Fog a Dox

FOG
A
DOX

FOG
A
DOX

BRUCE PASCOE

First published by Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation, Broome, Western Australia in 2012 Website:
www.magabala.com
Email:
[email protected]

Copyright © Bruce Pascoe 2012

All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced by any process whatsoever without the written permission of the author, the illustrator and the publisher.

Magabala Books receives financial assistance from the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts advisory body. The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through the Department of Culture and the Arts in association with Lotterywest.

Designed by Tracey Gibbs

Illustrations by Brenda Marshall

Cataloguing-in-Publication available from the National Library of Australia

FOR BRIM, A DINGO DOG

LYREBIRDS

Albert Cutts was a tree feller. A fella who cuts down trees.

People will always need wood for their houses, he told the possums, but the possums always needed apples for their mouths and only ever really concentrated when food was involved. In any case they
lived
in trees and couldn't see the sense in cutting them down. So they just glared at Albert even though the apples were off his tree.

Albert didn't cut down trees for nothing – that
was his job. No-one knew the bush as well or loved it more deeply. He lived in a hut beside a stream deep in the forest. He built the hut with planks split from forest timber, the roof from bark peeled off logs.

Albert was happy there. The only time he got really annoyed was when he heard his kettle whistling its head off when he was way up in the hills cutting logs.

‘I didn't leave the kettle on,' he muttered to himself, ‘I'm sure I didn't.' He put his axe down, covered his lunch box with a piece of bark to keep the magpies and currawongs away, and walked down the hill, plodded across the creek flat, and stepped from stone to stone to cross the stream, the kettle whistling madly all the while, fit to burn itself out and he couldn't afford that, he only had one kettle and he'd seen the price of new ones. Oh, he loved his cups of tea.

He stepped through the door and stared at the wood stove. No kettle. It was where he left it, safely on the brick beside the sink.

‘Lyrebird, that bloomin' lyrebird again,' he said to the owl that liked to roost on the rafter beside
the chimney. Nice and warm up there, and the only inconvenience was having to wait for Albert to let him out at night. But Albert was as reliable as the sun in that regard.

The owl blinked at the unusual anger in Albert's voice and said nothing, not a hoot, but then you never got much in the way of conversation from owls. Besides, the owl knew the tricks a lyrebird could play, had been fooled itself by the bird imitating squeaking bush mice and rabbits.

‘That's the third time he's got me,' growled Albert, ‘third time I've left work to come back to the hut, about time I woke up to it.' But what if it really was the kettle? He couldn't afford to let it burn out.

‘Bloomin' lyrebird makin' me miss all that work.' Never mind, he thought, it gives me a chance to stoke the fire and check on Brim.

Albert's dog Brim was slumped in the corner on an old wheat bag as five voracious pups sucked at her teats, mewling in their anxiety to get as much milk as they could, pushing at her with insistent little paws and butting her with their greedy muzzles.

Brim followed Albert's movements, a wistful, yearning expression in her eyes. She missed being up on the ridge tops with the old bloke, sometimes snooping about the fox and wallaby trails, sometimes sleeping in the sun, dreaming of having a good chase through the trees. And sometimes she just did what dogs are very good at: scratching. Nothing like a good scratch, followed by a little sniff of the air, a glance at Albert, and then a little dog-think, which never took very long because, well, dogs never think for long; food always looms too large in their mind and blots out anything but the thought of a bone buried near the woodheap – or was it under the verandah, or the apple tree? Oh, well, I forget where, I'll have to check them all.

Albert would sometimes catch Brim as one of her thoughts evaporated under the dominant influence of bone memories and call out to her, ‘Lose concentration again, darlin'? It happens my furry princess, even to the best brains. One minute we're working out how many eight-bee-one planks in a sixty-foot log and next minute we're thinkin' of rabbit stew. It happens, ol' darlin', and that's a fact.'

But what Albert didn't know was that Brim had been teaching herself to count. Don't laugh, dogs can count. Smart dogs, anyway.

For instance the bone under the verandah, or apple tree, or woodheap or … anyway, that bone is one bone. One. And the rabbit that ran under the dunny. One rabbit. One. She knew it was one because if there'd been two,
two
, she wouldn't know which one to chase. Simple, counting.

And foxes. Like last winter when she had seen a pack of them sitting in silhouette on the ridgeline staring down at their chookhouse. Brim counted them. One fox, two fox, ah, ah, where'd I leave that bone? I hope them fox don't get it, now, where was I? Oh yes, one fox, two fox, ah, ah, lotsa foxes. See, I
can
count past two.

But no counting foxes today. Too busy with the pups, look at them all, one pup, two pups, gee their little claws scratch … ah, one pup, two pups, ah, ah, piles of pups. There, did it again, counting.

‘How are the pups goin', Brim? Got 'em under control, have ya?' Albert knelt down and stroked his dog's head. She flattened her ears and stuck out the
tip of her pink tongue. Gees she loved that Albert.

‘You're a good dog, Brim, a real good dog.' He rubbed her between the ears and around the back of her neck and she closed her eyes in delight. Gees she loved that Albert.

He stroked the silky muzzles of the pups, two of them asleep with Brim's teats in their mouths. ‘Gees you're good little pups,' he murmured as he inspected their delicate pink paws, so innocent, so new, never walked on rough ground, never chased a cat, never felt pain. ‘Beautiful little boorais,' the old man murmured, unconsciously using the Aboriginal word for babies.

His grandfather taught him that. Old Grandad Shorty. Short Cutts, get it, very funny. Grandad Shorty only knew a dozen or so words of his mother's Maap language but that was better than nothing.

Old Shorty was pretty dark, but most blokes who worked in the forest splitting railway sleepers were like that. Wood sap, charcoal, sweat, they got in your pores. And Albert was much the same. Years of cutting trees had stained the creases in his
hands, years of grubbing out roots, splitting posts, burning off the heads, well, you got a bit brown, so no-one remarked too much about Albert's colour, he was much like any other old bloke in the bush.

Albert's secret was that he not only knew some words of the old language, but he used them too. Mirrigan for dog, buln buln for lyrebird, wagra for crow, goomera the old possum, googai the owl beside the chimney, they all knew the sound of their own names, got used to Albert addressing them with respect.