by Claire Dunn
My thoughts stray back to wallaby, its limbs being torn apart and scattered, with every voracious bite becoming less plump wallaby and more empty carcass, flesh disappearing inside dingo. Right now wallaby is literally turning into dingo. Its flesh is already stewing in digestive juices, feeding dingo cells, dingo blood, wallaby visible only as a spring in dingo’s step and meat on its bones. But hang on – doesn’t that mean that dingo is becoming wallaby as well? Where does dingo start and wallaby finish? How can anything claim to be one thing when it is a product of many? Even my body – how much of it can I claim as mine and how much is the oats I ate for breakfast, the microbial soil workers that nourished it, the hands that tended it? My mind spins with the implications, dingo dissolving into wallaby and back again. Nothing is fixed, nothing ever solid. It’s all just energy being recycled; energy exchanged, bartered or borrowed; life force moving in and out in constant flow.
Still, poor wallaby. I, too, feel like I’ve been in the grip of nature’s tooth and claw, something brutal but beautiful happening to me. I’m also dingo, emerging from a long hibernation, skin loose on my bones, with an empty belly. I am … bloody hungry, actually.
“Practical yet philosophical,” Nikki says, pausing to look at Ryan. “Gentle yet strong, open yet guarded.” Ryan looks up from his whittling.
“Confident yet unsure,” I finish.
They turn to me.
“A deep thinker,” Nikki starts. “Determined. Wise.”
Ryan narrows his eyes. “Authentic. Charismatic … Hard on herself.”
“Takes one to know one,” I smile back.
My belly growls loudly. I stir the pot of rice and beans, wishing it was wallaby. The thought crosses my mind to rob dingo of its dinner, but I remember its ribs lined up like monkey bars, much like mine. Not withstanding all the walking, dancing and fire making I’ve been doing, I have been fasting one day a week and shivering the rest of my body fat away. My no-store-bought meat policy (apart from the extra-large meatlovers pizza at the pub) has amounted to my cut of two roadkill roos and one roadkill possum, three whelk, and a thigh of Terri’s chicken, which I helped to kill and prepare. I rarely enjoy the fasting day but love the lightness I wake up with the next morning. It makes me feel animal-like, lithe and lizardy, able to slip and slide unseen between spaces, flexible both inside and out. And the spartan diet has meant that for the first time in years I’m not bloated at the end of every day.
But it’s spring now. The famine is over, it’s time to feast. Time to be fed from the fat of the land.
Time to hunt.
*
BMX bandits on the beat, Ryan and I once back at home set off on our bikes with cordage, knives and peanut butter, laughing as we remember Dan getting pulled over by the cops and trying to explain why he had rope, garbage bags and gloves in the back of his van. “Roadkill kit” apparently didn’t fly so well. It’s easy to forget this life is far from normal.
Ryan follows my lead through the mud puddles of the heath, to the trail of my shortcut jogging loop a few kilometres away. I’ve been eyeing off this spot for a few months as a potential trapping site, the wallabies all channelled into a few obvious entry points on the grassy fence-line. We fashion the simplest of snares with green parachute cord, propping it open at wallaby head height with a couple of twigs and tying it to the wire. Practising the double noose knot Ryan showed me, I set a few more by myself. I’m a little concerned about how I am almost excited as I lay death row. It’s the first time that I really feel I might be capable of feeding myself in the bush, even without a knife.
The T-bar snare ramps up the technology significantly. I take Ryan’s lead, setting two sharpened and notched ten-inch sticks into the ground and fixing a looped cord to a slightly smaller T-bar stick, which we bait with peanut butter. It takes us a good ten minutes and several false springs to balance the T-bar in the notches, while pulling down a wattle sapling to attach it to. The snare will theoretically lure an animal to stick its head through the looped cord, which, when pressure is exerted upon it, tightens and triggers the sapling to snap back, essentially hanging the animal.
“So, how ya going with that book?” Ryan asks, rubbing the back of his knife against the notch to make it more sensitive (as if it wasn’t already hard enough to set).
“Well, you’ll be pleased to know that five months in, he’s only just finishing his shelter.”
Ryan raises an eyebrow and smiles.
I’ve been finding it hard to put down Solitude, the journal of Bob Kull, a one-legged American guy who spent a year alone on a remote Patagonian island. His experience so far is uncannily similar to mine (albeit on a different scale). Impatient about all the things he wants to do, he is rushing around trying to finish his shelter so he can properly “start” his experience, all the while admonishing himself for not sitting still long enough to soak in the light of the passing storms, as he thought he would. Instead of a firestick to throw around, he throws around the cat given to him by sailors, then becomes dismayed by his callous behaviour and guiltily feeds it his few treats. He is also shocked by his four-seasons-in-a-day emotions, the way he seems to be growing less rather than more equanimous, storms of rage and grief rolling in regularly. I sense icebergs ahead, as he plans and replans all the things he wants to do in the remaining months: scientific research, explorations of the remote archipelago, meditation, staring into the sea, ridding himself of fear and delusion, getting clear on his life vision … the all-too-familiar list. A few months ahead of him, I want to tell him that it’s okay, that it’s all perfect, and he should just weather the storms as best he can.
At the creek that afternoon, I weave native grape vine through the holes in our group eel trap, baiting the narrow end of the funnel with a chunk of stinky wobbegong. It seems too simple. I can’t imagine that a creature as adept as an eel, able to schlep across land to the next waterhole, could not swim backwards out of such a trap. It’s too large an evolutionary oversight. But, hey, we’ve all got our weaknesses. The proof will either be thrashing around tomorrow or not. I lower the trap into the deep hole next to the big-toe tree, tying it off to a sapling.
Up to my knees in cold mud, I jump at the screech overhead and grab a clump of lomandra for balance. I look up to catch the white jet stream of the channel-billed cuckoo, the first one returning for the season. My heart flies up to greet it as it peels upwards on the breeze. “Hello, up there,” I call. “Welcome back.”
“Welcome back, spring,” I’m tempted to call, but don’t, knowing that to another observer, the crown of spring returning could just as easily be given to the shining bronze cuckoo – the first time its male called from deep within a frosty forest thicket in August, stirring dreams of nests and mates. Or earlier still to some who pay close attention: the rose robin’s first faint chirp from high in the canopy, one glassy day in mid-July. The seasons are subjective, the word itself too neat to reflect the overlapping and incremental waves of change that accompany the Earth’s rotation. For every dependable thing – migratory birds, the spawning of mullet – others resist expectations, rail against routine. You can’t count on trees. Eucalpyt flowering is capricious and arrhythmic, budding some years and not others, responding to water and other mysterious personal preferences. There are no distinct lines, no four-season scores, no party of leaves released en masse to signal the turning of the page. There is just a movement back and forth across an invisible line, a warm breeze on cheeks followed by a cold snap, a brave rustle from the burrow and a scurry back within. Assume nothing, this land tells me. Keep your ears pricked, it demands. Hone your skills if you want to survive. I am in awe of those who can and have. I follow the call of the cuckoo out to the open heath. The sun beats down and I step into the shade.
*
“A hide is a commitment,” Sam says, holding up the hairy shell of someone else’s feast. I’m still stuck on the last t
hing he said, though – that every animal has enough brains to tan its own hide. Including us, he says, answering my question, although I wonder how he’s so sure. The whole equation has me boggled. It’s poetic, I guess, in a weird way. I’m struggling to picture by what kind of accidental or experimental process the link was discovered, which kooky caveman found that if you smear the brains of a dead animal into its own skin, and then smoke it, you get soft and durable leather.
The invitation to prove the theory right or wrong is in front of me, a deer skin bartered from a nearby venison farm. Pulling on some gloves, I gingerly extract the hide from the ash solution it has been soaking in for the last few days, the alkaline bath helping to loosen the fibres. It’s bloated and swollen like a tongue, bits of flesh still hanging from it.
“I’ve already got mine,” says Nikki, holding up the stiff shark skin.
Flies descend quickly as I scrape the meat still attached to the hide onto the ground. Transferring the hide to a workhorse beam, I ready myself for the graining process – removing the hair, epidermis and grain layer from one side of the skin. I copy Ryan, leaning my belly against the wet edge of the hide to stop it slipping from the beam. Gripping the scraper firmly in both hands, I bear my weight down and into the hide. The tool glides over it, as if I had merely wiped it with a tissue.
“This time with feeling,” Dan laughs. With a mock grunt, I dig the scraper in further and push down. A peeling of snotty stuff comes loose in one long string. Wow, this is going to need some serious elbow grease. Luckily I have a bit more now than I used to.
“Okay, ten thousand more of those and I’ll have done one side,” I say, wishing I was joking. Why did I think this bush skill would somehow be different to all the others, which require brute strength, skill, perseverance and practicality? I’m glad I’ve got a metal scraper and not the traditional rib bone to work with.
Scrape, scrape, scrape. Shift hide across beam. Discard snot. Scrape, scrape, scrape. I settle into a rhythm, soon finding myself in that sweet spot of monotonous motion. A holiday from my brain is what it feels like.
Deja vu washes over me again, and this time the sense is stronger. Even the dull ache in my shoulders feels familiar. It’s like a lineage coming alive in my hands. Nothing else could be as right as working this skin, learning how to clothe and warm myself. Why don’t they teach this stuff in schools?
“Howdy, partners, how y’all goin’ on ma buckskin moccasins?” Chloe says, returning from a break. Ryan shakes his head at her accent. We’ve all been talking in our best midwestern drawls all morning, channelling the mountain man I’ve been telling them about – the guy I bought a deer-antler knife from in the US, who told me he had never sat on a toilet. My throaty laugh feels rusty, but refreshingly so.
“So, part-timer, how does it feel to be leaving?” Nikki asks, Chloe smiling at the nickname she used to flinch from. Her part-time status is about to go to zero-time in a few days, when she permanently moves into Niko’s bush palace in the hills, a couple of hours south.
“I don’t know … sad, exciting, scary.” Chloe says, as she scrapes, obviously relieved to have finally made the decision.
Prising off a long string of grain, I catch a glimpse of the fibres underneath – a matrix of small protein strands twisted together like DNA. I scrape over the same spot and look closer. Every strand is woven randomly but connected to every other strand, each patch as unique as a fingerprint. This is what skin really looks like, so flexible and yet so strong. How incredible. This animal could have had a shell or armour, but life repeatedly chose, over millions of years, to remain soft and vulnerable, to sense the world rather than defend against it, receive rather than repel.
I glance over at Nikki. The permanent worry line in the middle of her forehead has gone. She looks younger. The others do too. We scrape silently side by side, the dull sound of metal dragging heavily against wood, shearing off skin, cleaving off layers. Something has been working us too, stripping back the layers, scraping away our defences, paring us back to reveal glimpses of our essential nature underneath. Making us soft, making us supple. Strong.
“Yep, you won’t be far behind me – only three months to go,” Chloe says. My cheerfulness sinks like a stone in water. Leaving? No! I don’t want to. I can’t. I’m surprised by the fierceness of my response, the sense that there is more I came here to do. I keep scraping.
2.
Knee-deep in club rushes on the shortcut to the traps, I am tempted to stop. The sun is tickling the tops of the banksias, and I can hear a bowerbird in the scrub nearby. The image I woke up with returns – an animal flailing around in the snare. I keep wading, up along the sandy heath, past the dog tracks, past sunset tree and butcherbird straight. My belly clenches tighter as I approach trap bend. I can immediately see the T-bar is empty, as is the second snare. The first is hidden in grass. I creep forward. The noose hangs limply in two broken pieces, the grass underneath trodden and bent. A chew-through. Close call. I’m both relieved and disappointed. I replace the broken cord with a new one, remembering to smudge it with ash from my pocket to disguise the scent.
There are another couple of traps down the trail to check on now. A few days ago I decided to set a Paiute and a figure four – both deadfall traps involving a heavy object, such as a rock, leaning precariously over a trigger stick, waiting to crush a small creature. They looked so much simpler in my notebook than in reality, although if trapping was easy, Davy Crockett wouldn’t have been such a hero and Ludwig Leichhardt might have survived. Whittling the appropriate notches at exactly the right angles, despite this being the beginner’s standard in small game traps, was itself a Rubik’s Cube. Getting both traps to balance against their bait sticks was like walking a tightrope.
The figure four is still holding, but the Paiute has been triggered, a puff of grey-brown fur collected on one edge of the rock. Phew, another near miss. Or maybe with traps, the gap between close call and catch is bigger than it looks. I wonder what will bridge it?
Harvesting a strand of settlers flax, I divide it in two and squat back on my feet to weave it into a short string. Attaching it to a tiny toggle stick, I attempt to balance it against an equally thin horizontal trigger stick held up by a rock. Just when I have exhausted every remaining expletive, my knuckles grazed and bleeding from the number of times I trap my fingers, it holds.
The day is unfolding as blue as the ocean and as endless. Wet grasstree needles decorate my legs with long calligraphy strokes as I wend my way back. I shiver, partly in delight and partly recoiling from the cold touch. The green rounds of geebung fruit litter the ground, the bush-food all-day sucker. I pocket some and pop two in my mouth, rolling them around my tongue to crack and spit out the bitter shell, before holding on to the sweet, fleshy coating of the seed.
I don’t actually want to go back to camp. Hides are on a brains-hunting hiatus, and I could do with a break anyway – my shoulders from scraping and the rest of me from social stimulation. My head is dull and cloudy, the same tired-but-wired feeling that used to be my default in the city. I’m amazed at how hard it used to be to drag myself out of the concrete jungle, even when I wanted to. When I would finally overcome the inertia, it would take about forty-eight hours in the mountain air for me to defrag and my atrophied senses to re-engage. I take a deep lungful of the cool morning air and splash my face from a puddle, feeling my clarity returning.
Besides, I need to save myself for Chloe’s farewell party tonight. My stomach flip flops. Why am I feeling so strange about it? We haven’t spent vast quantities of time together this year. I’ve been a bit short with her during the last week, but I’m not sure why. Chloe’s last day on The Block – imagine if it was mine.
Wandering down to my sit spot, I reach into my pocket for my breakfast of dried fruit and nuts. Around me the shelter builders are at full tilt: grey fantails twittering to each other as they fly in and out
of crannies in tree trunks, emerging with beaks full of silken spiderweb, yellow-throated scrubwrens gathering moss and weaving it into tear-shaped hanging bowers. The polite society of winter birds and well-organised feeding flocks have collapsed into a chaotic free-for-all, the northern migrants back in full cacophonous swing, yelling over each other across the breakfast table. Regent bowerbirds swoop and flutter in a game of catch and kiss around me. A skink pops its head through a hole in the log, perching on tiny fingers as if on the starting blocks. The delicate cream curls of the hakea flower brush against my cheek, yet another spiky thing finally showing its softer side. What the sandstone country lacks in lush greenery, it makes up for in abundance of flowers. The mountain devils disappointed the eastern spinebills for mere weeks, the last flowering barely brown before they burst forth again on the top ridge. Yellow is most definitely the fashion of the season. I challenge myself to describe the different shades – the midday sun of the glory peas, the avenues of buttercup bossias, the egg and bacon of the heath shrub.
I got a bit of a shock recently when, on Niko’s suggestion, I tried to draw some common birds from memory. How far does the yellow on a yellow robin extend down its belly? Where exactly is the white on the tail feathers of a currawong? On the belly of a magpie? Apart from the obvious features, I kept literally drawing blanks. So much for telling individual birds apart. Instead of a boon, my familiarity has become a blinker. What I was seeing was a label, a template based on the hundreds of birds I had seen. It was humbling to discover how deep the ruts of my visual senses are, how regularly my eyes run on autopilot. I’d see more if I looked at them with my eyes closed. Since then, I’ve been making an effort to see things as they really are.