It was Brindabella!
That was Pender’s first drawing of Brindabella. Of course, it disappeared in the wind and the scratching of the hens almost as soon as he had finished it. But later, he went to the bookshelf in the living room and picked up one of the sketchbooks his father had stacked up there. He took a piece of charcoal from a bowl on the mantelpiece, turned to a clean page in the sketchbook and began to draw Brindabella.
That was the second drawing. Soon there was a third, a fourth, a fifth. Once he started drawing her, he could not seem to stop. He drew Brindabella sitting, lying, sleeping, eating, hopping, standing. He drew Brindabella from a distance, Brindabella close-up. Brindabella next to the house, Brindabella with the hens. Brindabella looking at Billy-Bob. Billy-Bob looking at Brindabella. Brindabella licking her paws, Brindabella proudly slapping her tail.
Pender drew her every day, in the mornings, the afternoons, the evenings. He spent so much time drawing that his fingers were always blackened and smelled of burnt coal.
When he was happy with a drawing, he would tear it out of the sketchbook and put it on the shelf in the kitchen above the stove. This was next to the table where he and his father ate their evening meal while Brindabella hopped around under the table or slept in her homemade pouch hanging on the hook in the hall. His father inspected the drawings carefully.
‘I see,’ he said, pushing his glasses back on his nose. ‘Yes, I see.’
Sometimes Pender would sit and look at the collection of drawings he had done, and the pictures seemed to form a kind of story. But it wasn’t a story about the real Brindabella. It was about an imaginary joey that hopped about like a secret ghost inside his mind.
The real Brindabella was getting bigger and stronger. Out in the yard, she would rush forward in bursts of running bounds. Sometimes she would tumble over herself, but she was learning. The red hens were no longer frightened, and took to following her around the yard, then squawking backwards when she fell amid them.
Pender’s father told him that she needed to practise hopping to build up her muscles. So Pender took her for walks beyond the yard and out along the river. He carried her in the calico bag over his shoulder until they reached the pathway, then he would stop and let her drop out of the bag onto the ground. She would hop ahead, then stop, look around for Pender, and come hopping back. Or else she would linger behind as he strode on, then dash to catch up with him.
One day, he took her all the way along the river, up the hill through the wall of trees, to the clearing where he had found her inside her mother’s pouch. Of course, Brindabella’s mother was no longer there. The same day she had been shot, Pender’s father had gone up with some other men from the neighbouring farms to bury her.
Now it was just a simple quiet space, filled with the sounds of birds and insects and leaves rustling in the wind.
Did Brindabella even remember her mother? Pender wondered. Did she remember much before that crack of the bullet through the sky that had changed the adventure of her life?
‘Do you remember?’ he asked out loud.
That noise, that terrible cracking sound, a huge thunderbolt, and the mother kangaroo had fallen, down like a tall tree in a storm. But the storm ended in an instant. That crack, the fall, and then the beating of her mother’s heart slowly fading, bomp, bomp, bomp, smaller and slower, further and further away.
Brindabella stared at him, her ears twitching, an enigmatic expression on her narrow face. Did she remember?
Pender climbed up a high overhanging sandstone rock and lay down on his stomach, watching Brindabella from above. He pulled out his sketchbook and stub of charcoal from his pocket and began to draw her. Brindabella hopped forward a few steps into the clearing, sniffing.
‘Hold it,’ called Pender, holding the charcoal up in the air for a moment. ‘Don’t move, Brindabella! That’s perfect!’
Did she remember?
It was late in the afternoon. Pender had tied Billy-Bob up with the rope looped around the verandah post and left Brindabella in the yard while he went in to help his father prepare dinner.
The sun was setting. This was the time of mysterious half-light when Brindabella always felt the most restless. She hopped over to the fence and faced the bush. Across the field, a family of wombats who lived in nearby burrows had come out as usual to graze. They looked like a gathering of brown-grey boulders, slowly shuffling down the hill.
‘Do I remember?’ thought Brindabella. ‘Of course I remember. I remember everything!’
She remembered darkness and warmth. She remembered a feeling of belonging, of being where she should be. She remembered her mother’s heartbeats. They were like thoughts. Thoughts of trees, leaves, the other kangaroos and bush animals, the wildness, the freedom, the scents—and the dangers, too.
Brindabella knew it was not quite true that she remembered everything. She wanted to, but as time passed, she could feel the scraps of memory slipping from her mind. She hated that feeling of forgetting, particularly about her mother.
How different her life had become! Living in a household of humans and chickens and that silly black dog. Why, she could outrun the dog in moments if she had the chance, she said to herself scornfully. She could feel her own strength in her limbs and her tail. She wanted to bound, to be free, to not know where things began and ended.
When she thought of Billy-Bob, she felt afraid. What if she became like him, trailing around after his master with no other wants than to be near
