【荆棘鸟】第四章 04

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Sometimes they spent days on end in the saddle, miles away from the homestead, camping at night under a sky so vast and filled with stars it seemed they were a part of God. The grey-brown land swarmed¹ with life. Kangaroos in flocks of thousands streamed leaping through the trees, taking fences in their stride, utterly² lovely in their grace and freedom and numbers; emus built their nests in the middle of the grassy³ plain and stalked like giants about their territorial⁴ boundaries, taking fright at anything strange and running fleeter than horses away from their dark-green, football-sized eggs; termites⁵ built rusty⁶ towers like miniature skyscrapers⁷; huge ants with a savage⁸ bite poured in rivers down mounded holes in the ground.

  The bird life was so rich and varied⁹ there seemed no end to new kinds, and they lived not in ones and twos but in thousands upon thousands: tiny green-and-yellow parakeets Fee used to call lovebirds, but which the locals called budgerigars; scarlet-and-blue smallish parrots called rosellas; big pale-grey parrots with brilliant purplish-pink breasts, underwings and heads, called galahs; and the great pure white birds with cheeky yellow combs called sulphur-crested cockatoos. Exquisite¹⁰ tiny finches whirred and wheeled, so did sparrows and starlings, and the strong brown kingfishers called kookaburras laughed and chuckled¹¹ gleefully or dived for snakes, their favorite food. They were well-nigh human, all these birds, and completely without fear, sitting in hundreds in the trees peering about with bright intelligent eyes, screaming, talking, laughing, imitating anything that produced a sound. Fearsome lizards¹² five or six feet long pounded over the ground and leaped lithely¹³ for high tree branches, as at home off the earth as on it; they were goannas. And there were many other lizards, smaller but some no less frightening, adorned¹⁴ with horny triceratopean ruffs about their necks, or with swollen¹⁵, bright-blue tongues. Of snakes the variety was almost endless, and the Clearys learned that the biggest and most dangerous looking were often the most benign¹⁶, while a stumpy little creature a foot long might be a death adder¹⁷; carpet snakes, copper¹⁸ snakes, tree snakes, red-bellied black snakes, brown snakes, lethal¹⁹ tiger snakes.

  And insects! Grasshoppers²⁰, locusts²¹, crickets, bees, flies of all sizes and sorts, cicadas, gnats²², dragonflies, giant moths²³ and so many butterflies!

 

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