5. Davy's skin

The Lodge backs onto the river and a track winds parallel back upstream past the single men’s quarters to the wharf and the processing plant. Davy hurries along the track until he reaches the big lilly pilly tree beside the plant. There, he hides until the factory hands straggle back in to work. He sees his mother laughing at some raucous joke. She flicks the butt of her smoke at a small man wearing a plastic hair net. A dirty joke. He waits. When he hears the starting whine of the water pump he knows they’re busy again and it’s safe to move. He runs the length of the wharf, drops at the other end onto the boat ramp and scurries up the other side into the cover of the bush. He knows the bush is the only place where he won’t feel alone.

This is what he doesn’t know:

His name is not Davy.

The laughing woman is not his mother.

Big Stan is not his father.

They are white people and he comes from people whose land is hundreds of miles away to the south. Davy is an Aboriginal boy – he is one of the People. He is eight years old. His connection is Snake.

The People have a story about when Davy was a baby. It’s this:

At that time the People had a big meeting about land and all the families came. After everybody had greeted the baby, they built up the campfire for the meeting and he was put into the care of his aunty, a girl about fourteen years old. That girl was distracted because she had just met her cousin on her mother’s side, a handsome boy from Mareeba and he invited her to go for a bit of a walk.

She knew she wasn’t allowed to be with that boy. She was wrong skin but she wanted to go anyway. So she put the sleeping baby on a blanket in a little lean-to at the edge of the camp and those two snuck off for a cuddle.

In that rainforest there’s a snake called a scrub python. He grows up to over twenty feet in length and comes out hunting at night. Scrub python likes to go after things like possums or small wallabies. He’ll take a chook too – or a puppy.

It’s not exactly true that the python crushes you to death. What he does is to get his coils round you nice and tight until you let out your breath, then he tightens up a little bit more so you can’t breathe in. Then he just waits until you suffocate. Everybody knows he hunts by tasting the air with his tongue until he gets the flavour of something alive and small. Once he locks onto that track he’s relentless.

Here’s this little ngawa all by himself with that baby smell of sour milk and stale piss and out of the darkness comes sliding that big old snake.

If anybody had looked up from the conference they might’ve seen the last six feet of the python’s body pour itself into the annex. But they didn’t.

The python’s tongue flicked the air as it drew itself up beside the little brown body in the white cotton nappy. The baby was lying on his back and the head of the snake drew up to the sleeping face to taste the air. Then its head disappeared under one tiny shoulder and reappeared on the other side. The baby was raised up with his head resting on the arched neck of the snake. The great snake with its cold eyes and flicking tongue held him motionless as the giant coils of its body slowly insinuated themselves into position.

Next thing you know there was a heck of a ruckus at the camp.

Nobody remembers exactly what happened but a woman screamed and those two young lovers got sprung. The boy’s mother dragged that young girl into the firelight by the hair. Then the boy’s real girlfriend tried to slap him and got his mother instead. The boy fell into the fire. People started shouting. Hell of a mess. The old fullahs all got cheesed off because they weren’t the centre of attention anymore and they started to grumble. It went on for quite a while before the baby’s mother could make herself heard.

Where’s the baby?

Usually it would be that the mother and the girl would just go and retrieve the baby but this time it was as if the people knew something was going on. Everybody, including the old fullahs followed the girl to the little humpy which was really just a couple of sheets of tin propped up with some branches.

When they got there, somebody flicked the tin away and everybody stopped dead in their tracks. Nobody said a word – not even the baby’s mother. The last one to arrive was the old bloke who spoke for that mob, a fullah named Eddy. He said, “Nobody move”.

There wasn’t much chance of that. Everybody was still trying to figure out what it was they were looking at.

The snake was huge at somewhere around twenty feet. It was coiled into a tight circle that raised its body into the shape and size of a truck tyre. The diamond patterns of its scales glinted in the flashes of firelight.

Nestled in the centre of this tangle of muscle that tiny baby lay fast asleep. The snake’s head rested on his little chest.

Scrub python had been asleep too, or at least his eyes were closed but when Eddy spoke, the eyes flashed open and the tongue began to twitch at the air.

“Don’t worry,” Eddy said, “nobody’s going to hurt you.”

It wasn’t clear whether Eddy was talking to the baby or the snake but the baby stirred. He waved his arms in jerky little spasms and his tiny fist bumped the snake’s eye. The people gasped but the python wasn’t the least worried. It moved its head clear of the baby who woke at that moment.

That baby lay there in the folds of the scrub python gurgling and smiling at the circle of faces around him as if he were safe in the soft arms of his own mother.

Eddy stepped up a bit closer and hunkered down like stockmen do when they decide to have a bit of a yarn.

“Now listen father,” Eddy said (his connection was Snake too), “this baby is one of the People and we’re about to get into a big long fight. We’re going to need these young fullahs to carry it on when we get too old or too tired. So I’m just going to take him now OK?”

When Eddy reached out his hand the snake drew back in the figure S that means it’s about to strike. Eddy sat back nice and calm and said, “We’ll look after him.”

The snake kept Eddy and the semi-circle of people baled up with its eyes but they saw that its body was unwinding itself from under the child. The baby was lowered gently as a feather onto the blanket. Then Scrub Python wound his way straight under Eddy’s moyu, across the feet of some of those standing by and back into the bush.

The ones who were touched said it felt like magic, like nothing they’d ever felt before or since and the others started making jokes about how good it must’ve felt on Eddy’s moyu.

Your moyu is your bum.

After that Eddy gave the baby a new black-fullah name.

But Davy doesn’t know any of this.

© Ray Lillis 2012