Free Mr Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald Page B

ill-humour. ‘What have pepper-pots to do with anything?’
    â€˜Did the Flood reach to all corners of the earth?’ continued MacCracken. ‘And if it did, look at the way these bugs float on water and climb to the tops of trees, and squat under rocks flat enough to stop their breathing but still emerge pretty fit, old Covington.’
    â€˜The sun is hot,’ said Covington.
    One day MacCracken showed Covington a seed bug, a leaf beetle, and a native bee—holding them cupped wriggling and buzzing in his pink palm—three random specimens that Covington stared at thunderstruck.
    â€˜What made you choose these—’ he spluttered— ‘ Darwinii ?’
    He reached out and dashed them from MacCracken’s hand. MacCracken collected the same insects up, put them in an envelope and resolved at his next opportunity to have an expert tell him what in the world was offensive aboutthem. Their discoverer’s name? They had a pungent smell all together. He thought it was that. Deafness sharpens the remaining senses and drives an old walrus mad.
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    There came a day when Covington knocked on MacCracken’s door ready to say something, and—so it chanced —MacCracken had something more important on his mind and was embroiled in literary composition, and told his housemaid to have Covington call at a different hour, or even better, the next day, if it so pleased him and goodbye.
    Covington turned instantly away. From that day the tone of the friendship changed. MacCracken began to feel its greater pull despite himself. Something more was expected of him and he knew not what. It made him grind his teeth in frustration.
    On his next return, in April, Covington’s mood of offence preceded him all the way up from Tathra to Sydney, and he declined to announce his arrival at all. When MacCracken went swimming at the end of his day’s work he found Covington sitting in a rock-shelter smoking his pipe.
    The next day, at the hour when they usually met, MacCracken found Covington engaged with the blacks of Watson’s Bay, studying their fishing nets, employing their sign language (as they needs-must with a Covington), poking into their smoky fires with a stick to see what was sizzling there: oyster, mussel, pippi, scallop or abalone. In the dusk his great laugh told MacCracken his whereabouts. ‘Do I care that you’ve found me?’ that laugh implied. ‘Rain on you, Dr MacCracken—I’ll sleep under the stars.’
    MacCracken peered into Covington’s past as best he could. There were diffuse shapes down there like shadows in the tide. De Sousa, a shipping agent who was a rival to Smith and Elder, who handled Covington’s cargoes, toldMacCracken that Covington had a patron who gave him his start in Australia by sending him there in the first place.
    â€˜A Spaniard, was it?’ MacCracken asked. ‘By the name of Sia Di?’
    â€˜That’s no Spanish name I ever heard,’ replied De Sousa.
    â€˜Nor I,’ MacCracken reflected. ‘But that is what he calls the man of his life. After which he gives a rueful grunt. There is a feeling of pride around the name, but Covington would rather spit than boast, so all I get is the annoyance.’
    There was nothing unusual about obscure patrons in that colony. If you lacked one you invented one. A letter of introduction was all that was needed to change things around for a hopeful. There was no better place on the planet for correcting reversals of fortune and ill-birth, and none worse for sucking the spirit from an overreaching hopeful, either. Origins were made to be muddied as a matter of course. The next man you met could well be a lord, though he dressed in tatters and affected a colonial style.
    So far Covington had told MacCracken nothing about his early life except that he spoke of a stepmother, a Mrs Hewtson of Mill Lane in Bedford. ‘She had a loving affection for me, I