Freshwater eels are born in the salt water of the ocean, after a journey of months, a journey of which almost nothing is known for many species.She could see a swirl of movement, of dust and swept leaves ... obviously a gust of wind - but it was a windless day, and she was under a dense canopy of trees which was not moving. She knew of willy-willys, the small dust devils or tornadoes of the open, flat, hot outback - her car had once been partially lifted and dragged from one side of the road to the other by one - but not this swirl of wind in uneven space dense with trucks and boulders to prevent movement and shaded from the driving power of the Sun.
Cautiously, she moved towards the area.
Nothing. Just leaves, twigs, debris - typical forest floor litter, although something nagged at her.
She straightened, saw a couple of other areas of movement, and then covered her face as the movement started where she was.
What was going on?!
She listened as the swirl moved away, and noticed that all three swirls were moving in straight lines, lines that would converge at a sandbank in the river.
This is not possible.
Insulated from her fear by her scepticism, she remembered a path that would take her to a vantage spot above that sandbank where the paths would converge. She turned sideways, and bolted along well known paths until, a minute or so later, she could gently move a branch, and see -
... a mound of leaves, brown, writhing, moving as a single swirling mass that looked like a car sized beetle. The mound positioned itself on the river, and then a stony - literally made of stone, the sceptical part of her mind noted to itself - pair of arms appeared over the side of the stationary mound of wriggling leaves and rested on them, clasping hands, as if leaning on a shelf, followed by a head which tapered into broad shoulders at the top of the arms.
The hands unclasped, and one patted the mound, as if patting a faithful dog on the head, and then she heard a voice - well, she called it a voice, but it was really the grinding sound of rocks dragging over each other, and yet ... and yet, she could hear the words in it.
"Now, kids, you've done very well, and I'm proud of you. We've lost of couple of you, but I think they'll be with us soon, so, stay together for this next bit."
And then the head tilted towards her. It had eyes! She could see what looked like eyes, maybe they were really just shapes gouged or worn in the rock, but they were sure like eyes.
And then one of the eye shapes CHANGED IT'S SHAPE, for all the world looking as if it had winked at her, and there was a swirl of wind on the sandbank just ten metres away, across a shallow channel with a uneven, rocky bottom that she knew she could safely walk across, forcing her to close her eyes, and when she opened them, the sandbank was free of the car's worth of leaves, and it's stony sentinel - not even a footprint or mark left behind.
And then she realised what had nagged at her mind, back in the forest of eucalyptus: the floor litter she had been looking at was from a deciduous forest. She gave up to the fear and shock then, her body sagging sideways against a convenient rock as her mind fled screaming to hide in inner haunts and sob like a scared child until it could regain its courage and subside the screams into little hiccoughs of doubt.
She stayed like that a while, until she had recovered enough to start trying to rationalise, and then she saw the leaf. It was an oak leaf, on a branch an arm's length away, stuck on a branch, one corner moving back and forth for all the world like someone trying to wave in a friendly, reassuring fashion - a stranger saying "See? I know your ways - I am not a threat." This time, her body also fled, until she out of the forest, and she could hide in the long grass in a cleared area nearer to town.
She stayed there for an hour, as the sun passed its zenith, and the day heated. She'd often hidden, as a child, in similar grass, hidden from the horrors of life in an orphanage. She'd tried to do the same one day she had become separated from the other kids on a school excursion ... but she'd only done that after she had tried, politely, to get the attention of some adults to help her. She'd even tried to wave to some of them. It was then she saw the leaf ...
An oak leaf, brown, the way they are when they fall in autumn - not the way they are at the end of summer. She looked at it, and made a decision. She could remember where the other leaf was, and carefully picked this one up. It quivered a little, like a kitten settling in to a comfortable hand, and she quivered in return, but not like a kitten, and turned back to the forest, the mysterious forest where she had been drawn for so many years, and felt, in her innermost mind, that place her consciousness had fled to, a grinding of rocks that, for all the world, sounded like "thank you".
Copyright © Kayleen White, 2013 (where this date is different to the year of publication, it is because I did the post some time ago and then used the scheduling feature to delay publication) I take these photographs and undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary or artistic merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit, of course :)
