Endangered Species
Psychedelic Water 26
*
“Oh shit!” Maryanne’s muffled exclamation bursts from the back seat as she slews around in the Professor’s embrace. Half a dozen vehicles have rolled to a halt ahead of them on the crackly bitumen of the buckled rural road, interrupted on their pilgrimage to the Mardi Grass by a hastily erected roadblock.
The driver’s gaze is still glued to the uniformed patrolman who glares at their vehicle through impermeable shades, his thin mouth betraying an obvious mix of disdain and suspicion. He stands like a sweaty waxwork mannequin, barely bearing up beside the potholed road under the molten sunlight, idly waving a faintly illumined baton as he studies their battered four wheel drive.
A dozen paces beyond, a scratch-besmirched pair of older vehicles has been pulled over onto the grassy verge. A disgorged scrum of worried young passengers blinks in the bright sunlight or stares at the ground while another cop snuffles a leash-straining sniffer dog around their bare feet. One dreadlocked girl empties her overstuffed velvet bag onto the bonnet of a gaily painted station wagon while her equally Rastafarian boyfriend is strip searched by a burly pair of importunate constables on the side of the road. Pale white skin dazzles in the shimmering glare as he scowls and shifts from foot to bare foot, clad only in revealingly skimpy budgie smugglers.
“Do you have the mull?” Maryanne whispers to her beau in the back seat of the Jackaroo Deva. “Uh…” the Professor replies. He pats a small package in his vest pocket, then drags the young woman up onto his lap and kisses her.
The driver holds his smouldering joint out of sight beneath the dash while a lazy curl of fragrant smoke slowly winds through the cabin. He scrunches the half finished number between forefinger and thumb when the baton-waving cop turns to watch the dreadlocked grrl; she rants at her boyfriend’s interrogators while another cop grabs at her flailing arms. The driver is about to flick the evidence out the window when the policeman turns toward their four wheel drive, and he feels the blank sunglass gaze glaring directly into his eyes.
Smoky zephyrs waft from the open windows as the shaman meets the cop’s stony stare through the dust-streaked windscreen. He fortifies the etheric circles which already ring the vehicle in spectral hues and the policeman glances away to direct a van onto the overgrown verge three cars ahead.
Ram shifts into first and rolls one space forward, approaching the milling clot of chequered hats and dark blue uniforms with a neutral expression that belies an inner maelstrom of roiling turmoil. He takes a deep breath to slow his racing pulse, itemises his stashes and concentrates on being one with the land; invisible in plain sight.
When another car pulls up behind them he notices the panicky face of his passengers in the rear view mirror while they fumble together in the back. The Professor is reaching into Maryanne’s loosened dress to cram his stash between breasts and the girl is trying not to be too obvious as she objects; “Fuck off!”
“Be not afraid,” the shaman murmurs, almost too softly to be heard by his passengers. He calms himself with a deeper breath.
“Where can we put it?” the Professor demands.
“Maybe we better eat it,” Maryanne suggests. She watches the other young couple by the station wagon, which is being methodically gutted by two leering cops. The Rastafarians are both being strip searched beside the road in clear view of everyone while all their possessions are chucked onto the verge. The dreadlocked girl has been reduced to tears and a skimpy pair of polka dotted panties by a smiling policewoman. Another of her interlocutors holds a small plastic bag of weed aloft to the effusive acclaim of his uniformed comrades.
“How?” the Professor hisses into Maryanne’s ear. “It’s a full ounce of hydro…”
The shaman is watching the cop with the baton, who leans down to the window of a panel van two cars ahead. He proffers the disposable stem of a breathalyser to the driver. “They’re cheaper than drug swabs,” Ram tells his passengers while his fingertips continue to extinguish the joint beneath the dash. “Don’t panic – just be relaxed and comfortable…”
The Professor’s brows knit together in the mirror. “Very funny.”
The cop stands erect to examine the breathalyser before waving the panel van onward down the unobstructed road into Nimbin. The next car – a rumbling old black V8 Valiant - slowly rolls up to where he awaits and then suddenly races away in a cloud of grey fumes, swinging across the narrow road to overtake the cautiously slow moving van. The black beast roars down the steep hill and emits a surprisingly loud blat from its horn. The squad of police turns to watch as a pair of their fellows leap into a bright red highway patrol car and gun the engine.
The shaman rolls the four wheel drive forward to where the thoroughly distracted cop stares after the Valiant fugitive, juggling his breathalyser and baton as he reaches for his radio. Another cop yells to him just as he turns to inspect the battered vehicle and its trio of scruffy-looking occupants. The driver makes a slow waving pass behind the dash and catches the cop’s eye as he mutters; “These are not the droids you are looking for.”
The highway patrol car squeals off down the bitumen in a rush of burning rubber, siren screaming and rooftop lightshow flashing away into the distance, just as the pallid dreadlocked lad breaks free and kicks the policewoman who’s stripped his yelling girlfriend to her undies. All turn from watching the chase as a scuffle ensues and the cop with the breathalyser raises his baton to wave the four wheel drive onward.
The shaman shifts into second and the Jackaroo Deva rumbles off after the fleeing van and its fleet pursuer. After a couple of hundred yards he releases the breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.
“Omigod!” yells Maryanne. “Now I really need a smoke!”
“Better relight this one,” the driver tells her, passing the slightly crumpled joint over his shoulder as they pursue the pursuer. “Better smoke it fast – we’re only five minutes from Nimbin.”
The township fairly glimmers with intimations of kaleidoscopic consciousness. Revellers greet Saturday morning blinking and gawping as they converge on a plethora of stalls and cafes, manned and womaned by dreamy proprietors and smiling staff. The roadway is filled by gawping strollers and bumper-to-bumper parked vehicles. When the Jackaroo Deva rumbles up the main street the shaman slips into the only vacant parking space, right outside the Town Hall in the centre of the painted village.
His passengers dash off with scarcely a word and immediately disappear into the burgeoning throng that already fills all the footpaths and thoroughfares. When he slams the door he wonders if he’ll ever see them again. He crosses the road toward the refurbished old Rainbow Café and strolls through the solidly packed crowd, soaking up the sights, sounds and smells and catching snatches of converse from slowly strolling gaggles of locals and tourists who block the footpath all around;
“Looks like it won’t rain on the parade this year.”
“Thanks to climate change.”
“Yeah, geez it’s dry.”
“Is it? Looks pretty green.”
“Always looks pretty green around here.”
“No rain, no rainbow.”
“Was pulled over by a booze bus on the way in.”
“Not the swabs in the cop Winnebago?”
“They’re fuckin’ swabs all right.”
“Here, Popeye – stick this in yer pipe ’n’ smoke it!”
“Tried the local hash?”
“Yeah – great stuff – Dutch water method…”
“The gold tops are just coming on.”
“This time of year? Where’d you pick ’em?”
“Didn’t. Bought them…”
“Yawwnnn.”
“Where’d you crash?”
“Under the stars on the air mattress.”
“See the Psychedelic Circus?”
“Nah. Let’s take a look around. Maybe get a cookie…”
He spies a long haired Asian woman in a passing car and cranes his neck to be certain it isn’t Amber. He’s slightly surprised by how fast his pulse is suddenly racing – even more rapidly than it had at the roadblock. She’ll turn up, he tells himself while his eyes scan the crowd for the mysterious Tantricka.
Last night’s parties have obviously taken their toll on many late risers in the bustling crowd; yet the moment of wonder is never far away. Jaded eyes and distracted minds awaken to the fresh panoply of clear blue sky, rich clean air and the living carnival arising everywhere, greeting the late morning with expectant glee and carousing arousal. The shaman spies a gap in the colourful crowd and swiftly stalks through the renascent throng who are beginning to party hearty on the main street.
The shaman heads for the nearest fresh juice bar and makes a beetroot, three carrots, two apples, a chunk of ginger and a handful of parsley disappear almost instantly. The freshly squeezed juice barely touches the sides on the way down and within a matter of seconds he feels thoroughly fortified.
His subsequent, more leisurely and serpentine stroll wends through the chaotic displays that clog the Nimbin Museum. He follows the floor mural of the legendary Rainbow Serpent, winding through halls of time-strewn artefacts, art and articles from the hippy heyday and more recent times. Pilgrims slowly proceed through collaged installations of hand-wrought exhibits and soft-sell mobile dealerships, surveying the historic landscape of broken and realised and forgotten and resurrected dreams enacted by two generations of dedicated impassioned souls living at or beyond the farthest fringe of society’s wage slave existence.
Like the rest of the village, the museum is chock full of tourists from Queensland’s nearby Cold Ghost, Surface Paradox, Bro’sbane and parts and ports far more distant. Shiny, clean looking middle class people in runners, shorts, t-shirts and sunnies mingle with myriad backpackers and wealthier guests of every imaginable race from all around the globe; a microcosm of the strange young eclectic nation of Oz.
A door opens into the narrow lane between the museum and the Rainbow Café, where long wooden tables seat a raft of black-clad, black-hatted, surly young men with their female offsiders. They sit with arms crossed, carefully watching everyone from behind identical dark sunglasses, packing the market or picking their marks while a ghettoblaster fills the lane with blaring strains of barely rhyming rhythmic hip hop.
They eye the shaman and study his bag with frowning expressions as he strides through the laneway, but soon decide he’s not a trespassing dealer. ‘Foreign’ dealers from beyond their turf are provided with a quiet word delivered from behind an impassive or growling façade and given a very short time to disappear. A tattooed Koori nods him past the wooden tables to the rear of the museum, where fires burn or continually smoulder throughout the long weekend in the Aboriginal entertainment area of the Bundjalung Nation’s camp.
The ever-present ithyphallic forms of Nimbin Rocks overlook the partying mob as dancers sashay before talented musos that strut a small stage beneath banners that read ‘Earth First!’ and ‘Aboriginal Land’. A café opening into the back of the museum does a booming trade while the local three piece band sings a paean of the ancient land; a rollicking dirge about the demise of freedom and justice in the ‘Lucky Country’.
The shaman joins a more laid back circle around two blazing logs and squats by the ashes of the previous night’s revelry. Three young men share a stubbie while two more lie in deep dreaming sleep on the grass by the fire. An incredibly skinny semi-naked cowboy with a tall black Texan hat and spurs strapped to eagle-tooled boots sits rocking on the ground in a pair of ridiculously tight swimming togs. Two older men yarn in the lingo nearby until one turns to the shaman. “Got any baccie, bruz?”
“Do you have any tobacco?” his companion enunciates, unsure of the shaman’s provenance in the multicultural atmosphere.
“Sure – but have this instead.”
“Mmm,” the dreadlocked young Elder smiles approvingly. “From around here?”
“From Gumbayngirr,” the shaman demurs.
“In that case, welcome to Bundjalung!”
“Thanks, Gilbert.” The man’s jet-dark eyes bore directly into the snowy white interloper’s emerald orbs as Ram’yana explains; “You were with the dancers in the park last night.” Gilbert’s face is split by a smile and they shake hands, using the first three stages of the universal Rainbow Clasp. A crew of orange t-shirted Jungle Patrol volunteers veers around the scene as they continue on their merry rounds preserving the peace, liaising with visitors, cops and vastly outnumbered local inhabitants.
“This is my cuz, Jaggin. He’s from out Baryugal.” Jaggin is smoky ebony, five feet tall and as gnarled as the trunk of a bottlebrush. A pair of his upper front teeth are missing when he smiles and enfolds Ram’s extended hand with both of his own; evidence either of initiation or simply poor dentition.
“Out Washpool way, eh?” the shaman observes. “Lucky man!”
“You know it?” Jaggin is astonished. “You bin there?”
“Not for twenty years, but I’ve been there. Beautiful country. Lucky man,” Ram avers once again. He asks about some of the mob he knows by name; some prove to have moved on, some are doing fine, some are in jail, but all are still deeply embedded in the extended family life of the Bundjalung nation. Another few numbers are skinned up and ignited before he takes his leave as a fresh slab arrives at the fireplace. The sleeping men begin to rouse beneath the trees as the first can of beer hisses open.
Strands of melodies and a plethora of rhythms interweave with distorted loud hailers and myriad conversations as he steps into the bustling main drag. Busking street musicians, sound systems and impromptu bands mingle amidst the clamorous crowd. Colour erupts everywhere from psychedelic hoardings and multifaceted costumes of those already preparing for the annual parade - still a day away, but rapidly looming in most everyone’s thoughts.
“Ram!”
“Ramses!”
“You’re back!”
“That’s my front, actually…”
“How’s the forest?”
“What’s happening, man?”
He runs a pleasantly hedonistic gauntlet of offered joints, reserved nods, frowns and winks of recognition and warm smiles of greeting, and it takes half an hour to traverse only three hundred yards. The Chai Tent beckons in the marketplace, but as he passes the Oasis Café the attractive aroma of finely wrought coffee and an empty chair at an outdoor table seduce him with the promise of roasted bean water and honest wooden primitiveness. He finds an empty space on a wooden bench where some recoverees nurse hangovers with coffee and newspapers; others imbibe fresh orange juice or spoon chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream into smoky maws.
A Spanish guitarist busks at the profitable spot where tourist buses disgorge loads of fascinated and eager passengers onto the street. He beats out rhythms that entreat an unlikely group of nascent flamenco dancers to burst into fiery motion around him. A passing Argentinean pedestrian joins in with skirts swirling as she beats out a rhythm and prances barefoot on the unforgiving concrete. She cries out in a spontaneous concentrated consecration of the fleeting moment, while conversations merge and stream around a florid array of swift spinning hems.
“Not as many ferals this year. Or tepees.”
“Nah – not in town, anyway.”
“Y’hear what that comic said here last night? The ferals kept moving north ’til they fell off the continent and drowned.” Yellow-tailed black cockatoos swoop and scream overhead, just beyond the electric wires, tall native figs and surveillance cameras perched on high steel poles like electronic vultures.
“Y’hear what that black guy said last night? He reckons ‘Nimbin’ means ‘Brownjack’.”
“What, aboriginal cops?”
“Nah, the little hairy fellas, y’know – Brownjacks.”
“You ever seen one?”
“Course not.”
“Know anyone who’s seen one?”
Ram opens his mouth and barely holds back from volunteering a hasty affirmation. He closes his teeth round an apple instead. Recollection arises unbidden from one of the previous psychedelic nights, replacing the bright daylit scene with campfire darkness where dreadlocked Cameron speaks with a pair of Japanese visitors on the Star Earth Tribe land.
The Rasta had finished sucking a passing joint dry before he started regaling the beaming young couple; “Hippies are an endangered species here now,” the feral said through the knotty plaits of his beard.
“Not in Japan!” The slight sunbrowned man with a far neater beard and designer dreads laughed over the flames.
“No?”
“No – in Japan, many hippie!”
“We hear nothing about it out here, but in Japan
“That right.”
Ram turned to the Nipponese man. “It’s because that’s where the young people are – all over Asia . In the sixties and seventies the demographic balance was like this;” He steepled his fingers into a pyramid. “Old people…” He indicated the triangle’s pinnacle with a wave of his fingertips. “Young people…” he swept his wrists outward. Then he inverted the pyramid. “Now in the West, it’s like this. Very few young people, and all more tightly constrained.
“But not in Japan
“No,” agreed Zen. “In Japan
Cameron conceded the point. “Well, there are a lot more Japanese in town this year, and they’re not all like the squeaky cleanskins that used to turn up, it’s true…” The shaman excused himself to water a nearby tree. When he returned Cameron was describing a strange small creature he’d seen nearby. “It’s only about the size of a rabbit – but it’s not a rabbit.”
“Not a rabbit?” The Japanese hippie couple repeated in unison.
“No – about the same size, but different.”
“Not a bandicoot?” Ram asked.
“No – wait – there it is now!” Cameron’s whisper morphed into a gasp. “You hear that?” A strange loud squeak filled the sudden silence.
“You’re right,” Ram whispered, squatting forward on his toes by the small cooking fire. “That’s no bandicoot.”
“Here it comes,” Cameron said as a squat shrub rustled only a few paces away and a small dark form emerged. He flicked on a blue-white LED flashlight and a diminutive rat-like creature was brightly illuminated for a flashing moment before it leapt and darted for the rainforest underbrush beside the creek. “Sorry – I probably shouldn’t have frightened it. But it’s here every night.”
Catalogues of photographs, drawings and paintings riffled through Ram’s mind; reams of images of native and imported animals studied during years of fauna surveying, or witnessed live and firsthand in plains, woodlands and deep forests throughout the eastern half of the great island continent. None of the remembered forms quite matched this tailless, two kilo marsupial with a surprisingly flattened and rounded face. “Another unknown,” he announced. “A little like a bettong, but not a bettong. Not a bandicoot. Not a potoroo. And definitely not a rabbit.”
“Not rabbit?” Zen echoed. The Japanese Wwoofa (a willing worker on organic farms, exchanging work for board as he travelled the country) still peered into the darkness in stupefaction. His beautiful mate Shi clung to his bare arm, patiently awaiting an explanation.
“No,” said Cameron. “Something very rare and unusual.”
“What is ‘bennon’?” Zen asked.
“Bettong.” Cameron corrected. “Like a bilby.” Zen and Shi regarded him with nonplussed expressions.
“A small kangaroo-like creature, only a foot tall – thirty centimetres,” Ram explained.
“Ah!”
“Oh! But that not one of them?” Shi’s voice is a gentle purr.
“I can’t work out what it is,” Ram admitted, listening to the creature rustling just out of sight in the darkness. “Around here,” he gestured at the massive tree-clad cliff facing them, “anything is possible. Up there above us is an escarpment - a great flat plateau full of rocky land, forest and caves. Anything could live up there…”
“And now that everything round here is regenerating so well, things’ll be coming down here, too,” Cameron continued.
“What that animal?” Zen enquired.
“Buggered if I know.” Cameron flashed his torch around for a few seconds. “It’s still there, somewhere.”
“You not know?” The young lovers peered into the dark.
“No idea,” Cameron confirmed, glancing at the shaman.
“Speaking from a view gleaned after years of fauna surveys and travelling and camping in remote bush,” he said, inwardly disapproving of the self-aggrandisement implied by his words, “that creature is a small marsupial that may be totally unknown to anyone but the Aborigines.”“They know?” Shi’s eyes were glittering pools of firelight.
“Maybe,” said Cameron. “Probably.”
“You not see it before?”
“Not even in reference books,” Ram assured Zen. “All the images are spinning through my mind now. It’s not a bandicoot or a bettong… even if the tail’s been gnawed off by a dog. And those white splotches look like the markings on a juvenile koala, but its face is more like… a hamster…”
“But that definitely wasn’t a koala,” Cameron assured the visitors. Two flying foxes circled the Sally wattle they were seated beneath and the Japanese visitors looked up as the macrobats alighted in a nearby quandong tree, screeching and warbling in their complex semi-simian language.
Zen was amazed. “Wooah!”
“This animal unknown?” Shi’s eyes were wide, flickering in the firelight as she blinked up at the stars. It was only the third or fourth time that Ram had heard her shy, self-abnegating voice during the evening’s converse. “Not them –other little one,” she said.
“Well it’s unknown to us,” Cameron clarified. “But it could be completely unknown as well.”
“This country is recovering from a century and a half of logging and rampaging cows.” Ram gestured at the dark, hulking, lightless hills that surrounded them. “But it’s ringed by rugged country that no living white person has thoroughly explored. Between here and the mountains that run down the entire eastern side of the continent is a wild, wild country that’s almost totally uninhabited… by modern humans…”
“Like the Washpool and the upper catchments all along the coast and up on the mountains,” Cameron agreed. “Real wilderness, National Parks and reserves no-one lives in…”
“No human live there?” Zen was surprised.
Cameron bared his teeth in a grin. “Not for hundreds of square miles, in many places.”
The shaman shifted into a sitting position. “Last month all the Oz state governments in the east announced they’re declaring a wilderness sanctuary strip that will stretch from the far north tropics of the continent all the way to the far south, on the edge of the Southern Ocean. They’ve realized that you need at least that much land to preserve all the endangered creatures and forest types when you take climate catastrophe into account. And that last wild strip is the land they say they’re going to reserve.”
“Climate catastrophe?” Zen inquired.
“What they call ‘global warming’.”
“Really?” Cameron was incredulous. “When did this happen? I haven’t heard a thing about it!”
“It was front-page news for a day,” Ram replied. “Hardly anyone noticed, it seems.”
“Wow! Good news for a change! That’s incredible.”
“But true. We should really all be celebrating, but it seems most of the people who spent years getting arrested for saving those ecosystems don’t even know that we’ve won. Tell any feral forest fighters you see!”
“Don’t worry. I will.”
The shaman stared up at the brilliant star that still held Shi’s attention. “On the other hand, it is just an announcement by governments that may not be around for more than a year or two. But we can hope.”
“And there wild animal no-one know there as well?”
“You just reminded me,” Ram slapped his knee. “Less than a year ago eye saw an ‘extinct’ huge black quoll on the roadside… one of those mysterious big cats people occasionally report seeing…”
“The ‘black panthers’ you mean?” Cameron smirked.
“I can see why they’d think so.” The shaman returned his smirk. “If you hadn’t seen a quoll up close you’d have nothing better to mistake it for.”
“A koll?” Zen asked.
“Quoll,” Cameron corrected. “A native marsupial cat, called the spotted-tailed quoll.”
“Like koala?”
“About the same size, but you wouldn’t cuddle a quoll, mate, it’d tear you to pieces – unless you trained it from a kitten, and maybe not even then. You ever see a Tasmanian Devil?”
“You mean like on cartoon? Bugs Bunny?”
“That’s the one. Like that, but in real life. You don’t try to pat one.”
“You see one of them but black?”
“And big,” Ram agreed. “Almost as tall as the bonnet of the four wheel drive.”
“That big?”
“Aye – hai – completely black, like a panther, but with a couple of major differences, like a tail longer than it’s body, curved up over its back…” Ram swept his hand up into the firelight, “with a plumed, almost bulbous fringe on the end. A prehensile tail…”
“Just like a quoll,” Cameron suggested.
“And standing… well, almost on tip-toes, not like a cat at all – except for the curved arch of its spine when it turned to look at me. And the face was more squashed in than a cat’s – the face of a big sabre-toothed dasyurid marsupial quoll.”
“With pouch?” Zen suggested as Shi clung to his arm.
“With a pouch,” Ram confirmed. “Though it may face backward, not forward as in most other marsupials; some of the carnivores here are like that.”
“Ahh.”
“Should we tell anyone we see this animal?” Shi whispered.
“If you like,” Cameron said. “Just don’t tell any scientists.”
“Why not?”
“Because they come and catch it. Or kill it.” Cameron mimed the act with a chopping motion.
“No!” Shi was appalled. She looked to Zen for assurance that she’d understood the conversation correctly. Her beau translated for her in a rapid barrage of Japanese.
“Yes!” demurred Cameron. “They kill it, for research.”
“Really?” Zen was obviously confused and a little distraught. “If it so rare?”
“Because it’s so rare.” Cameron looked away and began rebuilding the fire.
“There used to be another species of quoll, all through this country,” Ram told them. “A smaller quoll with a more rat-like tail…”
“Not the spotted-tailed quoll, like the one we’ve been talking about,” Cameron explained as he built the pyre higher.
“No, a smaller quoll that became officially extinct a couple of decades ago. It’s not completely extinct – eye’ve seen one on the Carrai Plateau, a few hundred kilometres south of here, in that new wilderness reserve we were talking about.” More bats joined the small family at the nearby quandong tree. A dog began to bark in the far distance while Cameron filled a blackened stainless steel kettle from a large polycarbonate water container. The attention of the Japanese guests was riveted to the spectacle of the broad-winged fruit bats soaring a few metres over their heads.
“So this quoll not extinct?”
“Well… it’s debatable whether there are enough contiguous family groups to allow the species to survive long-term – enough of them to make it - but no-one really knows. You can’t count them by satellite - they usually live in surprisingly remote areas away from imported carnivores like dogs and cats, and the only people who work out there – the loggers – hardly know the place at all. They spend almost all their time in air-conditioned machines and don’t have the time or inclination to go exploring – and they’re not likely to tell anyone if they see any endangered species.”
“They have to pay for their mortgages,” Cameron explained.
“And the double-mortgages on their trucks,” Ram conceded. “Most of the areas we saved from logging in the past decades had never been surveyed before they started cutting them down. That’s why it was so easy for us to save many places. All we had to do was conduct flora and fauna – plant and animal – surveys, and in most of those untouched or barely touched areas we’d find rare and endangered species…”
“…That were about to become a whole lot more endangered,” Cameron filled in as he began rummaging around in the shadows to explore beverage options.
“Exactly. So we had legal grounds to stop the destruction because the workers and surveyors working for the government supposedly never saw a thing – but the first time anyone else looked, there were rare and unique animals there. I’ve seen four higher-order animals - marsupials - that aren’t described in any book. Five if you count whatever this is in the bushes… but we need a closer look to be certain.”
“Well hang around – it’ll be back,” Cameron assured him. “It’s here every night. Tea? Mint tea? Maté tea? Hot chocolate?” Shi climbed daintily to her feet and helped fill the small table with containers of milk, soymilk and honey.
“But back to the eastern quoll,” Ram continued. “When the authorities realized there were hardly any left, the museum in the Emerald City
“Pelt?”
“Skins,” Cameron translated.
“…and the pelts were all female.”
“What?” Cameron laughed in shock. “Females?”
“They’re still in the drawer in the museum. You can see them there. They may have been the last sixty females – but as far as the museum knew, they were definitely from the last site where they were known to exist…”
“And they kill them?” Zen and Shi were dumbfounded.
“Of course,” Cameron said. “To prove they exist.”
“So… we not tell anyone then,” Zen decided. Shi nodded enthusiastically and reached for the honeypot. The flying foxes screeched and wheeled, inhabiting their own reality between the starry sky and the domesticated primates who huddled round the flickering fire below.
*
A True Story
- R.A.
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