by Black Inc.
But now that it’s winter, the trees just look dark and sunken in, as if they’re just hanging on by shutting off their minds, like my grandpop when he had the stroke and Dad said his body was just closing down slowly like something in the winter. And on the track, there’s ice crystals on the clay, and when you look real close you can see the crystals are long, growing into lines, and the more mushy the clay the tighter the crystals pack in. They do it in the night, in the cold snap. You can put your foot at the edge of a puddle and just press real gently, and all these little cracks come into it, rushing outwards like tiny creeks.
Sometimes there’s frost on the rabbits’ fur. I brush it off with my hand. Rabbit fur smells nice, like lichen or dry moss. My mum left behind some leather gloves with rabbit fur inside and when I put them on once I pulled my hot hands out and smelled her smell. What are you bawling for, my dad said. I hid the gloves just under my mattress. When I touch them they feel like a green leaf, just soft and dry and bendy and not knowing autumn’s coming.
*
I looked up at the lady’s porch lights the morning I got my new hat for my chilblains. Dad made it for me with rabbit skins. He rubbed my ears hard with his jumper and my mouth ached with holding it shut then he pulled the rabbit-fur flaps down and tied them.
See you back here with the bunnies, he said, squeezing his hands under his arms before he stoked up the chip heater. One day a boy at my school who works at the feed supply told the other kids we were so backward we didn’t even have hot and cold running water at our place. He said, It’s like deliverance down there with you-know-who. I asked Dad what deliverance was and he rolled a cigarette and said why? The next time he wanted chook pellets he asked for them to be delivered that day and then he stoked up the chip heater so high that a spray of boiling water gushed up and hit the roof like rain and it sounded like the fancy coffee machine at the milk bar. When this boy came around with the pellets, Dad told him to empty them into the bin and then said would he like to wash the dust off his hands in the kitchen. The boy went in. I stood looking at the chooks and made myself small like them and felt the straw under my claws as I scratched around, and felt how the wheat powdered as I cracked it in my beak, and then there was a scream and the boy came running out holding his hands out in front of him. And they were bright pink like plastic. As the boy ran past, my dad called, Don’t forget to tell your friends.
*
I pushed the rabbits into a hessian bag and heard music coming out of the house with the lights on. It was violin stuff. I saw the lady who’d bought the house come out onto her porch as I cut across the ridge. She was wearing King Gees and you could see the new fold marks in them. She had hair the colour of a fox. When she saw me her face went all bright and excited even though she didn’t know me, like the lady doctor who did all those stupid tests on me at school just saying stupid words and expecting me to make up more words and say them straight away and not giving me any time to think it over.
She said, Well hello there, has the cat got your tongue? She had lipstick on. I thought maybe she was on her way to church.
I said I didn’t have a cat and her eyebrows went up.
You’re up very early on this wintry morning. What’s that you’ve got in your bag? she said, like we were going to play a joke on someone. I showed her the top rabbit’s head and her mouth went funny and she said, Oh dear, oh the poor little things. What did you want to kill them for?
I said for Mr Bailey. I said they died very quickly and always got the traps right around their necks. She hugged herself with her arms and shook her head and said goodness me, looking at my rabbit-skin hat. I turned my head slowly round so she could see better.
She asked me suddenly if I lived in the house down the hill and I said yes. Then she said what a marvellous location and what a shame the power would cost an arm and a leg to put through, otherwise she would have made an offer, and that this little place she’d picked up was such fun and a goldmine. She said all her friends from the city thought she was quite mad but she’d be the one laughing when property values went up and she’d done all the extensions. I was waiting for her to finish so I could go. I could feel the rabbits stiffening up inside their bag. I could smell them.
What’s your name? she asked me finally and I said Billy.
And do you go to school, Billy?
I looked at her and said you have to. Her eyes went all crinkly and happy again.
And is it a special school, just for special children?
I couldn’t work her out. Maybe she didn’t understand about school. I said not really then my mouth blurted out: You got hair like a fox.
She laughed like someone in a movie. Good heavens, she said. You are a character, aren’t you?
A man in a red dressing-gown came out onto the veranda and the lady said, Look darling, some local colour.
Love the hat, said the man to me. I waited for them to tell me their names, but the man just complained that it was bloody freezing, and thank Christ they’d got the central heating in. The lady said yes, the whole place was shaping up well, then she looked out down the track and said, The only problem is there’s no bloody view of the lake. Then she said, Billy, show Roger your bunnies, darling, and I pulled one out and Roger said, Good god.
They both laughed and laughed and Roger said, Well it looks like the light’s on but there’s no one home. Which was wrong. They were both there and they’d turned the light off by now.
*
When I walked down the track past the sharp turn and through the cutting my boots cracked on the black ice. You can easy go for a sixer on that. People say it’s invisible but it’s not really, but you have to get down real close to see where the water’s froze then melted a bit then froze again, all through the night, till it’s like a piece of glass from an old bottle.
Dad had had his shower by the time I got home. The rabbits were harder to skin because more time had passed. They ripped off with the sound of a bandaid like they put on your knees in the school sickroom. Get them off, my dad said when I came home one time with the bandaids on. He was watching me so I pulled both of them off fast and they bled again. Call that first aid? That’s bloody atrocious, said my dad. Get some air onto them. I looked at my knees. They felt like the hinges inside had got stiff and rusty, like the oil in them had leaked out.
*
Every day for the next few weeks, people drove up the hill to fix things in the house. You could hear banging and machines and then a pointy bit of new roof pushed up over the trees. The lady’s friends, the ones who thought she was quite mad, came up a lot at first but then it got colder and they stopped. The lake froze over at the edges and the ducks had frost on their feathers. One day I crept up and saw the lady standing with her arms folded on the new veranda, which was covered in pink paint, just staring out at the trees. All around her garden were piles of rocks and I saw a duck standing still as anything under the tree. I went closer and she saw me.
Well, Billy! she called, and I went over and saw the duck was a pretend one.
Look at all these bloody trees, she said, sighing. I’m sick of the sight of them.
She had on the overalls again but they didn’t look so new now. The digger had left big piles of dirt everywhere.
What are those trees anyway, Billy? she said suddenly and I said they were gum trees and she laughed and said she might have guessed that would be my answer, even though I hadn’t finished and was only sorting out what I was going to say next.
I said it was going to be another cold snap that night and more hard weather. And she said how did I know and I started explaining but she wasn’t really listening, she was still looking down the gully towards the lake, turning her head like the ladies in the shop when they’re buying dresses and looking at themselves in the mirror, deciding.
*
Three weeks after that time I was up in the trees, just listening to them and looking for good spots for snares, when I found the first sick one. When I touched
its leaves I knew it was dying, like when I touched my grandpop’s hand. It was a big old tree and used to have a big voice but now it was just breathing out. And it was bleeding. All around the trunk there was a circle somebody had cut and sap dripped out which is the tree’s blood, my dad says. It was a rough chopping job and the person had used a little saw then a hatchet and I could see how they didn’t know how to use the saw properly and had scratched all up and down around the cut. There was nothing I could do for that tree. I wanted to kill it properly so it wouldn’t just stand there looking at me trying its hardest to stay alive.
The week after that one I found another tree that was the same and then it just kept on happening, seven of the biggest trees got cut. When I looked real hard I flew up again and saw them from the top and the dying ones made a kind of line down to the lake all the way from the lady’s house on the hill to the shore. Then I came back down onto the ground, and I saw how it was.
*
You’ve done it again, Billy, said Mr Bailey when I came past. I don’t know what I’d do without you, two big fat ones today.
I got my money and walked up the hill towards the lady’s house and I saw her through the trees planting something in the garden. Dad said she kept the whole nursery in business.
Now I got quite close to her and the pretend duck before she saw me and she jumped backwards.
Jesus, kid, just give it a break, will you? she said in an angry voice. I stood there holding the empty box from the rabbits.
Just don’t creep around so much, Billy, OK? she said, getting up. I saw she had a special little cushion for kneeling on and I was looking at that cushion when she said something else.
Where did you get that box, Billy?
I said out of the shed. She laughed and looked up at the sky. I looked down at the box with the picture of the apple on it.
Out of your shed? That’s a finger-joint colonial box, Billy. Do you know how much some of them are worth?
Her voice was all excited, like that lady at the school who pretended boring things were interesting on that test.
What about selling it to me, she said.
I said it was my rabbit box and she said did I have any others in the shed. I said I would have a look. She was a loony. My dad sometimes split up old boxes for the chip heater. He kept nails and bolts in them.
I know where there’ll be a lot, I said. At the Franklins’ garage sale.
Her eyes looked a little bit like Mr Bailey’s dogs’ eyes inside the netting.
When is it? she asked.
On Sunday. They got lots of stuff.
Like what? she said, and then said a whole list of things like fire pokers? ironwork? cupboards? and I just kept nodding.
Lots of that kind of thing, I said. Lots of these little boxes with writing and maps of Australia and animals like emus.
She folded her arms and looked at me harder. Boxes with emus and kangaroos on them? With joints like this one?
Yep, I said, but you got to get there real early in the morning. Like 6.30 or something. ’Cos other people come up from the city.
She asked me where Franklin’s was, and I told her.
I can get there earlier than the dealers, she said, looking down the hill at the trees all secretly dying in a row to the lake.
*
On Saturday I set a snare just inside a little tunnel of grass by the lake. Dad says it’s bad to kill something without a good reason but I knew the rabbit wouldn’t mind. The trees were very quiet now. It was going to be a black frost. When the moon came up there was a yellow ring around it like around a Tilley lamp when you take it out on a frosty night.
I couldn’t hardly get to sleep with thinking. I thought of her going out there with her new saw from the hardware shop and cutting open their skin. In the night, while the rabbits nosed around with their soft whiskery mouths and Mr Bailey’s dogs cried and choked on their chains over and over all through the night.
When I got up it was still dark, as dark as the steel on the monkey bars, cold metal that hurts your chest. I felt a still, stiff rabbit in the trap and I felt sorry for it. I knew she would, too. Because in the lady’s head you can feel sorry and worried for rabbits but not for trees.
It looked like it was sitting up there by itself on the track, alive. All the crystals had grown in the night and now the black ice was smooth as glass all round that turn.
I got back into bed when I was finished. I felt my mum’s gloves.
*
My dad knew I’d got up early when he came to wake me up again. I don’t know how.
You’d better go out and check your traps, he said as he split the kindling.
Up the road Farrelly’s tractor was pulling her car out of the ditch.
It had crumpled into one of the big gums and leaves and sticks had been shaken all over it. Mr Farrelly said the ambulance blokes had nearly skidded over themselves on the bloody ice, trying to get in to help. What’s a sheila like her doing getting up in the bloody dark on a Sunday morning anyway, Mr Farrelly said as he put the hooks on. Bloody loonies.
Under the front wheel I saw white fur, turned inside out like a glove, like my hat. I went down through the trees, touching the sick ones. On the way I stepped in a big patch of nettles. No use crying if you weren’t looking out for yourself, my dad says. I looked around and found some dock and rubbed it on and it stopped hurting like magic. That’s what nature’s like, for everything poisonous there’s something nearby to cure it if you just look around. That’s what my dad says.
I made a little fire and smoked my traps. Five more weeks and I can get a mountain bike.
Fox Unpopuli
Eva Hornung
Tasmania has been invaded from the north by a fox.
A pregnant vixen arrived by sea in the belly of the TigerCat. Photographs hit the front pages: uniformed wildlife experts point at the floor of the Cat’s hold. From Devonport to Hobart and from Swansea to Strahan, people talk of it, shaking their heads, wondering what will happen.
Even as the forensic experts go to work on the impounded vessel, the sightings begin.
A fox could do untold damage. A fox could gnaw at the heart of this country, suck it back to white gristle and shit it out in hairy scat. TASMANIA ATTACKED! the headlines cry, above pictures of the uniforms and an identikit of the fox. The army, the air force and the resources of Tasman Forest are brought in to hunt her down. No expense is spared. Twelve choppers, two from the air force and ten from Tasman Forest, pound the air above the city and the foothills.
Suddenly the fragility of the island and its unprotected borders are blinding. Suddenly the stark white trees of the deadlands in the centre seem more visible, sentinel skeletons with armbands of silver, mementi mori of some past great invasion.
The island is on edge, on the brink.
The bone-thin vixen (her own army squirming in her belly) is sighted in the suburbs ten times and missed ninety-nine. She is moving west from the port, sure and efficient as an armoured personnel carrier, eating sufficient native birds, lizards, insects, snakes, amphibians, rodents and marsupials to leave a trail of cleaned bones and to keep her babies fat. She passes rapidly through the yards, under fences, through rhododendrons and rose gardens to the denser gardens and the bush at the foot of Mount Wellington; and then, for a short while, she disappears. Troops eddy and lose direction and Tasman Forest special forces stop massing on the streets, scouring gardens with spotlights and shooting rabbits, devils and quolls.
There is a lull.
It is winter and the land is shadowed, even sombre. The nights are long and the mornings and evenings end and begin at midday. The trim-edged woodpiles on which Tasmanians pride themselves (you can tell a lot about a person from their woodpile) slowly shorten as the wood fires puff without stopping. On a clear day, Mount Wellington looms over the smoking city, a white-haired old man contemplative over a campfire. The cold sea and the red icebreaker vessels in the harbour bring murmurs of the frozen Antarctic
. Tasmanians gather in pubs and talk openly of the fox. The talk carries a bellyful of histories into the warm fug – past poisons and murders and losses: the dark things to be visited on this land.
For the first time, the greenies and the rednecks are united – this is an environmental disaster you can shoot.
Everyone has bitter words for Victoria, the home port of the fox. It’s an act of insane jealousy, of war, of terrorism, to smuggle a fox to Tasmania. It was deliberate. Nothing good has ever come from Victoria. Melbourne, riddled with foxes, is a polluted wasteland. Melburnians are known to live in fear and lock their doors at night.
The Examiner runs stories daily and speculates on the clash between the fox and Tasmania’s other carnivores.
PRAY THE DEVIL SAVES US, the Mercury screams.
The fox’s apocalyptic wail shakes the air.
It is winter. She follows a tunnel pathway trodden through the undergrowth by many animals. Mountain ash loom in impeccable lines, up and away to the clear sky where their feathery leaves wave in thinner air. The light at the forest floor is dim, blue-green, pungent. Richly traced with the pathways of pulsing feather and fur. The mottled trunks glow a rimmed pink at dusk, the light dims to amber and the new smells still in the chilled air. The redolent stories of the night begin. Every thicket is laced with stories, filled with evening piping and shrilling. The birds give alarm uncertainly and the animals, despite themselves, stop and stare at the red stranger trotting up, smiling, to meet them.
It is winter but she shines and glitters rich red above the snow, rich red beneath the blue-frosted eucalypts. Rich red among the gaunt Huon pines and rich purple in the night shadows of the King Billys. Her ribs disappear even as her milk fills her undercarriage. Her masked face takes on a blue-black sheen and her whiskers lengthen.
Her cubs are larger at birth than any she’s had before.
It is a muted spring on Mount Wellington. Bushwalkers find piles of white bones and old scat but no other sign of the fox. The special forces comment grimly on the nightly news. The experts are hopeful as each day lengthens and there is still no sighting. Maybe she died. Maybe the devils got her young. Maybe the 1080 baits Tasman Forest uses to protect trees from wildlife have got her.