‘Those are dragonflies circling his head. And… oh my god!’ She gasped in sudden horror as she realised what creature had swum up close to the boy, writhing black body fluid as a brush full of ink squiggled across the water. Only its wicked head, raised above the current, seemed solid. ‘Aar-!’ she began to cry out in alarm.
‘Hush,’ urged Ern, seizing her wrist. ‘Don’t scare it.’
‘Don’t scare it?’
‘See what it’s doing?’
Heart in her mouth, Susanna watched as the snake rippled up to Aaron’s hand in the water and swam in a circle.
Aaron giggled and sang. ‘Hello snake, hello Gane!’
The black snake swam another circle and raised its head, flickering its tongue along the boy’s arm, wrist to elbow. Aaron giggled ‘That tickles, Gane!’
‘What’s Gane?’ Susanna asked in a terrified whisper.
‘The rainbow serpent. That’s not Gane. It’s a red belly black snake.’
Susanna stuffed her fist in her mouth so she wouldn’t scream and startle the venomous thing.
But the snake lowered itself back into the river and after swimming another circle, writhed away across the surface of the river towards the reeds of its nest, while Aaron sang ‘Goodbye Gane, goodbye snake!’
Ern and Susanna strode down to the riverbank as soon as they could, Ern scooping up his son and giving him a fierce hug.
‘Don’t go wandering off, boy!’ he said, kissing the child’s black hair. ‘The river doesn’t always want to be sung to, and sometimes it’s hungry.’
‘I’m hungry,’ declared Aaron.
‘Then you run off up to Mum and ask her for a cheese and vegemite sandwich. Quick sticks!’
Aaron wriggled out of his father’s arms and as soon as his feet hit the ground, he ran back through the trees to the caravan where his mum and aunties were making lunch.
Susanna and Ern watched him run.
‘Has he done that before?’ asked Susanna, surprisingly unfazed by this sign of otherworldliness in her grandson.
‘No.’
‘We should ask Debbie. She might have seen things.’ Debbie was her daughter, who laughed about being a ‘Shamrock Aboriginal’, proud of both her father Albert Haley’s ancestry and her mother’s Irish heritage.
Susanna Veronica Haley had come out to Australia in the fifties as a nurse, but she was born and raised in Ireland and was as mixed in heritage as her children.
‘My grandmother was from Norway, you know,’ she said quietly. ‘Mormor’s kulning was famous in our village.’
‘Kulning?’
‘Calling the cows with a kind of song. She’d call home the lost cattle not only on our farm, but for our neighbours too.’
‘Aaron wasn’t kulning, was he?’
‘No, but I saw Mormor kulning the cows back from pasture one day, and there was a light in her voice. All the animals came. Eagles and doves together. Rabbits and foxes. It was the strangest thing I ever saw. She told me to keep it secret, even from Grandpa. Said it scared people, and she only ever sang to the animals. Mormor thought that might be how Saint Patrick banished the snakes, by singing them into the sea. One summer, when we were parched for rain, she took me to the fields and we danced, and it finally rained. Of course, Ern,’ she said, ‘maybe he gets this from your and Albert’s people.’
‘Maybe,’ Ern said. ‘Grandma used to say we had a medicine man in her family, but she was stolen from her mob when she was only six. She didn’t remember much about them or her culture.’ Too late to ask her now, just as it was too late to ask Albert, both having passed too young.
Ern regarded the river solemnly, then the camp. ‘I’ll tell Debs, but we’ll keep it secret. This country got a history of taking away Koori kids. I’m not giving them any excuse.’
‘We’ll teach him to keep it quiet,’ agreed Susanna. ‘Things didn’t end well for my Grandma, when the next village found out.’
They shook hands on it, and walked back up to the campsite.
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