David Malouf: Fly Away Peter

‘I dunno. It’s something to do, isn’ it?’ He looked about, his grey eyes narrowed, and the land was a flat circle all round, grass-tips, tree-stumps, brush, all of it seemingly still and silent, all of it crowded and alive with eyes, beaks, wing-tips.

Ashley followed his gaze. The land shifted into a clearer focus, and he might himself have been able, suddenly, to see it in all its detail, the individual eye infinitesimally rolling, the red beak in a spray of gum-flowers, the tiny body at ground level among the roots, one of the seed-eaters, coloured like the earth. He was intensely aware for a moment how much life there might be in any square yard of it. And he owned a thousand acres.

But even if he looked and saw, he would have no name for it. Dollar bird. This youth had the names.

‘Where did you learn?’ he asked, out of where his own thoughts had led him.

‘Oh, here ’n there. Some of it from books. Mostly, you know, it’s —’ Jim found it difficult to explain that it was almost a sense he had, inexplicable even to himself. To have said that might have been to claim too much. A gift. Was it a gift? ‘In time,’ he said, ‘you get to know some things and the rest you guess. If you’re any good you guess right. Nine times in a hundred,’ and he gave a laugh. Ashley laughed too. He drew himself tighter together, the knotted legs, the elbows in hard against his body, and the laughter was like an imp he had bottled up in there that suddenly came bubbling out.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘how would you like to work for me? How would you —’

He stopped, breathless with the excitement of it. The landscape, the whole great circle of it, grass-heads, scrub, water, sky, quite took his breath away. All those millions of lives as they entering what he had just conceived. ‘How would you like,’ he said, ‘to do all this on a proper basis? I mean, make lists. We could turn this’ (it was the notion of time that took his breath away, the years, the decades), ‘into an observing place, a sanctuary. It’s mine, I can make what I want of it. And you’d be just the man.’

Smoke trailed from Jim’s lips in a steady stream. He had been waiting for so long for something like this to present itself, and now this Ashley Crowther fellow comes up behind him on a horse and offers it, just like that — not just a job but work, years, a lifetime.

The young man’s silence threw Ashley off balance.

‘I’d make it worth your while, of course.’ He swallowed. The landscape itself, he thought, ought to add its appeal; for it was an appeal more than an offer he was making, and it was on the land’s behalf that it was made. ‘How does it strike you, then?’ he asked lamely.

Jim nodded. ‘It sounds alright.’

‘Well then,’ Ashley said, laughing and jumping to his feet, ‘you’re my man.’ He thrust his hand out, and both standing now, feet on the ground, at the centre, if they could have seen themselves, of a vast circle of grass and low greyish scrub, with beyond them on one side tea-trees then paddocks, and on the other tea-trees then swamp then surf, in a very formal manner, with Ashley stooping slightly since he was so much the taller, and Jim quite square, they shook on it. It was done.

IF ASHLEY DISCOVERED Jim, it was Jim who discovered Miss Harcourt, Miss Imogen Harcourt.

He was on his belly again, with a note-pad in his pocket, a stub of pencil behind his ear and the field-glasses Ashley Crowther had provided screwed firmly into his head — they might have been a fixture.

He was watching a sandpiper in a patch of marshy bank, one of the little wood sandpipers that appear each summer and come, most of them, from Northern Asia or Scandanavia, nesting away at the top of the world on the tundras or in the Norwegian snows and making their long way south.

It amazed him, this. That he could be watching, on a warm day in November, with the sun scorching his back, the earth pricking below and the whole landscape dazzling and shrilling, a creature that only weeks ago had been on the other side of the earth and had found its way here across all the cities of Asia, across lakes, deserts, valleys between high mountain ranges, across oceans without a single guiding mark, to light on just this bank and enter the round frame of his binoculars; completely contained there in its small life — striped breast and sides, white belly, yellow legs, the long beak investigating a pool for food, occasionally lifting its head to make that peculiar three-note whistle — and completely containing, somewhere invisibly within, that blank white world of the northern ice-cap and the knowledge, laid down deep in the tiny brain, of the air-routes and courses that had brought it here. Did it know where it had arrived on the earth’s surface? Did it retain, in that small eye, some image of the larger world, so that it could say There I was so many darknesses ago and now I am here, and will stay a time, and then go back ; seeing clearly the space between the two points, and knowing that the distance, however great, could quite certainly be covered a second time in the opposite direction because the further side was still visible, either there in its head or in the long memory of its kind.

The idea made Jim dizzy. That, or the sun, or the effort of watching. He raised the glasses to rest a moment, and in doing so caught something unexpected that flashed through the frames and was gone.

Where?

He let the glasses travel across, back, up a little, down, making various frames for the landscape, and there it was again: a face under a sun-bonnet. It was lined and brown, and was at the moment intensely fixed upon something, utterly absorbed. He shifted the glasses and found a black box on a tripod. The face ducked down behind it. The composite figure that now filled the frame was of a grey skirt, voluminous and rather bedraggled, topped by the black box wearing a sun-bonnet. The black box was pointing directly towards him. Could it be him that she was photographing?

It was only after a minute that he realized the truth. What the woman had in her sights was the same sandpiper he had been holding, just a few seconds ago, in his binoculars. For some time, without either of them being aware of it, they had, in all this landscape, and among all its creatures, been fixing their attention from different sides on the same spot and on the same small white-breasted body.

He wasn’t all that much surprised by the coincidence. It seemed less extraordinary than that this few ounces of feather and bone should have found its way here from Siberia or Norway. That was itself so unlikely that men had preferred to believe, and not so long ago, either, that when the season turned, some birds had simply changed their form as others changed their plumage — that swallows, for example, became toads — and had actually given detailed accounts of the transformation: the birds gathering in such numbers, on reeds, on lake beds, that the stems bent low under their weight, and at the point where the reeds touched the water the swallows were transmuted, drew in their wings and heads, splayed their beaks to a toad-mouth, lowered their shrill cries to a throaty creaking, and went under the surface till it was time for them to be re-born overnight in their old shapes in twittering millions.

Meanwhile the tripod had transformed itself back into a woman. She was stomping about in her grey skirt; an old girl, he guessed, of more than fifty, with grey curls under the bonnet and boots under the skirt. She lifted the tripod, snapped it shut, set it over her shoulder, and moved off with the rest of her equipment into the scrub.

Later, at the Anglers’ Arms, he discovered her name and went down river to the weatherboard cottage she had bought and introduced himself.