Free Into That Forest by Louis Nowra Page B

the creek where he drunked so much water I thought he might burst. Becky and me then washed the blood from him. He limped up to the lair and for several days lay there, eyes half closed, his weariness so deep that he dozed all day and night, trying to keep his eyes open just in case his enemy came back. But he never did. Dave were brave and Corinna knew it. She went out hunting by herself and brought back a rabbit for him. He were grateful - that were easy to see.
    When I think back I see time were passing without me noticing. I lost me talking and lost me counting. It were the seasons I noticed: summer and autumn in the rainforests and hills and then winter down by the coast. We had four summers . . . That made me ’bout ten years old and Becky a bit more than eleven. Four years to a child is like an eternity. Every year I live now passes quicker and quicker but back then a year were an eternity so it were like a time without end.
    Our world were a dark world. Most of our prey were creatures of the night like us. Sometimes at night it were like the whole of the bush were humming. There’d be the scratching, hunting, searching, fighting, snorting, barking, clicking noises of the dying bandicoots, the quolls, the mice, rabbits, dunnarts, possums, pademelons, grumpy wombats, swamp antechinus, potoroos, bettongs . . . it may be the secret dark world to humans but to me and Becky it were easy to see in. I knew what every silhouette, every shadow meant, no matter how quick the animal or bird were. Day were when animals hid in their burrows or in hollow trees, night were when we all came alive.
    I learned what berries to eat if we were starving cos I watched what Dave and Corinna ate and most times the berries had no bad effect on me, but they could eat the native cherry til full while me and Becky threw up. One sort of berry was so peppery that I dranked water for two days trying to cool my throat. Snowberries and purple berries were good to eat. We caught enormous crayfish in the creeks with our bare hands. If we couldn’t find our usual prey then we hunted rats. They were tasty. We ate mushrooms that were like white tennis balls and a jelly shaped like an ear that growed on trees. We even ate goannas and skinks. If we wanted a pick-me-up we’d lick sassafras leaves.
    I learned the countryside: the fens, the highlands of rock and stones, the rainforests, and what rivers we could cross. I saw orange-bellied parrots, wrens, wattlebirds, honey-eaters, currawongs, huge ravens and heard voices of a bird whose name I forget - it had a song like someone whistling a jig. Then there were the smells: dung, rot, fresh kill, old kill, the devils smelling like lanolin, the gum trees reeking of peppermint, forest floors smotheredin hairy toadstools that smelt of onion, then other toadstools that stanked of radish, fish, bitter almonds or even raw potato. There were special mushrooms that glowed in the night like hundreds of tiny lanterns. In summer the moors and fens were scarlet with flowers and the floors of the forests were white with petals of flowering gums and bushes. There were so much wattle that the countryside were yellow like someone had painted it during the night. Eyebrights and yellow bottlebrush and blue flowers stretched as far as I could see. It took a long time to learn the treachery of the earth - even Dave and Corinna were never a hundred per cent certain that the mossy ground we were walking on weren’t a fake floor. You think you’re walking on a real surface but it can gulp you up like it had tried to swallow Becky.
    Difficult times were when it were bitter cold and prey weren’t to be found, when the rain fell day after day til the whole forest were so sodden every step were a squelch. During these rainy times even our den were damp and all you could hear were the constant drip, drip, drip of water hours after it had stopped raining. It were aching hard on the legs to walk through those sodden forests, and it were