Disquiet - Imagine Australia

feels his body grow light, disappear, so now there is no skin between himself and the plateau. He
expands. The huge deep ground he is sitting on is holding him up, but soon there is no such thing
as up: he is nowhere, everywhere. When he breathes he can sense the air cool as it flows over the
moisture in his nostrils, his belly swells, then the same air, now a little warmer, flows out again.
This is what he focuses on: the air in and the air out, and in time he is nothing but something
through which air passes, just as it passes through the shivering treetops below him, over stones,
slips through blades of grass. The black night grows cold, and still he sits.
In the morning he hes in his sleeping bag and listens to the rain patter against his tent. The
comfort has changed, yes, but has not left him. He dresses and eats, breaks camp. Throughout
the day he checks his runs and sets new snares. The rain thins, stops, the clouds dissipate and
drift. He cuts carcasses from his traps and drags them up and down the pad, marking their scent.
Again, the sky colours pink and mauve, and again he prepares to sit.
On the morning of the twelfth day, just as he is headed back toward the escarpment, he finds a
wallaby corpse with its throat ripped red-raw. On closer inspection he sees the heart, lungs,
kidneys and liver have been consumed, along with some meat from the inside of the ham. Nothing
else has been touched. There are none of the usual telltale signs of a struggle. And when the
Naturalist gently lays his wet hand on the animal he feels the faintest warmth. A fresh kill,
displaying all the characteristics of a tiger kill. He refuses to be excited, thinking only: This rain win
have washed away any prints. The first thing he does is mark his position clearly on his
photograph. Then he searches his surrounds. He follows a nearby pad, stopping when it fractures
into a creek. Nothing. He returns to the site of the kill and picks another path to follow; this one
climbs a small snow gum studded rise, immediately dropping down the other side to linger along
the edge of a marshy stretch of cord rush. M has been following this route for an hour, checking for
possible rest spots along the way, when he finds a dry patch of flattened tussock grass below two
interlocking slabs of dolerite. He presses his hand onto the grass to feel for heat and thinks he
feels some. Any animal could have stopped here for some respite from the beating rain, it's true,
but M takes out his photograph and marks it with a tiny circle.
Now I have you.
Looking at his watch he sees he will have to hurry if he wants to be back before dark: the alarm
must not be raised. So, turning from the dolerite, he takes a bearing and strides off into the new
world, electrified and blood aflame.