That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott Read Free Book Online Page A

because of all the moisture in the air. Nearby, Bobby indicated a hoof print, protected from the wind and rain by the wall of granite beside which it was so closely imprinted.
    The little dog sniffed the cowpat, looked up at Bobby and Geordie Chaine and wagged its stump of a tail.
    Bobby wondered if he could explain what his people were saying. Could he? Sheltered like an insect among the fallen bodies of ancestors, he huddled in the eye sockets of a mountainous skull and became part of its vision, was one of its thoughts. Moving across the body, journeying with the old people, he drank from some transformed, still-bleeding wound.
    Bobby Wabalanginy and his Uncle Wooral heard the frogs and the birds singing and the voices and even the drooping leaves, and the sky told them there was rain to come, that they must be moving inland.
    Wind and rain hide the hunter while the kangaroo scratches his chest, rotates his ears inward and looks away, awaiting the spear. Birds nest. Striped emu chicks appear. There are possums everywhere in the tall trees.
    The plains run with water, streams joining old paths leading all the way to the sea, not just to King George Town where those people camp all the time now. Not everything or everyone moves that way.
    But these new prints in the earth came from there, these prints made by the bellowing, blundering devils the horizon people brought with them. What they want? What they offer?
    *
    The Chaine party were shown a creek, and were told it would lead them to the coast close to King George Town. They never really left the mountains behind because they saw them from each hilltop and agreed that, although quite unremarkable in the country of home, they made a grand impression here, floating like blue islands in this otherwise flat landscape. They crossed plains of dense mallee and areas of long, rippling grass, and the creekbed offered knotted groups of trees and deep pools of water at irregular intervals.
    Good for kangaroos, Wooral had said. Bullock, too.
    There were many small, dry and obviously intermittent tributaries and patches of soggy, recently burned land. One creekbed, descending a rocky slope, became a sequence of small deep pools stepping from one level to the next. An eagle in a large tree beside one pool, its nest surprisingly close to the ground, returned their gaze.
    Perhaps it was fatigue. Geordie Chaine moved in some other atmosphere: the air moist, the light thick and honey-coloured, and his breathing so shallow he wondered if the air needed to be eaten, swallowed rather than inhaled. The many and varied voices of frogs, the harsh rustling vegetation and the wind moaning in trees, the impertinent, abrupt birdsong, the improbably bounding wallabies …
    He heard a cow bellow, the sound strange in this wilderness, then a high-pitched barking. Chaine fell behind the other two men. He smelled roasting meat, and blundered on until he heard someone coughing and then there was Dr Cross sitting by a campfire outside a small hut, Wooral and Bobby beside him, Killam and Skelly on their feet looking back over their shoulders at him, Chaine.
    He scanned the clearing: a cow, tied to a tree and with a bell on its neck; a rough pen full of sheep; a tiny hut with its crude door of kangaroo skin. A vegetable garden. The strong smell of shit. Something tapping in the wind.
    I’ve taken this land, Cross said. My land. The three at the fire got to their feet and Chaine and Killam shook hands with them all. Skelly stepped back, but the Noongar man and boy held their hands out to him and when Cross followed their lead he shook all their hands.
    Bobby shook hands with Wooral, with Cross and Wooral again.
    Skelly kicked at a chicken scratching near his feet.

A single heart beats
    Alexander Killam agreed with Skelly’s judgement— agriculture was not worth the effort and trouble. Poor soil, the topsy-turvy seasons. The natives think stock is theirs to spear, and there is the trouble with the fires