taking care of the place
fear of bunyips
It’s getting dark. The gentle end of a slow and satisfying farm day. My farm is a tiny lakeside property which belongs to an absent friend. I am alone today. Last night we walked round the lake, or dam, and I told my German visitor all about bunyips. Today he rang from a nearby mountaintop to remind me: “You know, those scary… the obokodies.” “Bunyips?” I said. “Bunyips, yes,” he agreed.
I let the chooks out to huddle in terror under a clump of some flowering ginger that sings. Its scent sings. They are frightened by the death of their fourth friend, two days ago, who was torn into heedless headlossedness by a hawk. I guarded them all day. Chased them out into the sunshine and leaned over the sagging cyclone wire to pick them up, plumply one by one, and carry them safely home. I bent my back under bushes and collected basketsful of dry kindling. I washed all the rugs and hung them out for sun’s succour. I took the landfill and all our recycling down to the council bins, near the road. In between I was supping and sipping on things that the humming ether brought me, random stories, articles and talks that lit my tiny local and deeply domesticated sky like tinsel snow shaken through a palm-sized dome. I set the axe against the tank and broke some branches over my knee. At the foot of the scored stump on which hardwood is splitted I found the dusty remains of the peeled head, eyeless and gone, of the poor chicken who wasn’t the fittest, on Wednesday, and didn’t survive. This is where my inner-city Berlin visitor had executed her a second time, after she died, so he could pluck her in hot water and rub her all over with red cooking herbs. The whole tiny house smelled of good food last night and I ate my baked potatoes and looked on, unable to stomach it, lacking the courage, picking the eyes out of a salad.
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Don’t tell him about Drop Bears or Whoopie Chooks. He couldn’t cope!
I tried him on Drop Bears but he wasn’t buying it. Maybe because it was dark and spooky as we passed the dam and the moon threw strange crippled-hand shadows… and because, unlike Drop Bears, Bunyips are something I can believe in…. *shivers*
What’s a Whoopie Chook? Any relation to the Cushion?
A whoopie chook is allegedly a feral fowl of considerable proportion given to sneaking up behind it’s victim (in the dark of course) and sticking it beak in your bum and then screaming “whoopie!” Thus it can be used as a practical joke!
Beautiful Cathoel ????
Thank you, Pedro. It’s lovely to know you’re reading.
Mia-pup found the head a few days later, brought it into the house to gnaw the bony bits – was astonished when I took away her smelly bit of joy. ‘But it’s perfect – we can share it – ohhh…’
I’m sorry Alison, we should have buried the head but I… just couldn’t look at it. I think the hawk had had her for a fair while before I worked out what was going on. Poor chooken.
Mia would have sniffed it out anyway! No problem
I guess a peaceful, intact burial is not in the cards for most chooklings.