by Claire Dunn
“What was that?” Dan says sharply.
Ryan sighs and turns his back on everyone. I struggle to secure my own rope ends, as everything unravels around me.
“Hey, Ryza, do you remember when we made that deer-hide rope in class?” I say, Ryan shrugging in response. Why did I feel the need to say that? When I’m not being the camp warden, I’m mopping up after everyone, trying to keep the peace. I feel like screaming.
Bill hands me the mallet. Perfect. I whack at the fallen geebung, chipping the bark loose before dropping it into a pot of water boiling on the fire. The ropes wrap themselves around one another in the pot, turning a deep shade of blood red in the simmering water.
*
The night is hot and I drift in and out of sleep. I dream that I’m driving a huge bulldozer with L-plates on. It’s awkward and unwieldy, and I’m stuck in gridlocked city traffic. When I arrive at the demolition site, everything is being sucked into a vacuum and vomited out as a thick metallic sludge spiked with nails. Even my bulldozer gets pulled in and pulverised. I climb a leaning pole and watch as the grey lava beneath me swallows everything in its path.
*
On the morning of the second day of the rope workshop, Dan is pacing the Gunyah perimeter like a caged animal. Ryan and Nikki have obviously had a falling-out, Nikki red-eyed and quiet.
Nikki, Shaun and I team up, silently weaving our strands together. I’m so exhausted and on edge that I struggle to remember how to spin the fibres correctly.
No-one has spoken for a good hour, with even Bill lost for words to slacken the tension that is cinching in tighter and tighter.
Jessie races in pursuit of a fly, this time straight into my neatly coiled string.
“Piss off, dog,” I explode.
“That’s it!” Dan shouts, red-faced and fuming. “Get me the hell outta here.” And, with that, he disappears.
*
I shut my journal with a snap as Ryan approaches the waterhole. I don’t bother looking over to gauge his reaction. I’m so raw right now that, for once, I just don’t care. He walks by me with the barest of nods and squats at the water’s edge, as if waiting.
“What’s going on, Ryan?” I ask, the question verging on rhetorical.
He lifts his head to watch the clouds, one skidding on an air current to catch up to the mass.
“D’ya know that I walk around half the day having arguments with you in my head?” he finally offers.
I snort, surprised at his honesty. “Sounds fun. What about?”
“Oh, everything … and nothing. Just fighting with you.”
“Well, that makes two of us.”
We lapse into silence, watching the clouds pull apart like fairy floss. A currawong swoops in low, landing in a nest above our heads.
Spinning around, Ryan looks me in the eye.
“You know what? Being around you is too much like looking in a mirror.”
A moment of mutual recognition flashes between us. He turns back just as abruptly and dives steeply into the centre of the waterhole, surfacing almost out of sight.
We are all swimming in a sea of our own toxic shit. All the accumulated stink of our patterns and prejudices, usually contained within our comfortable routines and distractions, have nowhere else to go but out. We’re sweating in a cold-turkey haze, in the throes of a giant collective detoxification; the old structures of our lives are disintegrating into black mud, which we fling at each other daily.
I dive in to the other end of the waterhole and search for a log to cling to. That’s about as solid as it gets around here. The current is far stronger than I anticipated, and I hang on desperately, trying all the while to keep from drowning in a river of my own muck.
*
It’s time for my evening torture session with the hand-drill. A foreboding air accompanies me behind the kitchen, pre-empting the lashing I will no doubt give myself in a matter of minutes, my firestick more a cane for self-flagellation these days than any survival implement.
Everyone has produced a hand-drill coal except for me and Nikki – and Nik hasn’t even been trying since a few weeks ago, when her neck spasmed and froze as she was play-boxing. A trip to hospital allayed any serious fears, but she was told not to lift a finger until it healed.
The other day I watched Chloe sit down cross-legged and calmly produce her first coal. “Cool,” she said, as if it were nothing more than finding ten dollars in the grass. I’ve upped my practice to twice a day, despite the pain from the large blood blisters on both of my palms, but sometimes I can’t even coax smoke out of the bloody thing.
“It’s all in the technique,” Kate told me recently. “Strength is not the most important thing. You need to learn to draw energy up from your core – don’t just rely on your upper body. Trying negates the effort. But, most importantly, you need to have faith in yourself.”
That comment gets me smoking every time. To think that it’s somehow my attitude holding me back … it just makes me fume. No, if it’s a hand-drill I need, then a drill sergeant is what’s required. I’ve started doing push-ups every day to build up my biceps.
Tonight could be the night.
Grasping the stalk between my palms, I pause for a moment and pray with gritted-teeth fervour. For a moment my vision goes blurry from the intensity of the pain, as the blisters press together. I focus my attention instead on the movement of my arms, pumping them back and forth like pistons. Keep going, just keep going. The pain numbs into a general burning sensation.
“Frickin’ smoke, hurry the frick up,” I urge.
Like a spinning top losing momentum, the stalk starts rocking violently from side to side, and my forearms are losing their grip. With a single bum-puff the firestick jumps out of the notch, and with it, any hope of fire.
“Fuck you,” I yell, hurling the kit into the scrub. Burying my forehead into the sand, I sob hot tears of rage and injustice, just like the previous night, the one before that and the many others since I arrived.
You’re a failure. It’s almost April, and you still haven’t got a hand-drill coal. Look at you on the ground, crying. It’s pathetic. You’re just not trying hard enough; you’re not committed enough.
Just admit it, this whole year is a failure. You are a complete failure.
The accusations rain down like stones, and I curl into a ball for protection.
Scrreeeechhh!
My herd jerks upward at the piercing cry of black cockatoos. Three silhouettes wheel and turn, sprays of yellow tail feathers glinting in the sun. They circle and land in a nearby wattle, tearing branches apart with their beaks in search of grubs.
Whhheeee-ahhhhh!
My skin prickles. I know the call well, even though they rarely flew over the family farm. “The goosepimple bird” I called it as a child, before I knew its name, referring to the effect on my body of its call, as it echoed through the valleys and hills like thunder. “Rain’s coming,” Dad would say, if three blackies flew over. He also reckoned that they flew over more often when I was home. They would frequently appear when I was in logged forests, circling over me as I stood atop the charred stumps, looking down across blackened gullies. It would sometimes feel as if the Earth itself were looking down at me through those black eyes, crying a melancholy lament.
The cockatoos take off with a shriek, looking back as if beckoning to me. Peeling myself off the sand, I’m almost under their new perch when they rise up, landing just within sight. As I break into a jog, they leapfrog ahead again, and I quicken my steps to catch them, crashing through spiderwebs and ducking under branches, eyes focused on the flashes of black and yellow ahead. I burst into a large clearing. The birds have landed in the top branches of a single stunted fig. When I reach the tree they take off, circling above me once, before banking sharply to the west and disappearing.
<
br /> I run my hand over the mosaic of lichens on the trunk, frilly pinks next to lime greens. Old man’s beard lichen hangs like mint-dyed lace. The tree reminds me of the huge figs I half lived in as a kid. Hoisting myself up, I climb to a high limb and straddle it, nestling my cheek against the bark. It’s still warm from the late afternoon sun, and I sink my weight further into its embrace. A kangaroo lopes in to feed beneath me, figbirds perch on a branch nearby. I close my eyes, a breeze tickling leaves on my neck. It’s the touch of my grandmother’s fingernails as I lay on her lap, my cheek resting on the rough wool of her skirt.
“Why have I come here?” I whisper to her. “What should I do?”
3.
“Malcolm … can you hear me?” Skype crackles and fades. Kate warned me their internet connection was slow, but I was hoping for a miracle. I switch off the video setting.
“Claire – hi there, how are you?” a deep male voice booms.
I suck in a breath of relief.
Malcolm was an instructor at the tracker school who gave me the sense he could see me in ways that I couldn’t. He lived alone for a year in a primitive shelter decades ago, and I have a feeling he is exactly the elder I need right now.
My story tumbles out in a waterfall, the words tripping over each other in my urgency to unload them.
“I’m kind of here but not here … I want to be alone but can’t seem to leave the group. I love the skills but can’t make fire. I’m rushing around trying to do everything at once. I had such great expectations for this year and they’re all slipping away. I’m just not sure what I’m doing here anymore …” I’m trying not to break down.
“It’s clear what’s happening here, Claire,” Malcolm cuts in. “Your whole life, you’ve been conditioned to do: to achieve, to be productive. It’s what you equated with self-worth and approval. Now you’ve stepped one foot outside that world, your ego is desperate to maintain the status quo. It probably feels like you’ve got a civil war inside you.”
“Well, I know who’s winning,” I grumble. “But I had a great childhood, really, with affection and encouragement. It wasn’t like I was pushed … well, only with good intentions. This level of agitation just doesn’t add up.”
“Claire, the messages we receive from our culture run deep. It trains us to be human doings, rather than human beings. Your upbringing was particularly strong in this.
“For a woman, in particular, this comes at a great cost – separation from her true self. The most important task for you this year is to return to the feminine.”
My heart jolts, my hands rising to rest on my collarbones.
“What exactly do you mean by that?”
“The feminine is guided by feeling and intuition. She learns to listen to the impulses arising within her, and acts according to her own sense of rightness. Her heart, not what the outside world deems to be success, is her map and compass. This is the seat of her power.”
My shoulders droop forward, as if the strings holding them up have been cut.
“What I want you to do is simple: I just want you to feel. Feel everything. Unmoor your emotions from the judgments that will arise and come back to your heart. Ask yourself, ‘What do I feel like doing now?’ And then do that.”
My shoulders snap back to attention.
“That’s it? You’re saying that my whole project this year is just to feel? What about the skills – fire and tracking?”
“The Earth is a great healer. If you release into her, she will teach you what you need to know. Surrender.”
Surrender. The word resounds like a bell inside me.
“Claire, understand this,” Malcolm’s voice drops a register, “your mind got you there on the premise of learning skills, but you are there for something much more important. You are there to heal, to shift from being a girl buffeted by her external environment into the full power of a woman. Start with an experiment. Give yourself two days off – a holiday – and just do whatever you feel like. Be flighty, be spontaneous, be wild …”
“Just be myself …” I say quietly.
Malcolm leaves me with a warning. “Change is not easy, transformation less so. As each brick crumbles, it will feel like you’re falling apart. Life does shatter us, just as the seed shatters the pod. Take care out there.”
With that, my cyber-elder disappears, leaving me alone with a heart beating in nervous anticipation.
Closing the door behind me, I tilt my head towards the sun and let its rays soak through me like a shower of molten rain.
*
I rifle through my barely touched crate of books. There it is, down the very bottom, its pages yellow and musty: Women Who Run with the Wolves. The torn front cover shows a painting of a naked woman chasing her shadow across a moonlit desert landscape. The image jumped out at me from a pile of books in the back of a second-hand shop, years ago. I found it again when I was packing and threw it in at the last minute.
I turn over to the back cover.
The wild woman carries with her the bundles for healing; she carries everything a woman needs to be and know. She carries the medicine for all things.
I sink onto a stump. Two yellow robins cling to a nearby tree, watching. I draw my knees up and open the first page.
The spiritual lands of the Wild Woman have throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others.
We may have forgotten her names, we may not answer when she calls ours, but in our bones we know her, we yearn toward her; we know she belongs to us and we to her.
… then we leap into the forest or into the desert or into the snow and run hard searching for a clue, a remnant, a sign that she still lives, that we have not lost our chance.
I close the book with a shiver. The robin flits in front of me.
What do I feel like doing right now?
I stand up, wriggling my toes into the dirt.
What does Wild Woman feel like doing?
She takes one step forward, then another, and disappears behind a wall of green.
*
Wild Woman pads with silent bare feet through the rainforest this morning, leeches snuggling between her toes, bracken fern shivering the insides of her thighs. She plays snakes and ladders as she moves, feeling lithe and light – tiptoeing over fallen branches, crawling through burnt-out trees and swinging on hanging vines. She rests for a moment, then lets the sound of an unknown bird, a forest of tiny fungi or some other new friend seduce her.
Wild Woman plucks basket reeds from the heart of the lomandra, binding the bundle with roughly made string. Chewing on the white fleshy bases of the reeds, she gasps as a brush turkey stalks out of the undergrowth in front of her.
Wild Woman drapes herself along a log, making shapes from scudding clouds. White-naped honeyeaters feed at the mountain devils near her face. Fairy-wrens dance within inches of her toes. She rests in the silence between visitors, between breaths, between sunbursts and clouded shade.
Picked up by an afternoon wind, she rises to run down sandy trails, hurdling logs and ducking low-hanging branches, her mind wholly absorbed in the task of finding the perfect placement of every footfall, until eventually she falls into the leaf litter and traces wings with her arms.
Wild Woman finds a nest of moss woven with tiny twigs. It’s time for some nest work of her own. Diving under the steep far bank of the waterhole, she forages with fingers in reeds and rushes until locating the seam of silk. Sleek as a platypus she surfaces with a quiet splash, before diving blind again, all noise underwater as she kicks to hold herself at the bottom long enough to unearth chunks of clay.
Returning naked on the backtrail with a full bucket, Wild Woman scoops out gravel and earth in a circle within the centre of her shelter. Rocks are moved and shaped to fit, the ji
gsaw cemented with clay spread thick as cold sliced butter. Her hands continue to move between the rocks long after they are laid, making hypnotic circular motions in the hardening rivers of grey.
Wild Woman sits back to admire the beauty of her hearth; her hands are tired but she is deeply satisfied. The shelter feels warmer, no longer a collection of sticks and grass thrown together but made whole, awake, staring back at her through this single central eye. She wonders what changes it will witness over the coming months.
At dusk, Wild Woman reaches for the caches of dry sticks that collect in tree forks and snaps them over her bare legs. She has been alone all day, and considers for a second replying to the beckoning call from the trailhead, wondering what invitation it brings. She holds silent, though, and glows in relief when her small fire offers the best company.
When the dark can get no darker, Wild Woman walks under the cuticle moon, past the flickering glow cast on the leaves and limbs around the home fires of her tribe, to where the forest shadows deepen. Her heart thrums to the rhythmic whirr of flying fox wings, thin and papery against the moist night air; she watches as an orb spider weaves threads as thick and golden as raw silk. As she enters a new trail, a scribbly gum beckons to her, one limb twisted in a perfect circle, standing with hand on hip. The closer she walks, the more strongly she is drawn to it. She nestles herself amidst its sprawling toes, and rests.
*
I unwrap the bow-drill spindle slowly and turn it in my hand. This is not just any spindle, it’s the magic spindle. I haven’t once failed to get a fire with it, usually within minutes. Once I realised its special qualities, I decided to keep it for emergencies and special occasions only. It hangs from a beam in my shelter, wrapped in a special cloth. I’m comforted by the knowledge that it’s there.
I nestle my foot close up to the notch, the side arch stained cigarette-yellow from its close proximity to the friction. Jamming the bow between my right hip and the ground, I free up my hands to loop the spindle around the bow. Grabbing the wattle hand-hold, I fit it down over the upright pointy end of the spindle. I check my pose: left knee at a right angle, elbow wrapped firmly around my shin for stability. Good to go. I pause for a few moments longer than usual before lightly moving the bow back and forth, settling the spindle down into the notch before applying pressure. Smoke starts to waft almost immediately from the friction point. I speed up, the smoke billowing so vigorously I can’t see the board. I don’t want to wear the spindle down anymore than absolutely necessary and ease off as soon as I sense a coal.