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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: sales@magabala.com
Copyright © Bruce Pascoe 2012
For Brim, a dingo dog
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
Printed in China at Everbest Printing Company
Cataloguing-in-Publication available from the National Library of Australia
ISBN 978-1-921248-55-9

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
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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.
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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
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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 Maap
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.
That’s how Brim got her name. Old Grandad
Shorty told a story about his own grandmother
Daisy being born under a tree on the bank of
Lake Brim. Old Shorty remembered Granny Daisy
bringing him up on a diet of condensed milk, bread
and Golden Syrup … and stories, bush stories:
why the red gums grow where they grow, why the
magpie is black and white, and a bit of a rude one
about why dogs sniff each other’s bums. One day
all the dogs went to a big fancy dress ball and they
left their tails …
‘Ah, I’d better get back to work,’ Albert told
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Brim, ‘but I’m glad to see you’ve got your own tail,
my old darlin’.’
Albert stumped his way up the hill where his axe
and wedges waited on a day’s hard labour. The hills
and valleys soon chimed to the strokes of his axe
and the ring of the mallet on the steel wedge as he
split posts. It was hard work, but pleasant enough,
with the company of a yellow robin perched
slantwise on a trunk, watching with eyes like little
black pearls, sharp to any grubs or larvae exposed
by Albert’s work.
The kookaburra, kuark, was usually there too,
a beak like a pair of tin snips kept sharp for any
lizard or snake silly enough to come out in the
open. Currawongs and magpies stood by with a
show of disdain for human endeavour but their
greedy beaks never refused the big white wood
grubs that Albert dislodged from their tunnels in
the logs.
For Albert it was like being surrounded by
friends and relations, some of them close and
confidential, others haughty and a bit superior,
some frantic to fill their bellies or, like the grey
thrush, harried to exhaustion by a coronet of
gaping beaks squalling their hunger.
Even the goanna would sidle up from time to
time, sometimes saggy and baggy in dull grey
flaking skin, but after he’d rubbed that off against
the coarse bark of a messmate he appeared bright
yellow and black, like an enamelled prince.
Albert loved the bush. Some would say it was
a lonely life, eating a solitary lunch on a rocky
hillside surrounded by the debris of fallen logs and
split posts, but most times Albert had Brim to talk
to and on the rare occasions when she couldn’t,
like when she was suckling pups, there were the
animals; bird song glinting from the tree tops,
butterflies winking at him with the opening and
shutting of brand new wings still damp from the
cocoon.
Albert rested against a stump he’d cut in …
now, when was it? Before Brim was born, yes,
even before her mother, old Kudja, about a year
or two before the last big flood, so it’d have to
be, yes, 1972 or thereabouts, a long time anyway.
The tree he felled today would be that tree’s sister,
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and thirty metres away there was a tree that he
might cut in another twenty years … Well, maybe.
Maybe he’d still be swinging an axe in twenty
years, or a chainsaw if he ever lowered himself to
use a chainsaw, or could afford to buy one. Eight
hundred and eighty dollars they were, and that’s
160 posts or two week’s work, nah, stick to the
axe, Albert, cuts all right … and quieter too.
Brim would be coming with him again in a few
days because the pups were getting bigger and
she’d be wanting a rest from them soon, the little
devils. Their father was one of the bush dingoes, as
Brim’s own father had been. The dog that mated
with Brim was nearly pure dingo, dark like the
mountain dingoes are, a kind of golden chocolate
with swatches of near-black at the nape and flanks.
He was a beautiful dog, sharp as a tack. He’d quiz
you with his eyes, trying to learn about you: if he
could trust you, whether you were the kind of
bloke who shot creatures out of arrogance, just
because he could, just because he had the power of
death within the reach of his finger.
They’d only caught each other’s eye a few times,
but each time it felt to Albert like an interrogation.
What sort of man are you? How do you treat
your dogs? Do you keep your chooks locked up at
night? Would you get cranky if I fell in love with
Brim or are you prejudiced against dingoes? That
sort of look. They respected each other but they’d
never be mates, a wild animal and a man, never
mates, deferential acquaintances, but never mates,
because when a dog became the mate of a man he
lost his wildness, lost the freedom to decide where
he slept at night and the right to grab rabbits by
the back of the neck.
With his hat tipped over his eyes and his mug
of tea cooling beside him Albert damn near dozed
off before he roused himself from contemplation
of the canine universe and let his hand fall on the
smooth, hard shank of his axe, his uncomplaining
work companion of thirty-five years … Well, it’d
had nine or so handles and this was the third head,
but it was still the same axe.
He rose, his knees creaking, and slowly arched
his back, stretching the tired muscles of his
shoulders before striding over to the fallen log and
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elting the wedge into a radial crack, driving it
deeper and deeper until the post sprang out of the
log like a miracle.
‘Good splittin’ wood this stringybark,’ Albert
mused for the thousandth time, then fell silent
as a strange whining, piping cry reached his ear.
He twisted and turned about to fix the position
of the cry, wondering if it was the little communal
mew that currawongs peeped to each other as
they searched for food, or the choughs who
liked to march about together like a band of
scarlet-eyed horticulturalists, turning over the
forest litter, and remarking convivially on the
fascination of moss and liverworts, mushroom
mycelium and scrub worms.
But if it was choughs they’d eventually march
into the clearing in their neat parade and if it was
currawongs you’d never mistake their gangsta
rap. No, it was an animal. He listened again …
A baby animal.
He leant the mallet against the log and walked
quietly toward the noise, careful to avoid standing
on twigs that might snap or dry eucalypt leaves
that might betray him with their crunch. He stood
still and waited, sure he was close to the source of
the noise. A group of granite boulders stood only
twenty metres from him and he moved forward
and to his right so that he might see around them.
He met the fierce eyes of a goshawk, defiant,
challenging.
The bird at first lowered its head in a show of
aggression but when Albert stood his ground,
trying to see what the goshawk gripped in its
talons the raptor stood to its full height, puffing
out the hackles on its neck and chest and lifting
its wings, trying to produce the illusion of having
doubled in size. Despite the mad yellow glare of its
truculent eyes, Albert refused to be intimidated.
He leaned closer and could see at last what
the bird protected so zealously: a baby fox, a tiny
carcass from which the simitar beak had already
torn strips of flesh. Albert scanned the area and
saw the hole dug beneath the granite tor and the
flattened area before it where the baby foxes had
been playing, for yes, there were surely others in
the den and they must have become impatient
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waiting for their mother and ventured out to play
in the sun.
Why hadn’t the mother returned? She would
have heard the goshawk’s attack call. Had the
mother taken a bait, been shot by bounty hunters,
killed by an angry farmer who’d stayed up all night
to see what had been raiding his chookpen? Albert
backed away. There was nothing he could do for
the little fox. The goshawk was probably desperate
to feed its own young. Killing rabbits and mice was
what goshawks did for a living but if a baby fox got
too bold while its mother was away they’d swoop
on that too. That’s how the world goes around,
rabbits eat the hearts out of Mrs Maloney’s
wattle seedlings and goshawks eat the rabbits and
Mrs Maloney’s chickens if she’s out for the day,
drinking strong black tea on another lady’s front
verandah. ‘Aren’t the foxes bad this year, Mrs
Maloney.’ ‘And the hawks, Mrs Bortolotto, there’s
one been keeping a wicked yellow eye on my
chickens. Give it a good whack with the broom if I
catch him.’
But Mrs Maloney’s chickens are safe for another
day because the goshawk’s nestlings will feed on
baby fox meat tonight.
Albert split out his quota of posts but before it
got dark he returned to the granite boulders and
inspected the beaten sand at the entrance to the
den. No adult fox had snuck back to the cubs while
he had been working. They were orphans.
He knelt at the entrance and the acrid fox scent
was overwhelming. He reached his arm in and
followed the tunnel as it curved sharply beneath
the granite. He could just feel the fur of an animal
… and its teeth. The brave little fellow was trying
to bite his hand. He clasped the tiny body and
dragged it from the den, a fine little male fox,
barely old enough to leave the den on its own,
the eyes still bleary from the weeks spent in the
dark. He tucked the fox into his coat pocket and
buttoned the tab before reaching into the tunnel
again and finding another cub, and another. One,
two, three little foxes. Brim should have been there
to practise her counting … as she ate them: one
little fox cub, two little fox cubs …
Albert looked at the last cub and felt it tremble
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as it tried to bury its face in his hand, searching
for the security of its brother and sister’s fur. Poor
little thing, he thought, should bump it on the
head really, a fox, a chicken killer, goose egg thief,
should kill it, but … I can’t.
The pads of the little paws were pink and soft as
a baby’s toes. How could you raise your hand to kill
it, even though you knew it would grow into a killer
itself? He couldn’t do it and that was that. Should
never have reached into the hole, should have let
them die of starvation, would never have known
the little fellows, should never have looked into their
eyes and through to their tiny tremulous hearts,
and after his thumb sought out the minute pulse he
couldn’t have killed them for all the tea in China.
Choughs
‘China,’ the girl wrote, ‘is a big country with a lot
of people and they grow tea … and rice.’
She looked at what she had written, fiddled
with the pen, rotating the plastic tube between her
thumb and forefinger. ‘China.’ Her mother said she
should keep up her schooling, even though she was
sick. Too sick to be outside.
She looked out the window. Seven birds waddled
into the yard with a gait that made their tails sweep
and bob. They seemed to be talking to each other,
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like women down at the shops.
‘Maria, have you finished your assignment yet?’
Her mother said as she bustled into the room,
always something bordering on accusation in her
voice.
‘Yes,’ Maria replied, knowing this answer would
not be sufficient.
‘Is this it? Just this, “China is a big …”’
‘I was going to write more.’
‘You were looking out the window.’
‘What are those birds?’
‘What birds?’
‘Those ones, out there, talking to each other.’
Mrs Coniliopoulos went to the window trying
to think of reasons why sick girls shouldn’t waste
time looking at birds. When do I ever get time to
look out windows?
‘They … they’re crows … scavengers, peck the
eyes out of lambs.’
‘But they’ve got white on them.’
‘Well, they’re still scavengers, waltzing about,
think they own the place. Anyway it’s about time
you finished the China assignment so I can take it
up to the school. I don’t want you falling behind.
When you get well and go back …’
Maria stopped listening and clicked the
Google icon on her computer. Birds, she typed,
of Australia. Crow. She looked at the picture of
the very bad crow. Her birds were not crows. Not
ravens, either, or currawongs, or friar birds, or …
Choughs, that’s what they were, choughs. How
were you supposed to say that? She scrolled down.
Happy family birds. The chough is a sociable bird
that lives in close family groups and all members
help …
‘Maria, that’s not China,’ her mother accused,
looking over her shoulder, ‘that’s those crows.’
‘They’re choughs,’ Maria said.
‘Oh, Maria, please concentrate, I’m not doing
this to be mean, darling, you know I just want …’
Mrs Coniliopoulos began wringing her hands
and Maria knew from experience that the wringing
would squeeze tears from her mother’s eyes.
Maria looked out the window. Happy family
birds.
Mrs Coniliopoulos stared at the top of her
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daughter’s head where the hair was thin, sick
looking, from the chemotherapy. What can I do,
what can I do? The woman wailed within her own
heart, I’m a single mother and my daughter is …
‘Maria, please, I’m begging you to finish the
assignment, please, because when you get …’
Maria turned and looked squarely at her
mother’s face. She knew her mother was trying to
do the right thing, trying to be the kind of mother
that solved things, but instinctively she knew that
her mother had only the vaguest idea what to do
in most circumstances and since the illness had
arrived she could only think about getting Maria
to work. That’s all the woman had ever done, that
was the only solution she could think of to any
difficulty in life. Work.
–>*

and you’ve gotta help me, that’s what mates do.’
He went down on his knee before his little
ginger mate and held the cubs out to her. Her lip
curled involuntarily but Albert beseeched her and
she tried, she really did, she stretched forward
to sniff the cubs but recoiled with her nostrils
quivering, such an ugly, wild, unholy smell.
Unholy! What’s unholy? Some living thing that
is strange to you?
‘Come on, Brim, you can see how little they are,
you can see they’re not weaned, they’re starvin’,
poor little devils.’
Albert held a cub toward one of Brim’s spare
teats, while Brim’s own pups were tumbled in
dog sleep, all pink tummy and silken ear, all milky
breath and mother warm.
The cub’s nostrils quivered suddenly at the
smell of milk. Wild milk, unholy milk, dog milk,
but milk for all that and she hadn’t been fed for
four days, and her mother gone and her brother
gone and now this big creature burying her in
his pocket and this dog glaring at her … but the
milk, the milk, the lovely warm slippery milk. Her
tongue made little darts from her lips, hungry for
dog milk despite herself.
Albert lowered the little creature to the teat and
Brim flinched as it took hold, her eyes widening
with panic, fearful of the little foreigner, hating
its ugly, narrow little head, not at all like her own
babies with their blunt loveable faces, the most
beautiful creatures to ever live.
What are you doing to me, Albert? Brim’s eyes
pleaded, because even though she could count she
couldn’t talk, it’s a fox, Albert, a fox. One fox is one
too many.
Albert watched the cub attach itself greedily,
the pups too full of milk and sleep to notice, their
fat pink tummies fit to burst. Albert brought out
another cub and placed it beside its sister.
That’s two foxes, Albert, two, Brim appealed,
but Albert took no notice, bringing the last cub
from his capacious pocket.
That’s another one, Brim’s eyes signalled alarm,
that’s … that’s lotsa foxes.
But the foxes just suckled ferociously while
Albert squatted down beside Brim and reassured
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her with a calming hand repeatedly following the
curve of her brow to the base of her neck, strong,
sure strokes pressing calm and acceptance into
her heart. If Albert thought it was all right for a
bitch to suckle a fox, lotsa foxes, then it must be all
right. Why, even Rome was built by human babies
suckled by a wolf. Dogs didn’t learn much history
but paid particular attention to the bits where dogs
and wolves were involved.
Dogs and Doxes
I’m forty-one years old, Vera Coniliopoulos
thought as she watched the tortured breath of her
daughter, groping through the suffocation of the
hard chemicals sent to kill her cells, the good and
the bad. Forty-one and my daughter is dying and
no-one loves me.
It’s not hard to be maudlin in the stifled light of
a sick person’s room, but in her heart Vera knew it
was close enough to the truth to crush her spirit.
Vera was almost right but not quite because
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