Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,14
him a mean article. She slammed the bedroom door on him and told him to go and sleep with the shitty cows. In hindsight that was the end of it – Harry jackknifed on the couch, Edna alone in the bed. Family life …
Harry read about a campout for the bird observers’ club at Echuca, a weekend of mateship with birds. Edna said, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ But they borrowed a tent from her brother and lined Mues up to do the milking. On the morning they were leaving, Mues didn’t arrive and Harry couldn’t raise him at his house. Edna was disappointed, angry, close to tears. Harry gave her the keys to the Dodge and told her to go on her own. He took his good binoculars out of his bag and his copy of Neville Cayley’s What Bird is That? and put them on the passenger’s seat. Edna hesitated for a few minutes. She walked around the car. The cows watched them from the fence. They were agitated and started to bellow.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Why bloody shouldn’t I go on my own?’
In dairy country it gets dark from the ground up. The pasture, the mud on the laneways, the wetness of the land, rise to meet the linen skies. The daylight fades; then it fades again. The trees drip their black leaves; the last screech of the cockatoos. Harry stayed outside as long as he could, until the ground was murky and his feet were no longer visible. He walked cautiously in case he stumbled; his weight held back at the ankle. The kitchen door shutting behind him; his socks on the lino; water clattering into the kettle; a match struck to touch the gas … He took a Sao and ate it dry just to put something in his mouth, just to hear the sound of it breaking rudely in his head – like kindling; like words.
Edna didn’t look at the birds. She followed Alec Gedge around taking notes for him and holding his camera. The letters started when she got home. He used the official stamp on the envelopes: Mr A. Gedge, President, Birds Observers’ Club of Victoria, with a fantail underneath, its feet trembling because of the ink. Two months later Gedge came and collected her. Harry walked out into the paddocks when he heard the car on the road. His tongue tasted curdled in his mouth. The cows were surprised to see him out among them then, at lunchtime. She told him she needed to be on her own for a while, to develop herself and her interests. She left an address in her maiden name: Edna Orchard. Harry didn’t write – except to sign the papers.
A year later, in The Emu:
A PAIRING OF INTEREST
A social event of significance took place last month when our popular and energetic Secretary of the Bird Observers’ Club, Edna Orchard, was married to another of our esteemed members, Mr Alec Gedge. We extend our hearty congratulations to the newly minted couple and wish them many happy years on the nest together. At the wedding breakfast a series of Kodachrome slides were shown of the Easter campout at Rosebud. The slides showed an unsuccessful operation to remove tangled fishing line from the head and neck of a little tern and the autopsy of several terns that had ingested fishing line.
At dawn Michael is pulling the tinny up the Gunbower, feeling the cold water heavy around the oars. He rows from sharply hinged elbows, his belly and shoulders held still against the wind, his slim hands folded around the oars – pressing in, pressing out, pressing back. He doesn’t need to look over his shoulder; the creek ahead can be judged by the creek behind. The same thick race of water held in by a fringe of gum trees on each bank and the cumbungi dense beneath them. He edges the boat into a patch of reeds. The knife, the rod, the net and the bucket are scattered at his feet. He rinses the knife blade in the water, dries it on his shorts, pushes it into the skin of his forearm, pushes again, makes himself wait for the moment in between the slap, slap of the water against the side of the boat before the final cut. Blood leaps behind the blade. His heart flushes to attention, he feels the pain in his chest before his arm so he is able to look right into