The Soldier's Curse by Meg Keneally Read Free Book Online Page B

forest. Bangar frowned at this. The pademelon was his totem, he told Monsarrat. All life had its meaning and purpose.
    When he had seen Monsarrat looking towards the Three Brothers, Bangar had told him the story of these mountain triplets.
    The land around here, he told Monsarrat, had once been flat, and amongst its people had been three brothers whose mother was the spirit of the lake. When the brothers grew old enough to be initiated into their tribe, they were sent to other Birpai clans. The oldest, Dooragan, went to the stingray people to the north (no, Bangar smiled when Monsarrat asked, they didn’t look like stingrays – the animals were their totem). The middle brother, Mooragan, went to the crab people near the sea. And the youngest, Booragan, he went south to the shark people.
    Mooragan was jealous of the youngest, and tried to engage Dooragan in a plot to kill Booragan, so there would be more maternal love to go around. Dooragan refused, but Mooragan was not to be dissuaded. He pursued Booragan as the youngest walked south to meet his destiny. That destiny, unfortunately, ended with his death at the hands of his brother.
    But the murder did not take place unobserved. A watchful bird, known as a willie wagtail, saw everything, and flew to the boys’ mother with the news. The lake spirit was enraged, and immediately exacted her revenge on both of her surviving sons, discovering too late that only one of them was guilty.
    In punishing her boys, she angered the Gamal, the head of the Birpai people and the one who had the power to dispense justice. His justice, on this occasion, was to turn the three boys into mountains – Dooragan in the north, Mooragan in the middle and Booragan in the south. He took care to position Dooragan so that the boy-mountain split the lake in two, sundering his mother’s spirit.
    Monsarrat was fascinated by this tale. He knew the mountains had also been named the Three Brothers by his own people, although Captain James Cook had a far more prosaic reason for giving them the name – when he saw them from the deck of his ship, he simply felt they looked alike. The fact that they had been given the same name by the Birpai countless generations ago made them seem to Monsarrat to have an independent consciousness. After that, and despite himself, he often looked warily at the looming, murderous Mooragan.
    â€˜Why do you put up with us?’ Monsarrat asked on one of these walks.
    â€˜You’re here, aren’t you?’ Bangar said.
    But of course, it was a little more complicated than that. When the Birpai had first seen a party of whitefellas stumbling their way through the bush, they were somewhat amused at the newcomers’ incompetence. We’ll keep an eye on these ones, they thought, but they don’t seem up to much.
    But then more came, and more. And the rougher ones, the cedar-cutters and the like, would just as soon go through a Birpai home as around it.
    The Birpai people realised that these men did not share their connection with the land. They didn’t know how to use spider webs to pack a wound, how to light a fire in a canoe when fishing at night, using the right wood to keep the mosquitoes away, or how to make fishhooks from thorn trees. They didn’t know howto cut a shield from a tree in a way which wouldn’t kill the tree itself. They took what they wanted and more – timber, fish and, it was rumoured, sometimes women. And they seemed to believe the land would always provide more, no matter how much they abused it.
    There had been skirmishes – Birpai tribesmen, protecting their land, had raided parties working upriver. From then on these parties were heavily guarded, and the Birpai spears, lethal as they were, did not have the range of the muskets which took many of their lives.
    â€˜If we’d known the nature of you, we might have speared you before there were so many,’ Bangar had once told Monsarrat genially.