Walkabout - James Vance Marshall [12]
The water had revived a good deal of Peter’s vitality. He was coming now to do something that his sister couldn’t bring herself to do: to beg for food. His eyes were on the baby wallaby, still held in the bush boy’s hand. He reached out and touched it; tentatively; questioningly.
‘Eat?’ he said. ‘Yeemara?’
The sun was setting as the boys clambered down from the rock. Twilight, in the Northern Territory, is short. In half an hour it would be quite dark.
The bush boy moved quickly. Skirting the outcrop of rock, he came to a place where a chain of billabongs went looping into the desert: baby poollets, fed from the main pool’s overflowing breast. Beside the last of the billabongs was an area of soft sandstone rock: flat, featureless, devoid of vegetation. Here, the bush boy decided, was the site for their fire. He started to clear the area of leaves, twigs, and grass; everything inflammable he swept aside; so that the evil spirits of the bush fire should have nothing to feed on.
Peter watched him. Inquisitive. Imitative. Soon he too started to brush away the leaves and pluck out the blades of grass. And as he worked he fired off questions; his chirpy falsetto echoing shrilly among the rocks.
‘What you reckonin’ to do, darkie? What you sweepin’ the rock like it was a carpet for?’
The bush boy grinned; he’d guessed what the small one wanted to know. On the palm of his hand he placed a dried leaf and a fragment of resin-soaked yacca-yacca; then he blew on them gently, carefully, as though he were coaxing a reluctant flame.
‘Larana,’ he said.
‘I get it!’ Peter was jubilant. ‘Fire. You’re gonna light a fire.’
‘Larana,’ the bush boy insisted.
‘O.K., darkie. Larana then. You’re gonna light a larana. I’ll help.’
He buckled to; pouncing on bits of debris like a hungry chicken pecking at scattered corn. The bush boy clicked his teeth in approval.
From the edge of the pool Mary watched them. Again she felt a stab of jealousy, mingled this time with envy. She tried to fight it: told herself it was wrong to feel this way. But the jealousy wouldn’t altogether die. She sensed the magnetic call of boy to boy: felt left-out, alone. If only she too had been a boy! She lay quietly, face-downward on the rocks, chin in hands, watching.
Peter followed the bush boy slavishly, copying his every move. Together, with sharp flints, they scooped a hollow out of the sandstone: about three feet square and nine inches deep. Then they started to forage for wood. They found it in plenty along the fringe of the desert. Yacca-yaccas: their tall, eight-foot poles, spear-straight, rising out of the middle of every tuffet of grass. The bush boy wrenched out the older poles: those that were dry, brittle with the saplessness of age. Then, amongst the roots, he fossicked for resin; the exuded sap that had overflowed from and run down the yacca-yaccas’ stems in the days of their prime. This resin was dry and wax-like: easily combustible; nature’s ready-made firelighter.
Following the bush boy’s example, Peter snapped off the smaller poles, and hunted assiduously for resin.
Then came the snapping of the wood into burnable fragments, and the grinding of the resin into a gritty powder; then the collecting of stones (not the moisture-impregnated rock from around the billa-bongs – which was liable to explode when heated – but the flat, flinty, saucer-shaped stones of the desert). And at last the preparations were finished: the fire was ready to be lit.
The bush boy selected a large, smooth-surfaced chip, cut a groove along its centre, then placed it in the hollow in the sandstone. Next he took a slender stem of yacca, and settled the end of it into the groove of the chip. The chip was then covered with wood splinters and sprinkled with powdered resin. Placing an open palm on either side of the yacca stem, the bush boy rubbed his hands together. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, the stem revolved