The Swan Book (24 page)

Well! So many rats, so many owls, and all night, ‘The tremulous sob of the complaining owl…'
Bones remarked excitedly, his face covered with grey dust. In an authoritative voice, he explained that they were sitting in the best place in the world right now to see owls
. Man! We are right in the middle of a plague of rats that are multiplying in droves. Never seen anything like it before.
He explained that the rats had migrated in strands of millions flowing inland through the desert. In their wake, large flocks of native grassy owls had followed them, and the
Tyto capensis grass owls,
he explained, were also quadrupling in numbers each time they bred. The food supply was so good –
different, unusual, changed weather patterns are causing it. Well! It was like sitting in the middle of a feast
, said Doom, speaking knowledgeably about the extraordinary phenomena – a million to one chance they were lucky to witness. He had been visiting places like this for years, waiting for this to happen.

Yep,
Snip added,
Don't forget the owls were attacking the moths attracted to the fire as well and I think…

Yes, of course,
Doom interjected with science talk,
But I don't think the fire was a consideration in the mind of swarming rats being chased by owls.

My friend! Who knows the workings of a rat's mind,
Snip replied.

I thought that was our expertise: to know a rat when we see one,
Doom laughed, but Mail took a more serious analogy about predation in a natural feast or famine occurrence.

Vigilance! My friend. It was only sheer vigilance – the nature of our ancestors, that had saved us from a storm of vermin.

Snip said he agreed because he felt Mail really possessed the mind of a genius, and laughed.
In a way,
he said,
I really equate that brain of yours Mail with a high tech microscope. Someone, who could without hesitation, and with the least bit of prompting, easily cast his mind back through time in a matter of moments, to situate himself inside the brain of the first man and recreate his prophecy.

And the reason? Ancestry. It all boils down to the connective tissue of heredity. A miracle that is not restricted to time. The brain is a marvellous organ.

You are one of a kind, brother,
Mail laughed.

This whole thing was one of a kind.

One continuously ponders the puzzle of life,
Warren said with a deep sigh.

Of course, genius is always hard to ignore,
Snip said, with a wink.

Exactly. The reason why
Tyto capensis
and
Tyto alba
were nesting like flies around the spinifex.

The souls of women,
Warren reminded them, and looked at the girl who was still staring at her plate, unwilling to eat strange food.

You had better eat. It will be another long day.

The return to the highway commenced with a greeting from a blue-eye crow. It was crying next to its squashed-in-half mate left in the middle of the road. Warren stopped the car. The bird tried to defend itself as Warren sought to befriend it. Quietly, he moved closer, holding out his arm, then the bird did a very strange thing. It leaped onto his outstretched hand and onto his shoulder, while crying
aah-aah-aah
, and began chuckling its secrets into his ear. He asked questions, calling it a wise bird, for wise it was with age from the colour of its eyes, and then, he consoled it for its loss. The bird responded well to his voice, for it did another strange thing to demonstrate its ability to communicate its feelings to human beings. It began to mimic lines from that famous old ABBA song –
Money, money, money, it's a rich man's world
– which its ancestors perhaps learnt from listening to a truckies' roadhouse jukebox where they had spent decades pilfering scraps, and which the bird now sung repeatedly in so many
Aahs
. He sang, and the genies sang, and the bird was almost beside itself.

The girl wanted to keep this lonely bird. Warren saw her
moment of vulnerability and in that instant, she received his first lesson about what he meant by friendship. He sent the raven back off to where it belonged, into the northerly wind.

The day was spent examining owls' nests. Their vehicle had been left beside the road covered with Army-issued camouflage netting. Warren and the genies took great care to ensure that the vehicle would remain undetected, and had walked back along their wheel tracks off the main dirt road to buff up the grass.

They travelled on foot, walking into the vastness of low vegetation plains surrounded by smooth, tussocky hills. The work was hard. Dust rose with each step, filled the air with each breath of wind, and fell to settle in their hair, over their skin and in their clothes. They looked as though they had crawled in it, but they had blended into the country, and were indistinguishable from it.

The task of locating the nests of the grass owl was not easy. The nests were concealed at the end of tunnels constructed through the thick
kinkarra
spinifex grasslands. The genies walked in circles between each nest. Warren trailed behind. Oblivia always felt that he was watching her, just in case she tried to escape. She was seething with anger. She hated being watched, of knowing he was staring into her back, getting into her mind. She thought of ways of killing him once she had the chance. His phone rang. He was always busy on what the girl learnt was a mobile phone, capable of making calls from where they were, in one of the remotest places on the planet. Each time it rang and abruptly broke the silence of the bush, he would fall further back, while he talked into it
. Sure! Not now. Speak to you later.
Warren Finch, important or not, was determined to have this time on Country. He silently indicated
five days tops
with a show of his open palm to the genies when they looked back at him speaking on the mobile. They smiled. Agreed. He continued talking. Somebody else.
You will have
to cope. You can cope for a few days can't you?
A lot of hard talking had to be done to keep the world busy while he was away. How to finally topple that old goat Ryder once and for all? Take the reigns as the new President? March right up to what the country needed. It was time. He was saying how he wanted time to think, to prepare, to be ready for what was coming. How was he going being married and all? He repeats the question each time it's asked. Fine! Right!

Keep hitting if it makes you happy
, he said, whenever Oblivia decided to run back to take another slog at his face.

The genies always tried to mask the conversations Warren was having by talking about owls to the disinterested or disconnected girl – they could not decide which – by naming and describing the two-hundred odd species in the world. It became an endless conversation between the three men about the twenty or so types that included different barn owls, fishing owls, burrowing owls, wood owls, little owls like the one Picasso had as his sad pet. They discussed the Latin family names like
Tyto, Megascaps, Bubo, Otus,
but only
Ninox
and
Tyto
represented the nine different owls found in Australia. She learnt that barn owls could be used by farmers to control plagues of rodents as these owls were now doing out in the desert country.
I am in rodent country
, she thought while she turned and spat towards Warren. The three genies talked a great deal about why the owls had come from the east. What this meant. The ecology of the country had changed. Was this the Law doing something to the country? Then something changed. Words trampling her into the ground could also pick her up. She looked surprised to be told that each family of owls consumed several thousand mice and rats in a breeding season.
Yep!
Bones Doom commented, as though speaking for the girl's silences. She glared at him. She did not want to know these things.
These fellas will keep on breeding out here until they have consumed all the rodents, and then their own numbers will decrease, because most owls will not live more than a couple of years.

Such a large bird, very unlike the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo which might live for eighty or ninety years,
explained the gentle Bones.

There was no owl's nest passed before it received a thorough examination. The men never tired of their interest in how an owl had constructed its nest. With each clutch of eggs discovered, the find was welcomed by the genies as though a miracle had taken place, and chorusing,
Doom, how do you do it man, you are a fucking genius. How many is that now? 12,001? 12,002?

The eggs were examined for number and weight, and each egg created serious discussion to judge its particular shape and age, held up like a diamond against the sun to examine the embryo forming inside, and then finally, enthusiastic thought was given to how each egg felt as though it was the first marvellous thing they had ever held in the hand. Oblivia thought all the nests were the same. Whenever she was the first to see a nest she did not volunteer the information. What did it matter? She could not be bothered that each nest consisted of six or eight eggs with a displeased sitting owl. Who cared? She wanted to go home. The urge to bolt through the spinifex overpowered her. Only the swamp loomed large in her mind. A vision now contaminated with the ghostly sight of Warren walking like a dead man. A vision that would not leave his mind either.

The information about the owls' nests, including the level of anxiety to the disturbed owl, was recorded on pocket-sized computers. Doom was constantly reminded how painfully slow and tedious he was in his search to locate each nest in a fixed area, before the group could move on.
It's for science. Nobody knows anything about why these birds come to this place, or why the rats are driven here.
The girl was desperate to go. Warren catches up with her each time she walks away. She knows that she slows them down even further. The work becomes slower. Always Doom gives the same
answer, while sometimes glancing conspiratorially at Warren, the man on top of the nation who has up to this point, always been in a hurry. Warren nods:
Sure! Who hasn't got time for science?

We were doing this all last night,
Edgar Mail told the girl in a voice that was like an echo from distant spinifex groves, but there were other words burning inside of her:
Stupid girls get into trouble.
It was Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions' voice.
Stupid girls deserve to get what is coming to them.
The Harbour Master was dancing across the plain, stopping every now and again to stare quizzically at the owl hunters whom he repeatedly called,
stupid people
. He and the old woman were both shouting over the distance to reach one another, reminiscing about the bad luck of the girls with weather-beaten bones that lay scattered in places exactly like this. The Harbour Master called it
kinkarra nayi
. The desert. Spinifex.
Wiyarr! Wiyarr!
Everywhere. What next?

They said their bones were like white chalk.
Odd, how these bones were scattered around the ground throughout the spinifex
. The girl's stomach nods, rolls, and nods again. She saw prowling dingos with white bones in their mouths wherever the sun's glare struck the horizon. The dead lady's voice reminded her that all men wanted was sex,
so how do you like that? It happened on the refugee boats. It can happen in the mulga too.
The girl remembered there was an owl, a
julujulu
that once lived in the darkened hole in the roots of the tree. She had felt its soft feathers with her fingers. Now she was reminded of its softness.

Edgar Mail continued talking,
You should remember that anyone can be a habitual colonist perpetually in search of difference to demystify myths, always trying to create new myths to claim as their own.
The girl could hear the old woman and the Harbour Master chuckling somewhere in the air above them, telling her to forget about what that man was saying.
What would he know about the Feast of the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas back in 1697 when a white man
first saw your mythical black swan swimming about over there in Western Australia, who had always thought black swans were evil and never really existed? Did he stand back and not touch, believing he would be doomed on a shipwreck for taking a black swan?

You know, most of these eggs will hatch but when the food runs out in the summer, the rats will perish, and so too will most of the owls,
Edgar Mail said lamely, while looking at Snip, who looked at Doom. The girl began to think about how she was going to disappear into ghost country, just like the girls who never returned. She looked out over the ocean of grey-green grasses and thought of how Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions had spent years looking across oceans to stop herself from dying at sea. The Harbour Master reminded the girl that it was very difficult, impossible really, to survive if you never existed.

The genies kept talking about Oblivia's name.

Immya Wake. You are kidding me. Nobody has a name like that.

No. No way man.

You tell them,
Warren laughed, looking at her. The girl felt as though she had been stripped in broad daylight. She looked away while trying to decide where to run, but there was no place to run. The plains country was already a coffin for brides.

That's not a good joke comrade,
Snip snapped.

Yes! You are right,
Warren replied.
Swan girl, I know your name is Ethyl. Will always be Ethyl. I don't know who gave you that other name. But from now on it's going to be Ethyl, short they tell me for Ethylene Oblivion. A beautiful name really, Ethyl.

The genies wanted to know where that name originated.

The girl stalked off, spitting all over the ground as she went.

Warren Finch liked her spirit.
She was a good hater.
He smiled as though he was pleased with his new possession. The girl did not go far before she realised that she wanted to live, and this dead face Warren Finch was bloody well it, so when Snip commanded,
Stop.
Stay dead still until I come to you,
she froze on the spot. All she hears is Warren's voice, talking again on the mobile phone.