‘I’ll be careful,’ said Pender, feeling the blood in his arms and legs fill with creeping joy. ‘I’ll be very careful.’
The vet looked again at Pender’s father and then at Pender once more.
‘You know it can only be for a while. When she grows up, she will want to go back to the bush.’
‘I know,’ said Pender.
The vet got up and went to the kitchen with Pender’s father, leaving Pender on the sofa next to Brindabella. He leaned over and touched one of her little paws that was poking out of the pillowcase.
‘I’ll look after you,’ he whispered.
In a few minutes, the vet came back with a baby’s bottle of milk. She gave it to Pender. It felt warm under his fingers.
‘There you go,’ said the vet. ‘See if she will take it from you.’
Pender moved closer to Brindabella on the sofa, as close as he dared. He held up the bottle to her mouth until she found the teat. It only took her a moment, and then she began to drink hungrily.
He couldn't remember ever feeling so happy.
That was how Brindabella came to live in the honey-coloured stone house with the green shutters.
That first night, she slept in Pender’s bed. He wrapped her in a blanket around the pillowcase and she lay down next to him and went to sleep, making tiny snoring sounds. In the night, she woke up restless, searching for the milk, so he got up and warmed up the special formula as his father and the vet had showed him. Then he brought it to her and she drank and they fell asleep again together.
When he woke up the next day, she licked his fingers and scratched him with her paws and then laid her head against his leg. It felt as though she had lived there with them always.
At first, she spent most of her days inside the house. Pender carried her around in the pillowcase, tucked inside an old calico bag which he hung around his neck. When he lowered the bag to the floor and let her slip out to hop about, she followed him around like a duckling, wherever he went, from room to room. It was as though she couldn’t bear not to see where he was.
During the day, Pender and his father took turns to prepare her milk. Now, instead of staying in the hut at lunchtime, Pender’s father came down to the house to eat his sandwich with Pender and help him feed Brindabella. They fed her at their own meal times, either on their lap, or with Brindabella sitting up in the pillowcase, slung over the back of a chair. She drank and drank and hopped and slept. And grew.
The days passed.
‘I think she needs to have more time in the yard,’ said Pender’s father one morning, down on his knees as he swept the hallway with a brush and pan. ‘This place stinks of kangaroo droppings! And she needs the exercise, you know, to build her muscles.’
‘But will she be safe?’ Pender worried.
He had noticed that Billy-Bob was still wary of Brindabella and gave a low growl from the other side of the wire verandah door whenever she came near.
‘She should be all right,’ said his father. ‘But I think I’d better tie Billy-Bob up when he’s not with me. We’ll see if he behaves himself.’
He opened the door to go outside, pushing Billy-Bob off the step where he was snoozing. The dog stretched his legs back and forth and then trotted into the yard. Cautiously, Pender came out too, Brindabella hopping behind him. Billy-Bob glanced up at Brindabella through sleepy eyes.
‘I know what you’re thinking, Billy-Bob,’ said Pender’s father, nudging him with his foot and shaking his head. ‘You can’t fool me, old boy.’
He took a rope and tied one end around Billy-Bob’s collar and the other to one of the verandah posts. Brindabella hopped forward into the yard. She raised her black nose in the air, and the ears that still seemed too large for her face twitched. She hopped a few more steps, nearly overbalancing, bent down and chewed vaguely on a bit of grass, then spat it out. She slapped her tail on the ground and nearly overbalanced again.
‘Just look at her,’ said Pender’s father, shaking his head. ‘All those thousands of things she needs to know about being a kangaroo that her mother would have taught her. And we can’t teach her because we don’t know what they are.’
Brindabella paused. It was as though she was listening to him, her head on one side, her ears twitching.
‘She’s no ordinary kangaroo, Pender,’ said his father, laying a hand on Pender’s shoulder. ‘Being brought up by humans, life will be hard for her when she goes back to the bush.’
Pender understood that his father wanted him to remember that Brindabella would leave them and go back to the bush when she was old enough. He said:
‘Maybe she will stay with us. She’s used to us now.’
‘Ah, Pender,’ said his father. ‘When she grows up, she will leave and forget us. She will want to. One day, you will wake up and she will be gone. You’ll see.’
His father went back inside the house. Pender sat down on the step and put his arm around Billy-Bob.
‘Sorry about the rope, Billy-Bob,’ he murmured. They watched Brindabella as she made her way around the yard. The red hens came bobbing over but then ran wildly away, wings flapping, frightened by the joey’s strange hopping movements. Up on the roof, Ricky the grey-striped cat came to the edge and peered down, curling himself into the shape of river stone. The old white horse and the cows in the field looked calmly over the fence.
Pender picked up a twig and began to scratch in the dirt. After a while, without even thinking
