【荆棘鸟】第四章 05

The spiders were dreadful, huge hairy things with a leg span of inches, or deceptively small and deadly black-things lurking¹ in the lavatory²; some lived in vast wheeling webs slung³ between trees, some rocked inside dense⁴ gossamer⁵ cradles hooked among grass blades, others dived into little holes in the ground complete with lids which shut after them.

  Predators⁶ were there, too: wild pigs frightened of nothing, savage⁷ and flesh-eating, black hairy things the size of fully⁸ grown cows; dingoes, the wild native dogs which slunk close to the ground and blended into the grass; crows in hundreds carking desolately⁹ from the blasted white skeletons of dead trees; hawks¹⁰ and eagles, hovering¹¹ motionless on the air currents. From some of these the sheep and cattle had to be protected, especially when they dropped their young. The kangaroos and rabbits ate the precious grass; the pigs and dingoes ate lambs, calves¹² and sick animals; the crows pecked out eyes. The Clearys had to learn to shoot, then carried rifles as they rode, sometimes to put a suffering beast out of its misery¹³, sometimes to fell a boar or a dingo.

  This, thought the boys exultantly¹⁴, was life. Not one of them yearned¹⁵ for New Zealand; when the flies clustered like syrup¹⁶ in the corners of their eyes, up their noses, in their mouths and ears, they learned the Australian trick and hung corks¹⁷ bobbing from the ends of strings¹⁸ all around the brims of their hats. To prevent crawlies from getting up inside the legs of (heir baggy¹⁹ trousers they tied strips of kangaroo hide called bowyangs below their knees, giggling²⁰ at the silly-sounding name, but awed²¹ by the necessity. New Zealand was tame compared to this; this was life. Tied to the house and its immediate²² environs, the women found life much less to their liking²³, for they had not the leisure or the excuse to ride, nor did they have the stimulation²⁴ of varying activities. It was just harder to do what women always did: cook, clean, wash, iron,  care for babies. They battled the heat, the dust, the flies, the many steps, the muddy water, the nearly perennial²⁵ absence of men to carry and chop wood, pump water, kill fowls²⁶. The heat especially was hard to bear, and it was as yet only early spring; even so, the thermometer out on the shady veranda²⁷ reached a hundred degrees every day. Inside the kitchen with the range going,