Hunched under the weight of the roo, Clarrie took a few experimental steps, then stopped and said something to his father before turning to Chaseling and saying, ‘It’s too heavy, Kumina. I feel like Jesus carrying his cross.’
‘We could always take turns carrying it,’ Chaseling suggested, without much, if any, enthusiasm.
‘No, we’ll leave him here and come back for him later,’ Clarrie said.
They got the kangaroo back off Clarrie’s shoulders and replaced it in the boot alongside Chaseling’s swag, which now had a smear of blood on it. But it was nothing compared to Clarrie’s T-shirt, the shoulders of which were drenched in kangaroo blood.
‘How far away is the community?’ Chaseling asked.
‘Twenty minutes,’ Clarrie said.
Davie stepped out of the car rubbing his eyes. ‘We’re going for a little walk,’ Clarrie told him, then turned to Chaseling and said, ’If you want, you can leave your things in the car and we’ll get them later.’ Chaseling nodded.
The moon, round as a clock face, had risen higher, around twenty degrees above the horizon, lighting their way along the dirt road, with the vast canopy of stars providing additional illumination. ‘That big fella up there,’ said Noelie, pointing up at the formation that in the northern hemisphere is called the Sword of Orion and in the southern hemisphere is known as the Pot, ‘he’s the kangaroo man. Malu Wati, we call him. He go up there when he die at Kata Tjuta, after he been killed by dingoes. He live up there with Mulumura the lizard woman.’
‘Mulumura,’ echoed the piping voice of the boy, who was walking alongside the elder.
It turned out that the story about the clash between the roo man and the dingoes was a cautionary one. Because not far from the outskirts of the community they encountered a pack of dogs. Wild dogs.
3 THE PACK IS HUNGRY
WILD DOGS roam much of inland Australia. Hunting in packs, they prey on both native wildlife and farm animals. Every now and then, humans are on the menu.
A lot of the wild dogs are dingoes, descendants of the canines that crossed the land bridge into Gondwanaland from the Andaman Islands with their human masters 50,000 years ago or more. Others are descended from dog breeds introduced into Australia over the past two centuries. Both the native dingoes and their feral cousins are equally hated by farmers because they kill sheep and other stock, sometimes just for sport. Conservationists are more divided on the issue, giving the tick of approval to the dingo because it’s ‘native’ while feral dogs are regarded as unholy slayers of bilbies, wallabies and other native wildlife.
To prevent wild dogs wreaking havoc in the prime sheep grazing land of Australia’s southern and eastern states, the world’s longest fence has been constructed. Called the Wild Dog Fence, it runs for 5600 kilometres, from the middle of the Great Australian Bight in South Australia, up through the central desert all the way to the rural hinterland of Brisbane in the north east. Most of the dog fence is 180 centimetre tall wire mesh. In South Australia, parts of it are made of multi-strand electrified wire.
The desert country where Chaseling and his companions now stood watching a dozen pairs of red eyes appear in the gloom and, as they got closer, attach themselves to shadowy, four-legged forms, was hundreds of kilometres north of the fence. This was Dog Central. Wild dogs formed part of the landscape.
The pack consisted of an assortment of skinny mongrels led by a yellow-eyed male that had the sharp, almost triangular face of a dingo combined with the long, lean body of a greyhound. His short fur was a dirty tea-brown, with darker brown stripes running down the ribcage. His tail was thin, almost rat-like.
Until now, this pack had always steered well clear of human beings. But times had been tough of late. The last decent meal – the remains of an emu – had been consumed over a week ago. And while the dogs’ eyes told them that the four figures in front of them were humans, this was overridden by their olfactory senses as the irresistible aroma of freshly-killed kangaroo wafted through the air. Clarrie, his shoulders still wet with essence of roo, was plat du jour.
Growling from deep within his throat, Yellow Eyes slowly advanced on Clarrie, teeth bared, a tendril of drool hanging from the wolfish mouth. The dog’s ears were pressed against the sides of his head. Down the centre of his back, a line of Mohawk-like hackles was rising. The rest of the pack had come to a halt, watching from the gloom as their leader moved in for the kill.
Clarrie stood solidly, his hands loosely at his sides while the animal approached. He said something in Pitjantjatjara. Noelie, who had scooped up Davie from the ground, gave a terse reply and passed the child to Chaseling. ‘Gotta get a weapon.’ He darted off to the edge of the road.
Holding Davie in his arms, Chaseling could feel him trembling like a leaf. He heard Noelie stepping into the scrub. And he saw how the pack leader was now just a couple of metres away from Clarrie.
With a guttural snarl, Yellow Eyes reared backwards on his haunches, then launched himself up at Clarrie, who deftly moved aside with the grace of a matador sidestepping a bull. As the animal hurtled through the air, the powerful jaws snapped shut with a percussive sound like a steel trap. The dog landed deftly on his back legs, bunched up his body for the next attack and sprang at Clarrie again. Clarrie held his ground and kicked out at Yellow Eyes, his bare foot managing to avoid the dog’s slavering jaws and slam into its sternum. There was a muffled thump and high-pitched yelp. Yellow Eyes fell backwards and made an awkward landing.
The child in Chaseling’s arms was rigid with fear. The other dogs were on the move, running around in an ever-tightening circle. Chaseling could smell their foetid odour, hear their excited panting. From the edge of the road, there was the sound of dry wood being broken. Out in the gloom, Chaseling saw a cowboy-hatted form snapping off the side growth of a stout, metre-long piece of mulga branch.
But now one of the dogs circling Chaseling and the child came rushing at them. A kelpie-like black dog with a white patch standing out starkly on its face, it charged towards Chaseling’s legs. He lifted his foot to kick at it and the attacker lost its nerve at the last second, veering off course. Then another animal growled a challenge. It was a bull terrier cross, a barrel-chested bitch with piggy little eyes set into a big, bony head, atop which fluttered the remains of a pair of ears tattered from countless fights. From her low-slung stomach dangled half a dozen ugly nipples.
Pig Eyes had short legs, but when hunting prey, used her low centre of gravity to deadly advantage, turning herself into a canine battering ram that could knock animals off their feet.
Jaws wide open and long tongue lolling from her mouth, Pig Eyes came charging towards Chaseling’s legs. Davie gave a shriek of terror and started wriggling in Chaseling’s arms. As Pig Eyes attacked, Chaseling lifted his foot and kicked out, thankful that he was wearing sturdy, elastic-sided Redback work boots. The bitch’s jaws clamped around the toe of his right boot with bruising force. He thought, Maybe I should have spent a bit more and got the steel-capped Redbacks.
Pig Eyes hauled backwards while furiously snarling and shaking her head from side to side, throwing off a spray of saliva. Chaseling pulled back his leg, frantically trying to break away as he maintained precarious balance on one foot and held on tight to little Davie, whose struggles had become so violent he was almost sending the pair of them toppling to the ground – where, Chaseling had no doubt whatsoever, they would quickly become dog food. This thought spurred him to a more spirited level of engagement in the tug of war he was having with Pig Eyes over ownership of his elastic-sided boot.
He kicked out, then pulled his foot back towards him. The vise-like grip on his foot was finally released as his boot came loose in the mouth of his attacker and Pig Eyes ran to the edge of the road, her jaws clamped around the prize.
The boot was rich with the aroma of the blood and brain matter that had splattered onto it when Chaseling put the roo out of its misery. Pig Eyes was convinced