Linda Cockburn
Shortlisted for the Forty South Short Story Competition 2023
Published in the Forty South Anthology 2023
It was the news report that did it. A mother of three bringing up her children in the back seat of a car. There was a picture of her making school lunches while sitting behind a steering wheel.
The photo identified the street she was parked on, the colour of her car. He went looking for her. He scoured the area till he found her, it was night, the kids were in the back, three jellybean lumps of sleeping bag. She was in the front, sleeping awkwardly across the handbrake. He knocked on the window. Her eyes snapped open with a look of terror.
‘I’m here about a house,’ he said. She pulled her arms out of her sleeping bag and wound the window down several inches. He handed her his keys, and a slip of paper with the address.
‘It’s yours,’ he said, ‘I won’t be needing it.’ She leapt out of the car, sleeping bag around her knees and called after him. But he didn’t stop. He watched from around a corner as she got back in, sat there a while, then drove away. On the kitchen bench he’d left a detailed letter explaining things.
He drove out of the city and up a dirt road, parked his car, walked into the bush and pitched his swag. He was young. He could do this and like it.
On Monday he washed in the creek, then sat around his campfire sipping his coffee and watching a feral cat stalk birds. He drove to work.
A week later he found a rusty chest freezer dumped in the bush. He wrestled it to his campsite, buried it in the ground and used it to store a cast iron pot and billy, knives, books about bushcraft, twelve collapsible cat traps, twenty-three kilograms of coffee and a first aid kit.
He drove to a car dealer and exchanged his four-wheel drive for a campervan then drove it to where an elderly couple camped on the edge of the city. He handed them the keys and ownership papers. It was raining, could they give him a lift into the city? They pulled up their tent and he arrived at work only minutes late. Someone pointed out the mud on his shoe.
He spent the day writing resignation letters. Some smart, some funny, some full of angst and vitriol. In the end, he decided on two words – I quit. He left early for an appointment with his solicitor. She spent most of it shaking her head.
He caught the bus and walked the rest of the way to his camp where he stripped off the suit, folded it and placed it in the bottom of the freezer.
Over the next week, he trapped, killed, skinned and ate six feral cats and put a wallaby with toxoplasmosis out of its misery. A month later he’d sewn himself a cat suit using bone needles he’d crafted from their femurs and gut from their tendons. When it rained he stayed inside his swag, read books, sipped coffee and listened to the forest talk.
He discovered Agapanthus, Arum lilies, Spanish heath and Boneseed growing in places they shouldn’t. He removed and burnt them. The blackberries, though feral, were tasty. He left those. He moved camp once, twice, and by the fifth time he was so far from civilisation he couldn’t hear it breathe. At night Hobart was just a pale glow on the horizon.
He discovered creeks and rock pools, watched lyrebirds shimmy their tails and mimic kookaburras and chainsaws. They were feral too. But he left them where they were. He made a shelter with a rounded roof. He pressed mosses into it till it looked, from all directions, like a mound of earth. He dug ditches to draw moisture away and made a seat with an axe and chisel, and wove a seat from cumbungi leaves. He pulled up the roots once eaten by the indigenous people. Supposedly they tasted like bread. They were corky and dry, too late in the season. He’d try again in spring.
His cat traps, even this far from suburbia, still caught them – though they were cunning. Occasionally he trapped a bandicoot, or a devil, which he released. The bandicoots shot off like loosed arrows, whereas the devils loitered, snarling and grim.
Time ended. At least the counting of it did. He didn’t know what day of the week or month it was, but thought perhaps May. He sunk himself into his mattress of cumbungi duff packed into a cat-skin cover. It had taken him many days and twenty-three cat skins to make. He spent an afternoon watching the sky shred clouds.
He discovered he could smell water before he heard it, and, not knowing the name of something, or being able to Google it, was a fine thing. He established base camps in four areas so he could travel further, have a safe place to return.
He learnt rocks vibrate at infinitesimal frequencies; he could feel them when he lay on them — naked in the sun. When he ran out of coffee and yearned for the fifteen bags in the freezer, he found it easier to go through the headaches and be free of them than return for more.
He found a cave and spent a week there while outside it rained and howled. By the end of it he’d created a mural with the stumps of charcoal from his fire. There were undulating snakes, birds, bush, lizards, wallabies, wombats, devils, bandicoots, bettong, possums and a cat. He hoped one day to return and rub that one out. He was hungrier than he’d ever been.
He walked through an area with ring-barked trees and the round black balls of ruminant scat. He discovered a goat trapped by its horns in bramble and freed it, but only after he’d slit its throat. It took him a week to dry it into jerky. He marked the area in his mind. He’d return and trap and eat them all. He was lean, he used his belt to measure his shrinkage. His body was what it was supposed to be, wiry and hard.
He packed up and headed south for the city’s glow. He skirted houses with their turrets of lazy smoke and crossed backroads, the scars of them running through the bush like dull brown zippers. He found his way back to his original camp, uncovered the buried freezer, retrieved the coffee and drank three cups, one after the other.
He slept there the night, in the morning washing in the stream before donning the business suit and shoes, but forewent the watch. With wallet in pocket, he walked to the bus stop and waited. Cars hurled themselves past. He’d not realised how badly they smelt. On the bus he heard someone whisper, Skinny Sasquatch in a suit.
He arrived at the dentist without an appointment, asked for the dentist by name and sat in the waiting room on the luxury of a padded seat and flicked through a newspaper. The content had not changed.
The dentist didn’t recognize him, not until he told him his name. It sounded like stones rolling in his mouth. The dentist, an old friend, worked through his lunch break to remove two rotten molars that had been giving him grief. Despite the curious questions cast his way he found himself reluctant to provide details of his life between now and the last time they’d spoke. Shrugging when the sterile man in his sterile white cloth laughed at the leaves and a curl of lichen wound into his matted locks.
He searched till he found a place that would serve him coffee in a mug, sushi on a plate. He savoured each while watching the strange creatures pass him in this artificial forest of buildings. He listened in on conversations, the ridiculous price of petrol, the disintegration of a once fine love, but most people were silent, their thumbs rhythmically pressing screens.
He bought a crossbow and arrows, a fletching kit, a collapsible spade and three pairs of woollen socks. The bookshop, with all its masticated trees reformed and pressed with ink, provided him with three: one on butchery, one on weaving, the other on wild clay firing. He’d thought to buy something to read on wet days, but none of them seemed relevant. Thrillers, crime, fantasy, they were portals into worlds he no longer wished to visit. He bought curry powder and five kilos of iodised salt.
He caught a bus back, arriving on dark . Walking into the bush he felt himself enfolded. He’d been exposed in the city, with its sky scraped free of branches. He folded the suit back into the freezer and took five bags of coffee before closing it and cover it with leaves.
In the morning he brewed himself a cup, doused the fire, shrugged on his pack, adjusted the strap of the bow and walked further into the bush. This time he’d go over the distant mountain range, further from the city’s glow.
He buried a bag of coffee in each of his camps and worked his way back to where he’d found the goats. They were gone, the balls of their shit dull-grey. The discovery of a waterfall surrounded by tree ferns and filled with yabbies made a pleasant change to the gamey flesh of cat. It would go well with rice, he thought, and how good it would be to have milk in his coffee. But the thoughts soon faded. He stayed to watch a platypus swim, and to listen to the water’s music.
He woke the next day with a fever, a cough. It worsened till he used the last of his strength to gather wood, fill a kettle with water and crawl into the shelter and beneath the cat-hide blankets. He lay there for three days. On the final night, when the skin of his life thinned, he opened his eyes to find an Aboriginal woman standing over him, crooning words in a guttural torrent. Her ancient hand reached out to touch his forehead, and he jolted with shock. He woke the next morning, the fire dead, the fever gone. The old woman had told him he was welcome in both worlds.
He’d chosen this one.
He taught himself how to use the bow and arrow. He fired till his arms ached and his target, a rotting tree stump, was pocked and torn. Calluses and muscle memory grew till he was able to bring down a deer, butcher and dry it, and use its organs to trap more cats. The antlers he kept, planning to carve them into knife handles, buttons for a cat-skin coat.
He gathered vines, coiled them, and kept them weighted in a stream before inexpertly weaving a basket, then a second, an improvement on the first, and a third he deemed good enough.
The months passed. He crossed a flooded gorge by way of a giant Mountain Ash that in falling had formed a broad-beamed bridge. He heard whispers — forest spirits, he decided. Not the English fairy kind, but the accumulated energies of non-human life. So far away from people, they’d raised their voices and he, no longer attached to the umbilical of civilisation, heard them. But he did not speak their language.
He walked deeper. He was crossing a Button Grass plain when he saw it. The head with its strong jaw, the ripple of ribs, the sloped, striped rump of a thylacine. He sat on a mound of moss beneath a pandani tree and watched till it slunk away. That night he heard them talk to one another, back and forth across the landscape. They hunt cats, he thought, for his traps remained empty. His cat skin bags were filled with dried venison which he augmented with wild greens and the roots and stems of Lomandra longifolia and Polango. He takes his time sucking the nectar from Dragon leaf trees and brewing tea from Kunzea. While sitting at his campfire, snowflakes nestle in his lashes. It is almost winter again.
One day his head lifted to the talking trees. Their tone had changed. He followed the trail of their voices until he stepped onto a twin-tracked road with the fresh human scat of a crumpled beer can.
On the opposite side lay the broken bones of shattered trees, a rubble of forest crushed by the hungry claws and tracks of forest harvesters. A confused echidna scrambled amongst the debris, an injured wombat curled into a ball and shook. Its injuries too great to survive; he ended its life quickly.
He stood on a rock daubed with ochre and stared across the wreckage. The trees were silent. He heard the low murmur of those still-standing. They called to the fallen across the broken void. He turned to them, knowing he was unfamiliar with their tongue and will speak like a child. He doesn’t know the words, but feels – if he invests them with shared sorrow – they might hear.
He speaks, low and slow. When they hear him, they fall silent. He waits. Trees do not hurry. He will give them time. It’s many hours before they speak again. First one, then two, then a throng. He does not know the words, but he knows their meaning. He is welcome in their world, and in his own. He shrugs his pack on his back, jumps from the rock and walks into the waiting forest.
He knows where he belongs.
