Later, the same woman came out of her hut and stood making clucking sounds. Is this their language? he thought. He tried it very softly, putting his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Cluck cluck cluck.
Suddenly, in a spurt of dust, a mob of big birds shot into sight. All closely bunched and flapping their wings over one another’s backs and squawking, they squabbled round the woman’s skirt. She laughed, scooped a handful of something from the bowl she carried, tossed it into their midst, then went off again round the side of the hut.
Keeping low to the ground, he scurried forward on all fours, scrabbled among the beaks and claws, and with the maddened birds flying at his arms, and buffeting and pecking, scrambled for cover, then crammed the wet mass into his mouth.
The taste of it, the strangeness, the familiarity, dizzied him. The creature whose dreams he shared came right up to the surface of him. It fed on the saltiness of the stuff, and for a moment entirely took possession of him. He saw things through its eyes in bewildering flashes, and found himself shaken with sobs, but where the tears came from so suddenly, and why, he could not tell. A stranger, a child it might be, who had never wept, was weeping in him. He looked with wonder at his hands and at the remains of the pulpy mess. Wiped it off, a little afraid now of its power, and out of habit muttered syllables that were a formula against bad magic, though he did not think the magic was bad.
He went back to the line where the clothes, brighter now, were filled with sunlight and the lightness of breath. They moved about with vigour and were so lively, so emptily ghostly, that he felt a kind of dread at first of venturing in among them. The shirts made floppy gestures, shook their cuffs, launched out in a gust, and by instinct he ducked. The skirt stirred and swayed. It was like standing in the midst of a crowd that was never still. Now where was that? Where? After a little, with the air ablaze on his shoulders and scents springing up where he trampled the grass, he began to move in and out among them, daring the stroke across his face as he let one soft thing, then another, brush against him, lifting his arms so that a watcher, seeing him pass from one side to the other of the line, dipping his head, might have thought it a kind of dance, a strange blackfeller’s dance among the washing. Imagine!
When darkness fell he crept close to the hut. From an pening between the slabs, yellow light poured forth and where it fell made all the sharp little stones of the yard start up in shadow. He stepped round the edge of it, then squatted and very gingerly extended his hand so that the brightness crept up his arm, but there was no warmth to it.
He crept closer and crouched under the sill. From within came voices, and though the words made no sense to him, save for one or two of them, the sound did, the hiss, the buzz.
He put his shoulder to the rough slabs, believing that if he could only get near enough, the meaning of what was said would come clear to him, he would snatch the words clean out of the speakers’ mouths. If he could get the words inside him, as he had the soaked mush, the creature, or spirit or whatever it was, would come up to the surface of him and take them. It was the words he had to get hold of. It was the words that would recognise him.
He did not want to be taken back. What he wanted was to be recognised.
So when next day he began to run towards the boundary fence and the paddock where the three children stood staring, he had no notion of abandoning the tribe, even less of breaking from one world to another. It was a question of covering the space between them, of recovering the connection that would put the words back in his mouth, and catch the creature, the spirit or whatever it was, that lived in the dark of him, and came up briefly to torment or tease but could be tempted, he now saw, with what these people ate and with the words they used.
He was running to prove that all that separated him from them was ground that could be covered. He gave no consideration to what might happen when he arrived.
The dog intervened. It flashed out and began snapping at his heels. The boy raised the gun to his shoulder. He sailed up onto the fence rails to save himself, and before he knew it the words were out. The creature or spirit in him had spoken up, having all along had the words in there that would betray him and which, when they came hooting out of his mouth, so astonished him: Do not shoot. I am a British object.
It was, after all, the creature, which was so drawn towards them, that had begun to run and for a long moment kept him aloft on the rail, which he gripped with his toes, using his outstretched arms to steady himself, while the dog pranced and slashed the air with its yelping, the boy stood with the gun pointing, clouds rolled, the sky weighed on his neck, and the country, all swamp and forest one way, raw clearings the other, swung in a circle about him.
He waited for a bullet to bring him down, or for the creature, or spirit, to decide it was time to rise upwards and lift him away. But it deserted him, and it was his body that brought him down. On a cry from the smallest of the children, he overbalanced, began to fall, and the next instant was on all fours on the other side.
3
HE WAS TAKEN in by the McIvors, the family of the children who had found him, and given a place to sleep under a red blanket in a lean-to against the side of their hut. In return he helped Jock McIvor round the farm. He was a ready worker, at least to begin with, but could not settle or keep his mind on things; he did not stick, and was physically in too poor a state for the heaviest work. In this respect young Lachlan could run rings around him.
There was, from the beginning, a bond between him and the three children that went back to their meeting at the fence. They felt a proprietary right to him, having seen him first, and he, with his old instinct for self-preservation, for making the most of a weak position, saw the advantage of placing himself in their protection. He let them lead him about like a dog — the dog too took a fancy to him — listened to their secrets, was shown all the bits of things that were precious to them.
He in turn showed them a little of what he knew. He taught the girls to plait grass and make dillybags, to hollow out gourds, dig up the fat yellow or white roots that, once you had thumbed the dirt off, could be baked in the ashes, and to gather berries that yielded a burst of welcome moisture to the tongue or an astringent sweetness.
Making the distinction between them which he had learned among the blacks, he taught Lachlan to track. But the boy anyway stood in a special light for him, and that too went back to the moment of their first meeting, when Lachlan had stepped out in front of the two girls, raised the ‘gun’ to his shoulder, and stood there, square and determined, aiming fair at his heart. It had taken him only a moment of course to see that it was just a stick, but that did not mean it was harmless. What it stood for, and the boy’s fearful but fearless stance, was more important than stick or gun, and had made an indelible impression on him. He could never look at Lachlan, even if all he was doing was larking about in a childish way, without seeing, in his small compact figure, the power he had laid claim to with the pretence of arms.
His object always was to make himself agreeable to the girls, to play the pupil when they wanted to be teacher, the doll when they wanted someone to dress up. But he kept a watch on Lachlan, ready always if necessary to appease; and the boy, because he was very quick in his perceptions, felt it and knew his power. He led the man on an invisible leash, swaggering before the other children of the place, and only when they were alone together let out his natural affection.