’t feel like I have permission yet.”
“What, are you going to wait until some elder taps you on the shoulder and hands you the sacred spear, when they deem you ready? Maybe in a perfect world, darlin’, but not this one. We’ve gotta make it on our own here.”
Yeah, just like you did with fire …
I know what he means. I don’t want to feel like a tourist anymore either. I want to feel at home in this country rather than just a camper skimming the surface, to see even a little of it through native eyes.
That ultimately means killing. Only taking life would sustain me here in the long term. And only through entering into that predator–prey relationship am I ever really going to be woven into the familial web of this land. Once I step over that threshold with a clear intention, it will indebt me to the land for life, but I’m still just making the land’s acquaintance. Maybe canned tuna is just as hypocritical as matches, but to kill something now would feel like I had marched into a stranger’s house and helped myself to the contents of the fridge.
*
“Look here, this bloodwood sap is magic stuff. Heals any cut,” explains Mark, a local Gumbaynggirr guide who’s here for the afternoon. He gathers a sticky gloop of dark red sap seeping from a wound in the tree and smears it on Ryan’s bleeding toe. “Like one scar healing another, eh?” he laughs, his dark eyes twinkling. “The cure is always right next to the cause. You just gotta know it. If the giant stinging tree down in the rainforest gets ya, chances are cunjevoi – elephant’s ears – is right there too. Crush it up and it takes the sting right away. Don’t eat him, though – poisonous stuff.”
Mark grins like a cheeky schoolboy. We grin back, bunched up right behind him.
“Jeez, you lot are quiet,” he says. I think we’re all a bit starstruck. It’s the power of his presence: as if all the gentleness and optimism of the bush on an early spring day, after a shower of rain, has been bundled up, boiled and distilled into an essence, which oozes from his every pore.
“Ow,” Dan exclaims, as a jumping ant nips his heel. Pulling a bracken fern out from the roots, Mark mushes up the lower stem in his hands and rubs the juice onto the bite. “Wow, that really works,” Dan says, watching the red swelling disappear.
As Mark points out the food surrounding us, the wall of green starts to break up into individual forms. “Up here, native grape,” he says, pointing above my head. I look up, humbled to realise I hadn’t before noticed the thick bunches of purple berries hanging from a vine on the path to the waterhole. “Makes an alright jam, this one.”
“Yum,” says Nik, passing around the bunch. I pop a few in my mouth and stash a bunch in my pocket.
Back at camp, Mark lights a small fire to cook some of our collected roots. Chatting as we prepare our supper, no-one notices Sam approach until he’s standing next to us, a goanna slung over his shoulder, its eyes glassy. He lays it next to the fire gently, his hand lingering on its rough-skinned back. Only then does he stand up and greet Mark with a hug. “Great to see you, old friend.”
“Ah, you got us a gumgali,” Mark says, patting the goanna. He makes space in the coals with a stick before laying it on. “Best bush tucker around. My uncle showed me how to hide in the bushes with a stick, wait for him to come along. Sometimes waiting hours,” he says, eyes wide in emphasis. “I was a young thing and I’d be itchin’ and scratchin’ but, no, I’d have to sit still. Bush meditation, eh?” He laughs. “Back then there was food all over. Four hours a day, you get a plenty big enough feed for the family. Eels, fish, crays, mussels. And plants – yams, hundreds of ’em. Not like now; there’s hardly any left.”
As the stories flow, the smell of slow-roasted meat wafts through camp. I’m starving, the berries being all that I’ve eaten today.
Mark turns his head to listen as he taps a stick on the back of the charred goanna skin. “Ready for him? Ya betta be, ’cause he’s ready for you,” he laughs, breaking the skin open with his knife and handing us each steaming limbs of pink flesh. There is no hesitation from me. It’s different with Mark here, and Sam knows the land well too. I juggle the meat on my tongue until it cools enough for me to chew. The first mouthful is down before I register the taste. I savour the second, tasting of gamey roast beef, but way better.
“Marshmallows for dessert?” Mark says, separating the two fat sacs that I assumed were lungs from the back skin and carving them into chunks. I follow his lead, dangling a piece over the fire on a stick until it browns and sizzles.
“Oh my God, this is way too good,” says Chloe with her mouth full. “Just how I remember crackling.” Dan looks at me and laughs as fat drips down my chin. Mark’s visit has burnt off all the earlier bullshit.
After a billy of tea, Mark rises to leave. “Well, folks, I gotta go. Got another group to smoke. It’s bloody busy these days; not enough time for fishin’. I’ll be back, though,” he adds, seeing our crestfallen faces, before breaking into a belly laugh. “I gotta see how wet you get under them humpies!”
The fire gives off a large crack. Mark stops, a serious look coming over his round face. “What you’re doing out here is important. We gotta keep the old ways alive, and it’s not just up to blackfellas anymore. We gotta get back to Mother Earth, teach the children. Youse are all like six leaves just dropped from a branch, some spinnin’ quick, some slow. But youse are all fallin’. You’re all gonna hit the ground sooner or later.” He looks in my direction with a wink. “I know it ain’t easy, but hang in there.”
“Yarri yarang,” he says with a wave, and starts the engine.
Don’t leave us, I plead silently as his tail-lights disappear. We can’t do this alone.
I walk heavily back to my lean-to.
In an ideal world Mark would stay and hold our hands as we learn to walk the old ways. He would be our bridge, passing on the customs and gestures appropriate for this land, explaining away our awkward attempts at familiarity. His presence would melt my fear that maybe we can’t do this, maybe we will always be strangers in a strange land. But he can’t stay. In a way, Dan’s right – we need to learn to do this on our own, as clumsy as it seems. We don’t have the luxury of sitting under a mulga bush with a gnarled woman, waiting until she shows us the dance that will animate the land within us. And yet the world needs a new dance more than ever. It needs people who feel so inextricably linked to the Earth that to damage or destroy it is akin to ransacking the family home.
I want to be one of those people again.
*
Goanna grease still clings to my chin in the morning, as does the warm memory of the man in my dream. Tall, slim and with a mop of brown curly hair, he is attentive, romantic, his long limbs moving as fluidly as water towards me. I’m wary of him at first and keep my distance, watching him from afar. He comes closer, smiling warmly, smelling of freshly cut grass on a summer’s afternoon. I allow him nearer, sensing the extraordinary in him. Although I have never seen him before I know this man is my soulmate. Stepping forward as though to embrace, we pause centimetres from each other. We are so close, and yet the distance between us is still so vast.
8.
A change in season ripples through the forest like a shiver, two weeks before the calendar deems it ready. It’s as if someone has ever so slightly turned down the volume: a subtle but visceral recalibration, the high-fluted melodies of summer somewhat muted, a slower, steadier bassline emerging. I walk around for a couple of days feeling that something i
s missing before realising it’s the channel-billed cuckoo. “Storm birds” Dad calls them. No more will I wake at first light to their harsh screech, to the promise of rain they oftentimes break. I wish I had caught the moment they lifted their heads to an invisible beckoning, smelling something on the breeze perhaps, and rose en masse, tilting their long white wing-tips northwards, trusting their wings to deliver them back to the same valley, maybe even the same tree, they left months earlier. Their absence seems even more palpable to me than their presence did. Perhaps we only come to know some things by the spaces they leave behind.
Birds are one marker of the season change, but there are others. The bloodwood flowers are drying up, the flying foxes and lorikeets trickling back to the coast after a wild summer of nectar-fuelled drunken parties. The wattle responds to the exodus by rebelliously letting loose masses of yellow pompoms. On foggy mornings they are Christmas baubles set against the stark white of the scribblies. The banksias are also blooming late (much to the delight of the honeyeaters), while the geebungs are dropping their flowers. The abundant berries of the native grapevine, which we have been feasting on since Mark’s visit, are withering. Their replacement is the aptly named sour currant bush, which I just discovered fruiting on the path to my shelter. They’re apparently higher in vitamin C than any citrus, so I snack as I go – at least I won’t die of scurvy.
One morning I wake shivering under my summer sleeping bag and scuttle around to find a blanket. If this is any indication of the winter to come – which I have been told is pretty fierce, temperatures getting down to seven below – I need to give some serious thought to my real shelter. The lean-to that was meant to take a fortnight to build is still leaking (and hence still tarped) after two full layers of bark and two months of work.