Walkabout - James Vance Marshall [23]
Quite suddenly the bird raised his head; he drew himself erect and, with a stiff-legged goose-step, strutted into the centre of the clearing. Then he started to sing. And in an instant all his drabness was sloughed away. For his song was beautiful beyond compare: stream after stream of limpid melodious notes, flowing and mingling, trilling and soaring: bush music, magic as the pipes of Pan. On and on it went; wave after wave of perfect harmony that held the children spellbound. At last the notes sank into a croon, died into silence. The song was over. But not the performance. For now came a metamorphosis too amazing to be believed. The drab brown bird with its tatty, straggling tail disappeared, and in its place rose a creature of pure beauty. The drooping tail fanned wide; its two outmost feathers swung erect to form the frame of a perfect lyre; and in between spread a mist of elfin plumage, a phantasmagoria of blue and silver, shot with gold, that trembled and quivered with all the beauty of a rainbow seen through running water. Then, hidden behind his plumage, the lyre bird again burst into song. And as he sang, he danced; prancing joyfully from side to side, hopping and skipping to the beat of a high-speed polka. And every now and then his song broke off, was interspersed with croaking chuckles of happiness.
Then, as suddenly as his performance had begun, it ended. The feathers drooped, the polka came to a halt, the singing died. And he was just another bird, scratching the earth for food.
The children walked on. The sun dropped lower. The western sky glowed rose and gold.
At the first breath of the sunset wind they made camp beside a group of eucalyptus. There was no water; but the fish alleviated their thirst.
Out of the dusk came ants: winged ants: flying in swarms: attracted by the glow of the fire. Mating in mid-air they shed their wings, dropping inter-twined to earth. The bush boy stirred up the flames to move them on. Coils of wood-smoke streamed downwind.
Peter moved farther away from the fire – for the smoke brought tears to his eyes, brought on another attack of sneezing. But his sneezes were neither as prolonged nor as violent as they’d been the night before. For his cold was on the mend. Though they’d again walked close on fifteen miles, he felt reasonably fresh: fresh enough, at any rate, to appreciate the miming.
For now, out of the shadows and into the firelight, strutted the bush boy. In his hands were three leafy branchlets. These he draped about his body, to represent wings and tail. Then he started to dance: to mimic the polka-ing lyre bird. Round and round the fire he strutted, pantomimed, and pranced; then he screwed up his mouth and burst into shrill, raucous singing. His absurdities grew more tempestuous, more abandoned, yet never lost their realism.
At first the white children were simply amused. Then, as the pantomime grew even livelier, even more grotesque, their amusement turned to unrestrained delight. They laughed and laughed, till the leaves fell from the humble-bushes; they stamped their feet and clapped their hands, till the floor of the desert seemed to shake, and sparks from the fire went whirling away, like fairy lanterns, into the night.
Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, in the middle of his dance, the bush boy sneezed. He sneezed again and again and again (as he’d never sneezed before). Abruptly the pantomiming came to an end.
The sneezing had a curious effect on the bush boy. He seemed to grow suddenly weak. He passed a hand over his forehead, and his fingers came away damp. When he saw this dampness a great fear came over him. He remembered an old man he’d seen in the tribal caves: an old man who had sneezed at the time of the rains, whose forehead had become damp with fever,