Walkabout - James Vance Marshall [22]
‘Yeemara?’ He pointed at the fish.
The bush boy nodded.
The pool was shallow at one end, and Peter waded in. He could see the fish quite clearly; there were thousands of them – well, hundreds, anyhow – but whenever his hand snaked down to clutch them, they darted away. Like quicksilver. The bush boy laughed. He beckoned Peter out of the pool, and led him to a smooth circular rock, smaller than his, but quite as heavy, he suspected, as the little one could lift.
‘Kurura,’ he said. And started to trundle his boulder of quartz up to a shelving ledge of rock that overhung the pool. Peter followed him; and soon the boys and their stones were poised on the edge of the rock that jutted out, like a diving-board, over the water. The bush boy mimed his intention. Peter nodded in understanding; and together they hoisted up their boulders, staggered with them to the lip of the rock and hurled them into the pool. The splash was cataclysmic, loud as a whip-crack, echoing round the encircling rock; the spray was torrential, like the collapsing of a miniature waterspout; and the concussion, in the confined, rock-bound pool, was overwhelming, like the explosion of a depth-charge. The fish were stunned: upside-down they came floating to the surface.
The bush boy leapt into the pool. Peter followed. Together, they grabbed at the paralysed fish, tossing them out of the water, on to the rocks. Within sixty seconds a couple of dozen yarrawa were squirming their lives out, on the smooth, sun-hot granite.
The bush boy was jubilant. Climbing out of the pool, he gathered the fish together, in a twisting, glistening heap, playing with them, trickling them through his fingers like a miser worshipping his gold.
There were so many fish and they were so slippery, that when the boys wanted to take them back to the camp site they couldn’t carry them. Not until Peter took off his shorts. Then, in these, they wrapped the yarrawa up, and carried them back in triumph.
When the children had eaten – three fish apiece – Peter refused to put on his shorts. There was quite a scene.
‘Feel them,’ the little boy said. ‘They’re horrid and scaly. Full of fish.’
‘Wash them, and put them on,’ his sister ordered.
‘Shan’t!’
Peter eyed her defiantly.
It was the bush boy who settled the argument. He was ready to move again; the yarrawa were too valuable to be left behind; he rolled them up in the little one’s shorts and tossed the bundle to the lubra.
‘Kurura,’ he said.
And so they began the fourth day of the walkabout.
The going was easier than on the plateau: down the lower reaches of the valley then out across the plain – the vast, lonely, and limitless plain that rolled on and on, a flowering wilderness, silent as sleep, motionless as death.
Over the level ground the bush boy moved quickly. Too quickly for Peter, whose cold made him short of breath. Soon the little boy was panting. After a couple of hours his nose started to stream. The midday halt – in the shade of a group of golden casuarinas – was never more welcome. But it only lasted a couple of hours. Then they were walking again. Across the endless plain. On and on.
Half-way through the afternoon, as they were crossing a monotonous belt of scrub, there came a diversion : as welcome as it was unexpected. The children were walking in their usual order – the bush boy first, Peter next, Mary in the rear – when suddenly the bush boy stopped: stopped dead: like a pointer, one foot off the ground, nose forward, an arm flung behind him for balance. For perhaps half a minute he stayed motionless.: frozen; then he crept quietly forward, to where a low bank of wattle-bush formed a screen of scarlet around a tiny clearing. Expectantly the others joined him. Together they peered through the wattle leaves.
They saw a bird. An ordinary rather sad-looking bird, with big eyes, pointed beak and long, straggling tail. He was