My Year Without Matches

by Claire Dunn

  The idea with the second half of the year is that we choose an area of study to focus on. I’ve decided on tracking and trapping. For a real survival skill, I’m going to have a much better chance of trapping than hunting, and you have to track to be able to trap. If I commit to eating meat only from wild animals, that will give me a real incentive.

  My mind buzzes and whirrs with plans – where I’ll put my tracking box, what kind of trap I’ll start with, how many hours a day I’ll spend with my nose in the dirt. It’s all a bit exciting really, six whole months of tracking and trapping.

  Hang on, slow down. I thought your project was following the heart rather than mastering any one skill? Yes, well, there’s time for it all. What could be more wild than reading the tracks of animals? This is quite possibly the only opportunity I’ll have to learn one of the most sacred and ancient arts of all time.

  And, anyway, I am doing the heart business, checking in throughout the day with how I’m feeling. Just like bird radio, though, the more I tune in, the louder the signal gets, and it’s not always music I want to hear. Following Malcolm’s suggestion, I’ve been getting up and moving when difficult emotions arise.

  “Emotion is just energy in motion,” he said. “Dance to the soundtrack of your heart.”

  Numerous dance floors have been added to my map. No-one can hear or see me, the bush the only witness to my shake, rattle and roll. The more I give physical shape to the emotions rather than trying to analyse or ignore them, the more it opens new frontiers of feeling. I can sense it loosening the screws of my heart, reconfiguring the nuts and bolts of my make-up.

  It’s a kind of tracking through my internal landscape, the wild places and sharp edges I find on the land mirroring the ones I am discovering within. I’m following the well-trodden pathways of habitual thought and feeling; discovering new patterns in the changing weather of emotion, where the trails of fear, anger, grief and joy intersect, and where they diverge, where I lose them and find myself adrift in a wilderness.

  I rest my cheek on the sand, the raised edges of the tracks looking like tiny ripples. I think back to last night’s dreams. A tiger quoll, fierce and cat-like, plays around my legs. A young female lion pads up to me and stares deeply into my eyes. I’m a little scared, as the longer I meet her gaze, the more I realise we are one and the same. I woke with the feeling of her warrior strength lying beside me, wild and soft.

  *

  A red-necked wallaby lopes out to feed. Facing the opposite direction, he hasn’t seen or smelt me yet. As slowly as possible, I rise into a push-up position, gradually coming into a crouching stalk. The wallaby puts his head up, twitches his nose and turns his ears. I freeze. Slowing my step to a virtually imperceptible motion, I scatter my gaze. Just as I near the ten-foot mark, a yellow robin flies in to let out a single tweet above the wallaby. The wallaby doesn’t even bother to double-check, thumping away milliseconds after the subtle alarm.

  The more I notice in this forest, the more I realise I must miss. There are layers of relationship that I can only guess at, understandings and agreements that I am not privy to. They blur species boundaries, make a mockery of linear food chains, create fissures in distinct lines of kinship. Like the webs of white root fungus that hold the forest together beneath the surface, so too are there hidden webs above, feathery and fine. They are inside me too, these mysteries, secret alliances whose operations underpin the entire system from subterranean depths. They tell me more about what I don’t know, than what I do. I am trying to find a way to weave myself into this fabric, form my bonds, make my allies. I am trying to make visible the invisible.

  *

  At dusk I walk past Snake Creek until the soil leaches to sand, and gums give way to thickets of banksia, garnia and melaleuca. A runaway pine tree from the plantation nearby has sprung up on the edge of the swamp. I climb to the highest point, where five branches fan out in a star, and nestle in. The low sun glows on my left cheek. I burrow my arms up the opposite sleeves of my jumper and rest my head back against a branch, staring up into the twilight.

  It’s good to be out of camp. The others, Chloe included, returned like a flock of noisy white cockatoos a few days ago. We gathered inside Ryan’s teepee, loud voices squawking in my ears, questions prodding me like sharp spears. I scrambled to bundle up and fit back together the pieces of me that lay scattered over the land, in order to present some vague semblance of myself. Unlike the others, I had no holiday snapshots at the ready. My words sounded crass and clunky, betraying the subtleties of something I don’t yet understand myself, something that exists only in the daily movement of my limbs through space.

  I didn’t realise how raw I was until rubbed. Like the winter trees, I am stripped of bark, in the middle of a shedding process that needs the privacy of darkness.

  The sun is threatening to slip behind the western cliffs. It thickens in the middle, spreads like butter across the tops of the far stringybarks and waits. Just before it gives up, the ivory eye of the moon rises in the east to meet its gaze. The solstice always feels too soon, but perhaps it is time. I sway gently in my nest, a fulcrum between the light and dark.

  4.

  Three men fling mud in the faces of three women. A gang of men, the ringleader a bully I know, kicks in the flimsy sheet walls I have erected in an attempt to carve out a bedroom space for myself. A woman is tortured and gagged as a warning of what will happen if she continues to stand up to them. I wake, heart pounding, to blackness. Rubbing my throat, I bring my knees close to my chest.

  A strange clicking is coming from outside. I silence it by pulling the blanket up, my cold ears appreciating the gesture. Mangled lines from a half-remembered poem play on loop, “What will you do with your one wild life, your one precious day?” They take on a childish singsong tone, mocking, taunting. Stay under the blankets, that’s what I plan to do.

  I eventually pull on the woollens I left on the dirt next to my swag last night and roll up the door to another exquisite misty morning. My belly growls. I couldn’t be bothered making dinner last night. I step out for a pee. Overnight, ants have carpeted their mound with yellow wattle flowers. Why, I wonder? Attracting insects? Sandbags for rain? It looks like an Indian funeral wreath of tiny marigolds.

  The clicking begins again. I feel like something is watching me, the hairs on my neck prickling. A whoosh of feathers against moist air. I spin around to find a raven perched on top of my chimney, jet-black beady eyes staring directly into mine. The clicking turns guttural, whirring and slurring. Its language is lost on me. Corvids such as ravens, crows and magpies don’t adhere to the standard five calls of the songbirds. Their language is complex, resisting all attempts to map and translate it. Perhaps there are no corresponding words.

  I walk over to the kitchen to contemplate food. Black wings follow me.

  “What do you want?”

  The raven clicks and whirrs.

  Kneeling to set kindling, I freeze when I notice a dog print at least as large as my hand etched in the sand. I look behind me, half expecting to see yellow eyes staring out from behind a tree. I search for more prints. Another lies closer to my shelter, the toe mounds dug in as if straining forward, sniffing or salivating, perhaps. I’ve heard dingos howling from the western ridge lately, so it may have been one of them. If I were a better tracker, I could date the prints.

  Maybe they’re my prints, I think, and guffaw. I feel half-wolf at the moment, skulking around camp, the hooded coat I sewed from an old woollen blanket hung loosely around my bony shoulders. My skin hasn’t seen water in more than a week and is wolf-grey, clogged with dirt. I’m certainly hairy enough.

  The raven cocks its head and continues staring at me. What is this, freak-out-Claire day, or something? As if I needed that. I’m freaking myself out enough these days. I throw an arm up in its direction, barely raising more than a ruffle of feathers.

&nbs
p; As I steel myself for the hand-drill, my fingers are so cold I almost have to prise them open to support the stalk.

  Good luck getting one out of me today, the invisible fire warns. A familiar cavern of dread opens up.

  I yelp at the squeeze of my blisters. There is a strange pleasure in the intensity of pain this morning. It reminds me I’m alive. I push my palms harder against the stalk, steadying myself as nausea sweeps over me. My eyes bunch up tight in focus as I drill. There’s barely enough dust to fill the notch before my arms seize up.

  “Fuck you!” I yell and hurl my kit at the nearest tree, holding out my bleeding palms towards where the sticks lie. “What more do you want from me?”

  I pummel a coal out of my bow-drill kit and shove it under my kindling. Fire nibbles at the offering, wilfully slow. I force-feed it twigs until it has no choice but to explode in a fireball.

  I heat porridge leftovers and brew a billy of tea. The sun cresting the canopy is beaming ice rather than warmth. I should go down to my sit spot or work on my tracking box, but I can’t be bothered. Be useful then, make something. I forage for some good-sized coals with the wattle-stick tongs I made yesterday, and transport them to the bowl cavity I’ve been burning out of a thick branch. I hold the coals down with the tongs, blowing on them just enough to keep them red but not flaming. I’m already eating and stirring with coal-burnt spoons, and this bowl will complete the set.

  I jump at a high-pitched squeal in the distance. For a second I think it’s a voice calling me out of a dream. Is it a bird? It sounds a bit like Nikki. I shrink back against the kitchen wall.

  I’ve been asserting my boundaries with canine territorialism since the others got back. Wary and defensive, I offer no excuses for my self-imposed isolation. I’m not fit for human company even if I wanted it. I am empty of routine, sleeping odd hours and padding the trails alone at any time of the day or night. I wake alert, ears pricked and heart pounding. My companion is the moon, my comfort the sharp rub of splintered log against my naked body as I seek contact with the sun. My feet grow increasingly confident as I rove further afield, playing on narrow logs and scaling branches, watching mists roll in on dusk from the high perch of my sunset tree. Inside my lair at night I lick my wounds, gnaw on the bones of the day, sucking out the marrow and scratching it in my journal with dirty fingernails.

  *

  The moon rises full. I pace restlessly, procrastinating about fire lighting. I’ve been wandering downstream by the creek all afternoon. This land is full of edges, carved up and piecemeal. Where once I turned up my nose at them, I now find myself drawn to them, to the frayed borders where the wild butts up against the tame. I find myself lingering along the messy lines where bands of wattle break the back of disused paddocks, loitering in groves of chainsawn offcuts where airless soil grows thick with weeds. This land is wild in the way I need it to be. Not in the way that hangs immortalised in picture frames on walls, but like a half-domesticated animal, fierce and defensive, unshod. It doesn’t try to be anything it’s not. I like that about it.

  A dingo howls in the distance. That is one edge I have been as yet unwilling to cross. I’ve been wanting to further extend my night wanders, but my fear of dogs has prevented me. On my jogging loop, I recently caught glimpse of a huge black one slinking into the bushes on the edge of a quarry about three kilometres away.

  It howls again, this time louder, as if in challenge. I pace. I feel reckless. What the heck: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.

  I set off with a stick in hand, crossing Snake Creek with a quick step, and begin the trail to the quarry. I will myself not to hum, not wanting to distract myself from the sounds of the night, from the band of tension building around my chest. The moon is still low and barely casts a glow under the tree line where I walk. I haven’t brought a torch.

  As I near the quarry I slow, not sure whether I should stomp, to make my presence known, or creep in. Bushes rustle behind me and I spin around. Creeping is useless. This is not my turf. I’m sure I’ve already been spotted by multiple sets of eyes, ears and noses. I stride in, feigning confidence, scanning for any sign of movement before planting myself atop the most exposed mound in the centre. Trees take on grotesque shapes, contorted faces appearing in the branches and leaves. Was that a snarl? They’re winning.

  Dragging myself up to standing, I let out a blood-curdling howl. The forest freezes. I break into it again with another long howl. Shapes shifts uneasily around me. Cackling like a madwoman, I jog back to my shelter.

  *

  The stick I’ve been whittling all morning is growing too thin to grip. I set it down amidst the carpet of shavings and stare out into the bush. The wolf is hungry again. Good. Lunch is something to look forward to, something to do. It’s a welcome marker in the absence of any other, giving my day shape and structure.

  I savour a little longer the anticipation of eating by scraping a final layer of charcoal from the coal-burnt wooden bowl with the edge of a rock. A smear of olive oil shines it up, ready for use. I spoon in leftover rice and dhal and set it on my breakfast bar. A moth flutters in to perch on the edge, its Persian-carpet wings faintly humming. Morning, too, teeters precariously on the edge.

  My stomach growls but I resist picking up the spoon, knowing the full bowl is all that stands between me and the long empty afternoon, the stark and uncompromising sun that I shrink from, guilty in the knowledge that I have turned down the precious invitation it offered me hours earlier, yet again missing the opportunity to fully taste the nectar of life. Night is undemanding. I am at home in the shadows of night, but the afternoon gives me nowhere to hide. It’s a daily midlife crisis, which I have come to expect, the idealistic dreams of the morning crashing into the cold reality of the limits of this day, this life.

  The comfort of food overrides my reluctance, and I bury myself in the contents of the bowl until the last spoonful of rice hangs in the air in front of me. I bring it to my mouth with resignation, mentally writing off another day, whittled away, another day in which I have been a mere visitor to my life, rather than a participant in it.

  The day falls prey to a constricting stillness, every scratch and murmur in perfect syncopation, as if orchestrated. There is only one note of discord. Me. I sink further into the leaf litter, wanting to hide. A grey fantail lands near me, and it’s unusual to see it so close to the ground. For a second, my heart lifts at this seeming gesture of generosity. I extend one hand towards it. It flies away. Of course it wasn’t visiting, I chastise myself. What am I to this forest? Nothing, worth only the energy expenditure of an occasional alarm call. All my talk of connection is just anthropocentrism, a gross bid for social standing in a world that is entirely indifferent to me. The forest doesn’t care whether I spend the year curled up in a ball, whining, or become a master tracker. It’s been going about its business long before I got here and will continue long after I return.

  Return to what, exactly? I used to be so certain about life, about who I was and what I wanted. Things were constant, stable: right or wrong, good or bad. Who is this creature that changes as quickly as the weather? I can’t decide what to do with my day, let alone my life. The foundations are now just shifting sands under my feet.

  I pad back into the kitchen, sniffing for more food. I grab the milk-powder tin and shovel spoonfuls into my mouth, scrape at the sides of the empty peanut butter jar. My eyes dart around manically for something else, anything to dull the sharp clawing. I find a half-packet of dates and polish them off. Within minutes my belly begins to bloat. It’s a welcome distraction. I crawl off to nurse the ache in the sun.

  Behind me fire pops indignantly, begging me to feed it. Well, I won’t. See how you like being cold. The grey fantail flits up the top of the canopy, fanning its tail feathers back and forth as if in triumph. Catch me if you can. Its wings lift in a sudden breeze. Branches sway in graceful unison, belittling me w
ith their seamless choreography. I should get up and move. Instead, I slump my head onto the cold earth, arms wrapped around my middle. I don’t want to dance. For a while it felt great, like I was unburdening myself of heavy coats. It wouldn’t be too long, I thought, until I shook myself free of all the extraneous bulk I carried. Now it seems like every time I dance, I stir up more and more gunk. I have no idea how deep the well is, but the waters are growing more and more murky.

  The bush closes in, leaves reflecting back at me a thousand sparkles of sunlight. They shimmer mercilessly, so beautiful that it hurts. The whole forest is wrapped in an air of self-satisfied contentment. I want it to give me a sign – something, anything – but it won’t. It just exists. Nothing more. A cruel Zen master whacks me over the back again and again with a truth too stark. Is this all? Is this enough?

  The Buddha said if we saw the perfection of the world, we would throw our heads back and laugh at the sky. I see perfection everywhere, but my head hangs low. A hundred yards away, I can see the empty hammock and half-made tracking box. I lie between them, paralysed, my dreams sinking into the sand. What am I so scared of? Of making wrong decisions. Of failing. I can’t do doing and I can’t do not-doing. I can’t do anything and I can’t do nothing. Tears spring to my eyes. I’m flinging mud in my own face day after day. The spaces in between sound grow and pulse with emotions, overlapping and collapsing into each other. They’re sucking me in, dragging me down into a whirlpool. Craving, emptiness, doubt, anger, judgment, confusion, fear, all blend together until indistinguishable. I sink further into the quicksand.