'Do you think we are near?' asked Stephen, suddenly awake.
'Well, sir, I reckon we can't be a great way off.'
'Then as soon as we raise Bird Island I shall watch the shore with my glass; and as for getting wet, the sun will soon dry us. It is much higher than I had expected, and exceptionally warm.'
So they sailed on, the hands forward talking quietly, the boat all alive with the breeze, the sun climbing until cool spray was welcome and cloaks were laid aside.
'There is your island, sir,' said Bonden; and on the rise Stephen saw it clear, nicking the horizon beyond the point.
'So it is,' he said, and both he and Martin took out their telescopes. Steadily the low sandy coast filed by; and presently they agreed that this part or that might be familiar. Yet from the sea one dune or even one clump of stunted trees looks very like another and there was no certainty until once again, and with something of the same relief, they saw the flagstaff and its cairn.
'And it is not yet eleven o'clock,' said Stephen. 'I am afraid I have roused you men from your hammocks too early.'
'Never you mind us, sir,' said Plaice with a chuckle. 'We should have been swabbing decks else. This is more like a picnic, as they say.'
Bonden steered for the opening. To his surprise Stephen was able to tell him that there was a fathom of water over the bar at the lowest tide, and a deeper passage with the cairn and the flagstaff in a line, bearing due east. He took the cutter through the moderate flurry of breaking waves, along the entrance, into the quiet waters of the lagoon, and so to the stage where the Woolloo-Woolloo harvest was brought down to the brig.
'Now, Bonden,' said Stephen, 'make a fire - you have brought your dinners, sure?'
'Yes, sir; and Killick put up this parcel of sandwiches for you and Mr Martin.'
'Very good. Make a fire, then, eat your dinner, and go to sleep in the sun if you like. The ship is to pick us up off Bird Island this evening. I may not come down, but Mr Martin will, not later than two or half past. And let nobody stray. There may be venomous creatures in these reeds.'
There were certainly butterflies, some of the same kinds that they had seen before, others larger and still more spectacular; and as they walked up along the stream through the reeds and bushes they netted several. But the extreme contradiction of spirit was still as strong on Stephen as ever, the ebullient joy and the wound; and his heart was not in it. Nor was Martin's: Stephen, though never loquacious, was rarely as silent as this - the mood was catching.
They passed through the reed-bed to the firm ground and the open air, the vast sky, of the meadow. The stream was on their left hand, whereas on their first visit it had been on their right and they had crossed it much higher up. 'We are in a new part of the pasture,' observed Stephen. 'I can just make out the cabin, a good half- mile farther off than I had expected.' Lambs; a flight of whiter cockatoos; far over a drift of smoke.
'We might walk a furlong or so along the stream,' he went on. 'We are much too early.'
In time of flood the stream was clearly ten or fifteen yards in breadth, with deep-cut banks; but there had been no flood for some years and now they were covered with a fair number of bushes and tall soft grass growing between them, while the stream itself, winding through the meadow, was no more than a stride across, a rivulet connecting a series of pools. The first of these pools had some interesting plants, which they collected, and a millepede; at the second Martin, who was ahead on the path, whispered 'Oh my God!', stopped, stepped cautiously back. 'There they are,' he whispered in Stephen's ear.
They crept along the top of the bank foot by foot, bent, so that when they raised their heads and peered through the fringe of leaves and reed-plumes they could just command the surface of the pool. The platypuses took no notice: they had been swimming round and round when first Martin saw them. They went on swimming round and round, one after the other, in a broad ring, lost and absorbed in their ritual. They both swam low, surprisingly low, in the water, but the light struck the surface at such an angle that for the watchers there was no reflection: they could see everything below, from that scarcely believable duck's bill to the broad flattened tail, with the four webbed feet between them.
Presently Stephen whispered 'I believe we can creep nearer still.' Martin nodded, and with infinite caution they edged slanting down the side, Stephen steadying himself with the handle of the net. It was inch by inch now, each bush, each young tree, each tuft of grass very carefully negotiated. At water-level the going was easier and they carried on their serpentine approach to the soft damp mud of the pool-shore itself, each behind a clump of rushes, peering through the shaded gap between them. As he had done when he was a boy, reaching a point within hand's touch of a cock capercaillie calling and displaying in the spring, Stephen closed his mouth, so that the sound of his heart, loud in his throat like a hoarse old clock, should not be heard.
He might have left it open. The platypuses were wholly given over to their dance. Stephen and Martin sat there, easy on the yielding ground, watching, noting, comparing; and still the platypuses turned. Their ring took them far out over to the other side, where the sun showed their fine brown perfectly, and it brought them in towards the shadow, quite close to the rushes.
A laughing-jackass called, and under the din Stephen said 'I am going to try to catch one.' Slowly, slowly he sank the net when they were at their farthest turn; slowly, slowly he edged it out into the pool, under their invariable path. Twice he let them pass over it: the third time he raised the leading edge just in front of the second, the pursuing animal. It dived instantly: but into the net. He stepped through the rushes waist-deep into the pool, trusting neither the handle nor the stuff with so much weight; and with great strides he waded to the bank, his shining face turned to Martin and his gentle hand feeling into the purse. Warm, soft, wet fur and a strongly beating heart: 'I mean you no harm, my dear,' he said and instantly he felt a piercing stab. A shocking pain ran up his arm. He scrambled to the bank, dropped the net, sat down, looked at his arm - bare shirt-sleeved arm - and saw a puncture with a livid swollen line already running up from wrist to elbow. 'Take care, Martin,' he said. 'Put it back. Knife -handkerchief.'
He cut deep and twisted the tourniquet hard, but already there was a stiffness in his throat and his voice was growing thick. He lay back in the mud and explained that he had known similar idiosyncratic cases - a bee-sting, a scorpion, even a large spider - several cases - some survived, some did not -over in a day, one way or the other - but there hanging over him was Padeen's anguished face, and Paulton was saying 'Oh dear oh dear Martin, I thought a naturalist would know the male has a poisonous spur: oh dear oh dear, he is swelling -he is turning blue.'
'A poisonour spur?' asked Stephen through his pain, hoarse, unrecognizable. 'The male alone? In all the whole class of mallamia, mammalia...
