Spent Black Streamers
As a boy, I spent long summer days on my grandparents’ wheat and sheep farm on the Dale River, about 1 1/2 hours drive over the Darling Range from Perth.
It was hot and baked dry with yellowed stubble covering the rolling granite hills. The trees that dotted the landscape were predominantly large dead silvered skeletal remains, with axe marks on their trunks from the efficient “ring barking” that had killed them.
We caught koonacs in the smelly dam water with sheep pellets as bait, the ubiquitous bush flies coating us.
Crows, black and garrulous, croak and call, the noise flat and hard in the heat.
My grandmother is part of this landscape, in her faded cotton shirt (the pattern now indiscernible and sun bleached) and worn nondescript flat-soled leather shoes, squinting against the sunlight.
Dor Dor, (as known to her then tribe of grandsons) was as practical a solution, to the demands of eking an existence in the Australian bush, as there ever was. I suppose she was tough, but I don’t remember her that way. She fed us stewed fruit, paddock picked mushrooms, homemade tomato chutney, lemon curd, pan fried sheep’s brains, chops and kangaroo fry. We thought she excelled at dessert - and the broken up stale bread covered in cream and milk with a topping of fig jam was my personal favourite!
She raised turkeys and chooks. Free range, before the politically “woke” knew what free range was. They scratched amongst the dead grass and wood heaps, away from the chicken wire and corrugated iron enclosure that was a night time sanctuary from foxes.
Like some totemic offering, the chook yard wire was hung with desiccated bird bones and the spent black streamers of tattered crow feathers. A warning. For as the turkeys scratched in the dirt, gobbling excitedly, and the chooks fluffed in the dust, the eggs in the chook yard lay unprotected.
The crows with their unrelenting caws, are also unrepentant recidivist egg thieves. The bright orange yolk an elixir. Several magnitudes better than their usual fare of picked over lamb’s carcasses and unlucky grasshoppers.
Their raids are opportunistic. As the alarming gobbles of the fan tailed turkeys disappear across the hill toward the manna of spilled grain under the silos, the crows gather along the top of the enclosure. Unbalanced, on the thin galvanized piece of fencing wire, wings stretching out like awkward trapeze artists they are ready for an easy swoop down into the laying boxes.
Dor Dor fiercely loved her family and her poultry by extension. They were part of the world that existed and was given succor by my grandmother to feed a multitude of adults and children. She did a roaring trade in turkeys at Christmas time, with farmer's wives putting in their orders each year (I remember the little tomahawk, the chopping block and the signature stench of boiled feathers). And the chooks she fed and called and culled, as required to satisfy family demands for both eggs and meat.
The crows were not part of this world.
The 410 shotgun was loaded out of the gun-shy crows’ sight, behind the grey jarrah picket fence of the house yard. Double barreled. It was light and considered a lady’s gun. Not as heavy as a 12 gauge. Perfect for dispatching snakes and vermin around the house.
The crows, whilst engaged in the orgiastic fervor of breaking open as many eggs as avianly possible, weren’t thinking about Dor Dor as she strode purposely through the yellowed grass. Or her 410.
I remember, her long fingers twitching wire around another crow’s leathery limp black legs, affixing it to the fence. The bright glossy blue black feathers hanging down askew and akimbo, the dead glass of its eye, watching me.
Derek Baston
