Into That Forest - By Louis Nowra Page 0,15

when she noticed something. Hey, where’s your shoes? I forgot I had taken them off during the hunt. They hurt, I said. Becky looked at her own shoes and I knew she were thinking that she might take hers off, but she didn’t. I think she were afeared she would become like an animal and stop being a human. She heard an owl hoot. We have a barn owl at home, she said, and sounded very lonely. The female tiger got up, and as she were heading inside the cave, she rubbed herself against me, sniffed me face and licked me hand. She were saying in her own lingo, We are all in this together.

It sounds foolish, but when you are so close to some creature like a tiger you get to really know them and that’s what Corinna were saying to me - We are a pack. I followed her inside, leaving Becky out in the night gazing face full of sadness at the moon, the owl, the cameo, like she were possessed by thoughts of home. I would have thought of home but I were dead beat and besides - did I have a home to go back to? Me mother were dead - that much was certain cos Becky told me. But what about me father? Maybe he were out with Mr Carsons searching for us. Becky prayed for this. Sometimes I’d see her by herself kneeling in the ferns, her hands pressed together, mumbling her prayers and looking at the sky as if her father were going to come down like manna from heaven. She were a bit older than me in age but she were much more older than me in many other ways, so she had this burden or sense of responsibility and I were the biggest burden of them all, she said to me more than once. She feared I were becoming an animal but I knew that without the tigers there were no food for us, no warm bodies to sleep with, us four snuggled like a bundle of fleshy yarn in each other’s embrace.

The tigers stopped being animals to me. They were Corinna and Dave. She were a bit smaller than him and she had black hairs sprinkled on her white upper lip. Dave’s were just white. He liked us but kept his distance cos he had a lot of things on his mind, like protecting us, keeping an eye open for prey or enemies like bounty hunters. Corinna showed she liked us by licking us and curling up with us whenever we slept. Though I have to say, if she didn’t like something you did, she’d nip you to let you know. Their eyes were full black and they had a sort of inner glow so that at dusk they shone green and sometimes red. They liked to bask in the sun but tried to avoid looking into harsh light if possible. It were something that I were learning. I might be studying them, but they studied us as well. When they looked deep at you, you knew they were peering right into your soul and they knew if you were lying or not. You couldn’t pretend to them that you were happy when you were not. They knew when we were down in the dumps and would nuzzle and comfort us.

One time I laughed and said to Becky, Things are topsyturvy, we sleep during the day and we be awake all night. She didn’t find it funny cos she knew that meant the tigers had changed us and she didn’t like that one bit.

There wasn’t a time when I realised I were becoming like a tiger, I guess it just happened, like it were natural. But when I think back there were signs that I had changed, and Becky too. Our sight got better at night. Once nighttime were as thick as mud to me, but now it were like clear water. And me hearing - I could sit in silence and hear so many things that I did not hear before: the movement of fern leaves, like the bristles of a brush being stroked, when a quoll were passing (the black ones with white spots like a starry night coming to life) or the sharp cry of pain in a tree when a quoll knocked a sleeping bird off a branch and catched it in mid-air; the squeal of a mouse being taken by an owl whose wings