Free Diamond Spirit by Karen Wood

geez he was a good one. Honest as the day he was born. I used to put all the local kids on him. But I had to go down the Snowies for six months to do some contract mustering and I knew he wouldn’t be around when I got back.’
    He paused and flicked the toothpick across the aisle. His watery old eyes looked into the distance. ‘I didn’t want him to suffer, so I got up real early one morning and gave him a good shampooing. I oiled his tail and brushed his mane, then I polished his best show bridle and put it on him.’ Harry smiled with pride. ‘He always lived like a gentleman and I wanted him to die like a gentleman.’
    He paused, ran his tongue over his teeth and reached into his jacket again. ‘Took him down the paddock and shot him, I did. Hardest thing I ever had to do in my life. He’s buried under that big mulberry tree down the paddock. He used to like eating the berries off it.’
    ‘I buried Diamond next to our coachwood tree. She used to stand under it for hours and rub her neck on it,’ said Jess quietly.
    The two of them sat in the stable aisle, Harry chewing on a new toothpick, Jess twiddling her hair and looking at the old toothpick that had speared itself into a poo a few metres away. After a while she asked him about something that had been bothering her. ‘Do you believe in reincarnation, Harry?’
    Harry looked mildly surprised. ‘That’s a funny question,’ he said. ‘Dunno, I never really thought about it.’ He drew a neat circle in a patch of dust with his toe as he pondered the question. ‘But I always thought the Aboriginal culture of belonging to your country made a lot of sense.’
    ‘How do you mean?’ asked Jess.
    ‘Everything in nature is connected. All the animals and birds and lizards and plants, even the wind and the rain. We’re all related and we all need each other. It’s true of time as well – the past, the present and the future.’ He shrugged. ‘You just gotta stop and listen and feel; then you know it’s true. Sometimes when I’m out bush, mustering, sitting on a horse, I really feel it: the trees and rocks and dust all whispering to me, all soaking into me. Makes me feel alive.’
    Jess thought about how she felt when she was alone with the horses in the paddocks: the sounds of the wind and the birds; the movement of the grass and the sun on her skin. What Harry was saying made a lot of sense, but it didn’t answer her question.
    ‘So, what happens when something dies?’ she asked. ‘Do you reckon it gets reincarnated?’
    ‘Some mobs think so, others don’t.’ Harry crinkled his forehead. ‘The fellas I talked to told me that in the creation time, great ancestral spirits walked the earth and rose up to create all the different parts of the natural world, such as rocks and snakes and lizards. They told me that when a woman conceives a baby, a spirit from one of these natural things enters the woman. There are special places, sacred sites, where these spirits come from. And the spirit that enters you, like possum or turtle or whatever, becomes your totem.’
    Jess had heard some of the girls at school talking about totems. ‘A totem is like a spirit guide, isn’t it?’
    ‘No, no,’ said Harry. ‘It’s not like that at all. Your totem gives you duties to carry, obligations to your mob and country. It creates a special kinship with other people of the same totem.’
    ‘So, what happens when you die?’
    ‘The way I understand it, your soul splits into three parts. Your ancestral-soul goes to sky camp, your ego-soul dies and your totem-soul is returned to the spirits of nature.’
    Jess let her mind process this information for a while. ‘Reckon a really big old coachwood tree could be a totem?’ she asked.
    ‘I guess so.’
    Jess rubbed her chin. She couldn’t help thinking about Diamond and Walkabout and their uncanny connection. It wasn’t that they really looked the same. It was just . . . some weird sort of sameness.
    Maybe that was it.