Into That Forest - By Louis Nowra Page 0,29

ear that growed on trees. We even ate goannas and skinks. If we wanted a pick-me-up we’d lick sassafras leaves.

I learned the countryside: the fens, the highlands of rock and stones, the rainforests, and what rivers we could cross. I saw orange-bellied parrots, wrens, wattlebirds, honey-eaters, currawongs, huge ravens and heard voices of a bird whose name I forget - it had a song like someone whistling a jig. Then there were the smells: dung, rot, fresh kill, old kill, the devils smelling like lanolin, the gum trees reeking of peppermint, forest floors smotheredin hairy toadstools that smelt of onion, then other toadstools that stanked of radish, fish, bitter almonds or even raw potato. There were special mushrooms that glowed in the night like hundreds of tiny lanterns. In summer the moors and fens were scarlet with flowers and the floors of the forests were white with petals of flowering gums and bushes. There were so much wattle that the countryside were yellow like someone had painted it during the night. Eyebrights and yellow bottlebrush and blue flowers stretched as far as I could see. It took a long time to learn the treachery of the earth - even Dave and Corinna were never a hundred per cent certain that the mossy ground we were walking on weren’t a fake floor. You think you’re walking on a real surface but it can gulp you up like it had tried to swallow Becky.

Difficult times were when it were bitter cold and prey weren’t to be found, when the rain fell day after day til the whole forest were so sodden every step were a squelch. During these rainy times even our den were damp and all you could hear were the constant drip, drip, drip of water hours after it had stopped raining. It were aching hard on the legs to walk through those sodden forests, and it were wet country ripe for those damn leeches. Then there were the time I were bitten by a jack jumper. It were only a tiny ant but I fell into a coma and Becky had to drag me to the den where the three of them cared for me. Becky were afeared I’d die, til two days later I woke up. I can say at me ripe old age, with me knowledge and the experience I now have, that you haven’t had a proper sting til you been stanged by a jack jumper.

I learned to read the eyes and body movements of the tigers and they learned mine and Becky’s. It’s why even now I can read a dog as easy as ABC. But there became a problem that Becky and I began to notice. The tigers tried to breed. The year after the bounty hunter killed her pups, Corinna had just the one cub but it died soon after birth. They tried more times but she never got pregnant again. Maybe it were the womb. Maybe after too many pups were killed the womb gave up.

A winter came that were more cruel than the ones before. The wind and hail were like sharp icicles cutting through me flesh. Even covering our bodies in mud didn’t help and there were times when we didn’t leave the lair because outside our skin turned prickly with goosebumps and our teeth chattered so much we couldn’t growl or cough.

One day we were really desperate for food. Our prey were deep in their burrows and holes trying to keep the winter out, so we decided to try the bounty hunter’s place again.

When we arrived, he had just got back himself with two fresh tiger carcasses. He carried them to the lean-to and then chopped some wood. His horse must have smelt us because it began to get antsy, tapping the earth with afeared hooves and pulling at its rope, trying to get away. The bounty hunter thought something was up and he hurried into the shack and came back outside with a rifle. Once we seen that, we were out of there, skedaddling as fast as possible down through the shrubs and running through the kerosene bush til we could run no more.

There were no other food available so we returned to the bounty hunter’s to try and steal a sheep. His property were white with snow and smoke poured out of his chimney. He were home and therefore dangerous. But we were starving and we had no choice. It were hard to sneak up on the