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Timber John F Brennan Copyright © John F Brennan, 2018 All rights reserved. Except as provided by The Australian Copyright Act, 1968 no part of this publication may be reproduced or stored in a retrieval system in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. www.johnfbrennan.com Cover Image: Workman on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, 1930. ISBN: 978 0 6484091 0 6 Timber His first hare drive. Rows of men and dogs marching abreast, in wide lines across the rolling hills, forcing the hares into the trap, a right-angled fence lined with chicken wire. Hares, being surface dwelling and nesting above ground, were unable to hide below in burrows like the smaller rabbits they flushed out. Dozens upon dozens of the big orange coloured hares, hundreds in the olden days he was told, being driven forward, frightened, to be trapped between the men and the wire. Then the frenzy began. Men armed with rifles, shotguns, golf clubs, cricket bats and whiskey began going berserk alongside their terriers and children. It wasn’t uncommon for a man or dog or boy to pick up a pellet wound here or there, so watch out they’d said. Seven years old and without a rifle of his own the boy spotted a big male hare hiding in a clump of scrub away from the main melee. Without a second thought he leapt shirtless upon the motionless creature and managed to somehow grab hold of one of its strong back legs. The hare kicked and bucked with the sharp claws of the free leg, slicing into his forearms and face so fiercely he risked losing an eye and just when his hands were slipping he switched grip, wrestling into a choke hold with both hands about the animal’s neck. No animal dies easily and over the several minutes it took the boy’s small hands to choke the life out of it, the hare’s back legs ripped savage vertical cuts down his chest and thighs. Eventually he twisted his full 1 weight on top and only then could he squeeze hard enough, its skin held tight in his grasp, muscles writhing beneath and slowly those goat-like eyes clouded before his. Finally, it lay lifeless underneath him. No one witnessed the contest or saw his struggle and he felt nauseous and revolted but somehow strangely happy. Surrounding him everything seemed to move in slow motion as he dragged the carcass to where dozens of others were piled dead near the chicken wire fence, the foul musk stench of it on him. Now, some twenty-five years later, he still recalled the haunting dying cries of that big red hare. Not enough cover around for many hares these days. Most of the scrubland was now suburbia, or organic market gardens, with the remaining farms being less wild, every square inch in production and where large populations of hungry hares were no longer tolerated. 2 Skeletal and white, the trunks of blue gums stuck out from the ground at unusual angles. Like the half- buried ribs of a long dead sheep, a forest of dead trees standing lifeless, leafless and sun cured. Approaching the water’s course, where the water flowed when it was present, yellow flowered wattle filled much of the open ground between the twisted willow trees and the occasional lofty poplar. A clay coloured landscape, contoured by the meandering flow of occasional water. Barren dry most of the time, the streams here turned into torrents that uprooted trees and relocated the river banks when the rains fell heavy in the catchment area of the Blue Mountains foothills nearby. The boundary between the river bank and river bed was hard to make out just now. There wasn’t much water at all. The dry season was longer than usual this year. Despite the dry weather the poplar and willows trees were still in full green, with their deep roots tapping into invisible water running below ground along the river’s course. There was little free flowing surface water today, though sizeable pools remained in the deeper channels of the streambeds, linked here and there by intermittent flows running shallow across the khaki coloured stones. At least the drought made walking easy through the dusty ground of the riverbeds. Along the banks the vegetation thickened with clumps of grasses, spine covered bushes and the spear height shoots of fresh willow limbs rising from 3 buried trunks and stumps. Tricky to get through carrying a fishing rod, thick enough to make him creep and weave his way forward, enough to block a straight walk, not that it mattered today. Cicadas were everywhere, in full song and in such numbers that the din was riotous. Every year around this time, in the heat of summer, the little nymphs rose from the earth where they were living, feeding on the sap of tree roots, emerging to shed their skins and transform into winged creatures. It was the wings of the insects filling the air now, surrounding around him with sound. How wonderful, to be given wings after a life underground, to be resurrected he thought. Unlike locusts or grasshoppers that regularly came in plagues further inland, these insects did no damage above ground, just singing and mating. Once their eggs were laid amongst the soil and bark they perished. It was partly the cicadas bringing him out there to fish today. Stopping for a moment, viewing one of their transparent exoskeletons clinging to the trunk of a standing dead gum tree, he decided on the lure to fish with. A phelp would do today. A small brown blade spinner, the type that agitated the water in a buzzing fashion as they were retrieved. The rotations of the spinning brass blade mimicking the wings of fallen cicada furiously trying to escape from the water of the pools. Choosing what to fish was part of the art, and the fun. Not a day for fly fishing today, as the warm dry winds were predicted to rise, making fly fishing too awkward. Nobody wanted to spend their day extracting tangled fly lines from the tree branches. The usual choice of spinning lure out here was a black toby, 4 their movement swimming across stream like a darting brown trout fingerling, and very effective. This time of year, the fish grew accustomed to feeding on cicadas, becoming too lazy to chase fast moving prey, like a surface lure or a black toby. Phelps also made for easy fishing near the surface of the water, away from the hidden snags below that regularly stole line and valuable fishing time. Late morning, not the best time for fishing. Most luck was generally had at dawn or dusk, at the changing of the light, but now the trout lost their caution, gorging on the winged abundance throughout the entire day. The low water volumes saw the fish confined into much smaller pools too, so the chances of putting a tempting lure in front of one were greatly improved. There was a chance at least but nothing was ever for certain. Fish weren’t stupid. Years of catch and release saw some of the bigger ones being caught half a dozen times or more. Hooked, fought, exhausted and landed, extracted from their domain they quickly learnt to spot a fake. A small hook through a live cicada and floating it on the surface would almost guarantee a catch but that wasn’t allowed here, too easy, too unsportsmanlike. He’d done it often enough out here as a kid but times change, there were rule books and regulations now and you couldn’t get away with stuff like that anymore. Three fish in a single day was the best he’d ever done out there, legally anyway. Tickling trout you could do much better. As a boy, when his great uncle first brought him here, they took twenty-four good sized trout from this river in a single morning. Uncle Frank tickled those fish with nothing but bare hands, while Kieren stayed on the riverbank, holding the bulging 5 wriggling sack. Today they would have a person’s guts for garters and seize the car, when catching them with a fat sack like that. Still, having worked on the boats he knew that was nothing, not when compared with the brutal greed of commercial fishing. He’d seen oceans stripped bare by trawlers. Commercial fishermen were a different breed altogether and best kept at sea some of them. When newly landed into port, and with all the money and frustrations that a month at sea bring, they would cause serious trouble on their first few nights ashore. Having just done what they did, fighting oceans, enduring hardships on deck that few in the modern world could know, Kieren and his workmates would arrive ashore on wobbly land legs, feeling twelve feet tall and bullet proof. These strong and wild young men would spend every dollar they’d earned during a month at sea in three days ashore, on booze and girls and amphetamines, before returning to the sea. Back at sea money was irrelevant. The only currencies of value there were tobacco, weed and sleep. It advisable not to run into them as a group ashore until after they’d had the girls and before they hit the speed. Commercial fishing certainly wasn’t for the fainthearted, and Kieren was not in a hurry to return to doing that for a living. Men broke at sea working on those fishing boats, newcomers usually, thinking they had what it took without knowing what they were getting themselves into.

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