Fog a Dox (9 page)

‘What will happen to Fog?' Maria asked, stroking the dox between the ears, smoothing the golden fur.

‘Oh, he'll be all right,' Albert replied, desperately trying to construct a sentence without the D word in it. ‘He'll always have a mate.'

‘Yes, but what if he wants a real mate, like a girl fox?'

‘Well, that's up to him.'

‘But he's your pet.'

‘No, Fog is a fox, Maria. We call him a dox so that people won't kill him, but he's a fox and one day he'll go.'

‘But you love him and he loves you … He saved your life.'

‘Yes, and I saved his. Under normal circumstances he'd be … He'd never have survived after his mother … got taken. But who's to say I
did the right thing? He's a feral animal, he's not supposed to be here.'

‘So why did you?'

‘Because I couldn't help myself. You should have seen him when he was a cub. Him and his sisters.'

‘Sisters?'

‘Oh, yes, he had two sisters and after they grew up they went back to being foxes, eating baby birds and trying to kill chickens … That's what foxes do.'

‘So Fog will go one day?'

‘Don't know. We've never spoken about it. You ask him.'

Maria turned the dox's head so that she could look into his eyes.

‘Is that what you'll do, Fog, leave all your friends?'

Fog's eyes were inscrutable. As inscrutable as a fox.

Brim squirmed closer between Albert and Maria and licked the girl's hand as if to say, I'll stay, I'll stay, I'm not a stuck-up fox.

‘I love them both,' she said, ‘I'd hate to think of one of them not being with you.'

‘Well, that's the way it is. If it happens, it happens.'

‘Like me,' she said and tried to catch his eye. But suddenly Albert got busy with the lines.

‘Thought that was a bite for a minute,' he said before settling again, thinking he'd avoided the question. If it was a question.

‘I might die.'

‘Yes, you told us, first day in the hospital. But you're on a new treatment now, the doctors said …'

‘It might work.'

‘Yes, and Fog might stay, and might is better than won't.'

Maria thought about it.

It was unnerving talking to her because she was so intelligent and the threat of her illness, the possibility that she might die, had focused her mind to pinpoint concentration on the fundamentals. Of life. The nature of being alive. She didn't speak as a child her age would speak.

And yet she was thrilled with the things a child would be thrilled by: the beauty of birds and animals, the hectic glory of the country. To be
thrilled was to be alive. And she was thrilled.

Albert was saved from further questioning by catching two lovely perch and a blackfish. Tiger put them in the coals of the fire and told Colin to take Dave and Maria to get some yabbies.

Colin rowed them in silence across the river while the rainbow birds stitched threads of vibrant colour about them.

‘Look,' Colin said at last. ‘Look, there's Bunjil looking out for us.'

Maria looked where he pointed and there was a wedge-tailed eagle weaving great lazy circles in the sky.

‘That's our spirit bird. When we see him everything's all right.'

Everything? Maria thought to herself, but couldn't help admiring the huge bird wheeling giant circles around the sun.

On the other side of the river they pulled in the yabby pots and tipped the catch into a bucket. Fog peered into the bucket with obvious distaste for such spiky, clawy, scratchy looking things.

But they tasted terrific. Tiger tipped them into
a kerosene tin of boiling water and soon they were eating a meal of fish and yabbies and fresh damper while the orioles and shrike thrushes called about them.

The shrike thrush entered the camp, his head tipped to one side enquiringly while keeping an eye on the dogs and fox.

Albert tipped the bird some crumbs of damper.

‘Yarren, we call that one. He's a good bird. Lovely to have one around the camp. He's a good friend of our people. He'll sing for us later. He's got a beautiful voice.'

They drank more tea and dozed in the sun, mesmerised by the fragrant smoke from the red gum wood, deeply satisfied by the food they'd eaten. Queenie Bess was already asleep with her head on Dave's boot while Fog and Brim were like bookends beside the frail little girl.

‘I'm going to remember this forever,' Maria declared.

And she did.

The author

Bruce Pascoe is a writer who can't go to sleep without patting his dogs first. When he wakes up in the morning the first thing he does is walk with his dogs as they investigate the dawn. Bruce has written 26 books, lives at Gipsy Point, Victoria, on the magnificent Genoa (Jinoor) River. He lives with his wife, Lyn, has two children, two grandchildren and two dogs, Yambulla and Wangarabel, named after the mountain and town near where they were born. Bruce's previous two dogs, Brim the dingo dog and Reg the Independent are now sleeping in sunshine a long way from earth. Bruce has a Bunurong-Tasmanian heritage and the job he enjoyed most was being dog wrangler for the vet at Maningrida, Northern Territory.