The Best Australian Stories (28 page)

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.

The moss and lichen warm under her paws. She avoids the aridity of the
cropped green carpet lands – the dead trees are too few for shelter. She and her
family hug the sleek and shining pelt of grass and marshlands, the warm blood
of plenty pulling them northwards. The sounds of wood ducks call them on
until the crackle of bark birds, the tonk-tonk of linnets and the musk of potoroos
draw them back into the woods; and then diamond birds in the white gums
pull them to the mountains again.

In late spring the fox becomes visible again, almost. There are sightings of strange yellow eyes at night around Doo Town. Red hairs found on a fence near the Bay of Fires are sent to the Forest and then to Victoria for analysis. Footprints appear in the mud around dams and the forests seem hushed over leaf litter that buries the trail of bones. Electricity to a remote farm is cut, the wires chewed through; and then the quolls vanish. Greenies rich in fox folklore and mainland experiences are welcomed in redneck haunts, and rednecks with long genealogies of trapping and marksmanship speak at Greenpeace meetings.

Summer brings strange portents.

The weather stays grim and savage over Ben Lomond. The light of the sun hasn't been seen since the fox landed.

A jagged stone bridge, built by chained hands two centuries before, falls suddenly into the drain (once a river) beneath it. There is no explanation.

A record number of teenagers jump off forbidden things: for pleasure off Kings Bridge into the South Esk River; and to their deaths off the rim of the Tasman Blowhole into the raging sea.

She sits under a sizzling canopy. Leaves mottle the white-hot sun to a sliding
shimmer across her fiery back. The cicadas rasp and sigh. The lichen clings like
a pale dried skin to the rocks. The mosses are browned and crisp and the stalks
of the grasses whisper against each other. She is above the fern line, a speck of
red in this open, once-logged woodland. Below the hill she knows a wide river
bends. She can smell the water, sticky and blood-rich, and she has tasted the abundance of water in the animals and birds. She surveys the forest, ears pricked
for sounds of food stirring, but all she can hear now is the sound of her young at
play and the distant mumble and footfall of cows. These trees and hollows have
been licked clean. She can smell only fox stories and fading whispers of other
trails. She doesn't rest long. They will be gone in a minute, leaving eggs in high
nests to cool to a final stillness.

The beloved can hunt now for themselves, and the clan moves fast. Soon they
will disperse.

The
Examiner
, 14 February:
TERROR STRIKES!
All doors are locked in Jericho tonight after an alleged sighting of a fox in the early hours of this morning. ‘When I realised it might be a fox, I called the dogs off,' Harry Proctor, a local grazier, said today. ‘You never know what a fox might do to my dogs.'

Jericho is the second town to have a scare in as many nights. Bagdad, just forty kilometres away, locked all doors last night after an unexplained wailing was heard by several Fox Emergency Line callers.

A young male fox ranges over a headland heath above a wild western ocean,
eating as he goes. The wind blows over the land. He leaves small explosions of
hot blue feathers scattered in the tea-tree brush and flecks of blood on the black
rocks. He is too well fed to bother chewing lizards' legs, beaks or birds' feet, so he
leaves these too – tiny ciphers drying in the now brief midday sun.

A vixen stalks an eastern marshland. She is a small smokeless
flame, licking through the reeds and grasses without so much as a crackle. She is
seeking variety. She is bored with black ducks, bitterns, marsh snakes, egrets,
pademelons, ibises, spoonbills, water dragons, skinks, rails, crakes, turbo
chooks, banjo frogs, water rats, voles, mice, dunnarts and potoroos.

Her brother in the north wails his breathless cry to a chill moon. He is
perched on a jagged tor, silhouetted above a cataract. A glittering city trickles
out from far beneath him, curves in scattered glints and then spreads across
hills and plain. The sheen of a wide river stretches towards the northern sea.

He has just killed twenty-three peacocks.

He is answered to the south-west and the south-east.