Bruce Pascoe - Salt: Selected Stories and Essays

ALSO BY BRUCE PASCOE

A Corner Full of Characters, Blackstone Press (1981)

Night Animals, Penguin Books (1986)

Fox, McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books (1988)

Ruby-eyed Coucal, Magabala Books (1996)

Wathaurong: Too Bloody Strong: Stories and Life Journeys of People from Wathaurong, Pascoe Publishing (1997)

Shark, Magabala Books (1999)

Nightjar, Seaglass Books (2000)

Earth, Magabala Books (2001)

Ocean, Bruce Sims Books (2002)

Foxies in a Firehose: A Piece of Doggerel from Warragul, Seaglass Books (2006)

Convincing Ground: Learning to Fall in Love with Your Country, Aboriginal Studies Press (2007)

The Little Red Yellow Black Book: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press (2008)

Bloke, Penguin Books (2009)

Fog a Dox, Magabala Books (2012)

Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?, Magabala Books (2014)

Seahorse, Magabala Books (2015)

Mrs Whitlam, Magabala Books (2016)

Published by Black Inc.,

an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

www.blackincbooks.com

Copyright Bruce Pascoe 2019

Bruce Pascoe asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

9781760641580 (paperback)

9781743821053 (ebook)

Cover design by Akiko Chan

Cover photograph by Vicky Shukuroglou

Text design and typesetting by Akiko Chan

Ant holes on p. viii by Thaanawatkaewsri/Shutterstock; Coral fungi on pp. 545 by Full Tank/Shutterstock; Underwater plant on pp. 1023 by Steve Lovegrove/Shutterstock; Tree on pp. 1389 by Mark Higgins/Shutterstock; Desert/snow plant on pp. 2001 by Joachim Heng/Shutterstock; Rivergum trunk on pp. 2667 by Kingropes Access/Shutterstock

for the three salt rivers of Mallacoota

A LETTER TO BARRY

W hy did I think of you when I saw the fox hunting mullet in the river shallows? She must have been engrossed in her work because her coat was damp and shed ruffled it into feathers to protect herself from the cold. Her back was hunched as she stepped gingerly through the slip of water on the sandbar. Tea-tree tannin had steeped the river in amber, and you couldnt help admiring the dark ginger fox on a ground of golden liquor.

The only awkward posture in the scene was the way she hunched whether as reaction to the cold or coiled to pounce on fish, I couldnt tell. She didnt seem pleased by my sudden appearance but refused to look at me directly. The insouciance of vixens.

She would endure my presence simply because she was unwilling to waste the investment in her hunt. I was hunting too and knew how she felt: the intensity, the coiled energy, the hope.

I felt guilty for having imposed on her radiant quest. I passed on the opposite side of the river, guiding the boat through the shallow channel that hugged the melaleucas and wattles growing on the bank. I looked back at her when I could take my eye from the navigation, fascinated by her high-stepping stealth.

And I thought of you. Once again it took me days to return your call, and you probably think Im rude or neglectful, but I try to avoid the telephone, as you know, and my attention is so thoroughly in debt to the river, the insistence of its life.

The mist was thick at dawn. It hung like the gauze curtains you see in the back rooms of some old hotels where any welcome is reserved for the public areas. The forgotten rooms where guests would stay in more prosperous times are left to decay, to shred, to dream old tattered dreams. The river mist wreathed in frayed drifts like that grey gauze of disappointment.

I had to peer into those old shabby rooms to find the river banks and the landmarks I used to follow the channel in the sandy rivers course. At last I could make out old Geoffs fence. He shot himself last year. I wish he hadnt. Took it bad when he had to sell the farm. The town blamed her but Id seen them only a month before he died. Fishing together. They seemed happy. But how can you tell? Was the fox insouciant or careless? I chose the pride of insouciance because I was just an observer, as distant from the true workings of a foxs brain as I was from the motivations of most humans. Just an intrigued observer. No gift other than curiosity.

I loved Geoff. When I returned prodigal to the rivers after twenty-five years away, Geoff was delighted to see me and I clung to his welcome. He sat me down to remind me of a cricket game wed played together thirty-two years ago.

Geoff loved his cricket, and loved talking about his two-game career. In Geoffs version of events his contribution was vivid not overly embellished, but his ordinariness was central to the play. It was a great way to be welcomed.

I wish you hadnt done it, Geoff. I cant bear to look at your hillsides now.

Then I passed Byrons farm. He was a city man, a nerve nut, nose eroded by alcohol. He decided to become a market gardener but the tomato wilt got him. Though really it was the absence of his wife. She couldnt stand the loneliness of the river, the dawn mists parting reluctantly like the shrouds in a funeral parlour. Byron couldnt explain its beauty and she couldnt bear the awful screaming of the yellow-bellied glider, the haunting white ghostliness of the masked owl. And its call: like death itself.

Byron grieved and so, after another year of battling the wilt, he left the hothouses and went back to the suburbs. For love.

And the next farm, on the bluff above Byrons empty gardens, belongs to a Samoan abalone diver. His brother was shot by a gay man who had no other answer for the derision he was dealt. The surviving brother played one game of cricket just so he could use his dead brothers bat. Geoff would have loved it. So did I. I taught both brothers. Wild men of the sea, lovely lost Samoans. And the other man is out of prison now and hes still lost.

The mist still obscured the landmarks and I peered through its veils to find the sandy beach that marked a treacherous bend. A mate saved a kids life there when he cut the fishing line tangled around a toddlers leg. The other end was attached to an eighty-pound mulloway heading for Bass Strait. That toddlers father later sold the riverbank farm to Phillip, a man who made his fortune recovering swamplands in the environmental eighties. The river community hated him for allowing the salt water to resume its old course across the paddocks. Old Geoff didnt like it either, and sawed off the two giant ironbark gateposts, which Phillip used to block the communal roadway. Well, Geoff thought it was communal; Phillip thought it was his land. Geoff sawed his posts off and told me of his act of defiance with enormous glee. He even rubbed his hands together as he retold the story as if he was in some rural cartoon.

Geoff was dead now and Phillip was ill, but it was Phillip who had taken in Geoffs ancient blind terrier, Mate, after Geoff died. Funny world.

Phillip was combative, but he would say assertive. He did not get along with the abalone diver across the river. Being a fisherman, Dean liked fast boats, even though one of them was a yacht.