Whispering in the Wind Read online

  He rose to his feet and swept his great white cloak around him. There was a burst of thunder, a gust of mighty wind, and he was gone. Leaves came rocking down from the high limbs that had thrashed the air as he shot through them to the sky. In the wink of an eye he was amongst the clouds that tossed and writhed as they fled before him to the North.

  In twenty minutes he was back. He came in with a swish and a whirl of dead leaves, and there he was sitting on the log.

  ‘You weren’t very long,’ said Peter.

  ‘Ah! I went like the wind,’ he said. ‘I swept across deserts and into valleys where giants live. I looked into caves and canyons and searched the beaches where palm trees grow. But I couldn’t find a Beautiful Princess. I met my brother, the North Wind, and blew the smoke of his bush fires right back into his eyes. I speared his flames with rain and drove him back to the land where the winds are born, but no Beautiful Princess lived there.

  ‘I tipped a witch off her broomstick, made the hairs of a giant’s beard crack like little whips and swept into the land of the Aborigines. I flung the spray of a waterfall over the Aboriginal children playing in the shallows and touched the shoulder of their father as he cast his spear at a fish.

  ‘“Where can I find a Beautiful Princess guarded by a Dragon?” I asked him.

  ‘“They lived in the Dreaming Time of my people,” he told me, “but all the Beautiful Princesses became birds and the Dragons became lizards and snakes and there are none left in all Australia except one; she is the prisoner of a selfish King and is guarded by a Bunyip. The Sun told me about her. He shines on her each day and turns her hair to gold. It becomes so radiant that there is no darkness in her room and the birds come to her window for warmth on the winter days. She is the most beautiful Beautiful Princess since the world began, and when she smiles fear vanishes from the earth and all the animals of the bush leave their hiding places and come out into the sunlight.”

  ‘“I wonder how I missed her.”

  ‘“Your brothers know her,” he said.

  ‘“Could a little boy on a white pony find her?” I asked him.

  ‘“If he is brave and good. He would have to ride by the Plain of Clutching Grass to the Giant’s Castle, through the bush where the Pale Witch lives, across the Lonely Desert and on and on until he came to the Last Hill. Here, there grows a gum tree so old it remembers the beginning of the world. He must sit beneath this tree till the moon rises from behind the earth. When its face sits on the rim of the world a great castle will be silhouetted against it. The tree will speak and tell the boy how to find the castle and the Princess.” Then he remembered, “But it only speaks to good people.”’

  When the South Wind had finished his story, he rose from the log and loosened the folds of his white cloak.

  ‘So there you are, Peter,’ he said. ‘The Beautiful Princess is waiting for you. Be unselfish, think of others before yourself and you will find her no matter what dangers confront you. My brothers and I will tell our friends to look out for you and help you on your journey. But before I leave I would like to give you a present.’

  He put his hand into a pocket in his robe and took out a silver chain with a small leather bag attached to it. He bent down and placed the chain around Peter’s neck.

  ‘There is a Magic Leaf in this little bag,’ he said. ‘Of all the gifts I could give you this is the most precious and the one that will help you most. Whenever you are in trouble on your journey, when you meet helpless, sad people, or people who would harm you, or people who would kill other people or who would kill you, hand them this leaf and they will be transformed. Be generous with the leaf since it always replenishes itself! When you give it away another one will take its place in the bag.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Peter. ‘You’ve been a great help.’

  ‘Now I must go,’ said the South Wind. ‘I have three thunderstorms waiting to be carried to places that need the rain. Goodbye.’ He swept skyward, his robe trailing.

  ‘Mr South Wind,’ shouted Peter, looking up to where the clouds were gathering. ‘What does the leaf mean?’

  The South Wind’s answer came rumbling down through a gap in the clouds. ‘It means, “You are loved; you are needed.”’

  2

  Peter Meets Greyfur

  The South Wind rolled back the clouds and freed the sky from its woolly coat. The sun came sweeping through the trees behind the fleeing shadows. The grass rippled like waves and a bird sang. Peter leapt upon Moonlight’s back and galloped home. Crooked Mick sat at the door of their hut plaiting a stockwhip. He had a face like a walnut and a forehead so wrinkled he had to screw his hat to get it on. But when he rode wild horses he gave loud cries and cracked his long stock-whip. The higher the horse bucked the more he shouted and the more he shouted the higher the horse bucked. It was a wonderful sight.

  Peter reined in his pony with a scattering of gravel. The hens before the door squawked and fled. He dismounted and ran over to Crooked Mick.

  ‘You know what!’ he cried. ‘I have a Magic Leaf that means I am loved and needed. The South Wind gave it to me and he told me where I can find a Beautiful Princess. He said the leaf would protect me. I’ll start now and when I find the Beautiful Princess I’ll bring her home and we’ll sell white ponies, and that is how we’ll live.’

  ‘You can’t start now,’ said Crooked Mick, ‘because now has passed. It’s a minute past now now, so you’ll have to go in five minutes from now, then you’ll come up to now again.’

  Peter smiled at him. ‘When you talk like that it makes it hard for me to start.’

  ‘It does,’ said Crooked Mick. ‘That’s always the hardest thing to do. There’s nothing harder than starting and nothing easier than stopping. The best thing for you to do is to start when I have filled your tucker bag.’

  He got a tucker bag from the shed and filled it with food that Peter would need on the way. He put in a sausage, some chops, two loaves of bread, three apples, a packet of tea, some pepper and salt and a banana.

  ‘Grill the chops over coals,’ he advised Peter, as he tied the neck of the bag and threw it across the saddle. ‘Just before you take them off throw some green gum leaves on the coals and the thick smoke will flavour them. And I will give you a billy for making tea.’

  ‘How long do I grill the chops?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Till they’re all black on the outside,’ said Crooked Mick. He picked up the stock-whip he had just plaited and swung the lash around his head in huge circles. ‘This is a good whip,’ he went on. ‘Just watch how it falls.’

  He cast the lash in front of him and it came down to the earth in a graceful curve.

  ‘I want you to take this whip with you,’ he said. ‘It is a magic whip, the best I have ever made. If you are in trouble and you crack this whip, I will come to you even if you are on the other side of the world. I’ll show you how it cracks. Watch this.’

  He stood back and swung the long lash around his head. Faster and faster it went. Suddenly he jerked his arm downwards. There was a tremendous report. The trees shook and leaves came fluttering to the ground. The sound sped across the bush and rebounded from the mountains. It overwhelmed them like a wind.

  ‘Ah, what a whip!’ exclaimed Crooked Mick. ‘We’ll call it Thunderbolt and it is yours.’

  Peter was so excited he found it hard to say ‘Thank you’. He caught hold of Mick’s hand for a moment and Mick understood. He took the stock-whip and looped it in coils around his arm. All his life he had wanted a whip just for himself and now he had one.

  ‘I love its name—Thunderbolt,’ he said. Then added, ‘Do you think that I will ever need your help?’

  ‘Of course you will. When anyone finds a Beautiful Princess he is always given three mighty tasks to do before he can rescue her. You might have to tell the biggest lie in all the world, you might have to tame the wildest horse in all the world, you might have to fight the strongest man or dragon in all the world. That is where I will come in. C
rack the whip and I’ll be there. No one can ride like me, no one can fight like me, no one can tell a lie as well as I can. Some day you will find the Beautiful Princess and you will be able to marry her. Now off you go.’

  Peter touched Moonlight’s sides with his heels. ‘Goodbye, Crooked Mick,’ he cried.

  The pony sprang forward into a gallop. So swiftly he ran, his hooves hardly touched the earth.

  ‘Go where my shadow points,’ cried an old red gum as they passed. He was five hundred years old and knew five hundred answers to five hundred questions told him by the birds he had sheltered. A migrating curlew had told him where the Beautiful Princess lived.

  The shadow of the red gum’s mighty trunk pointed to a mountain range, a blue line of peaks, upon which the edge of the sky was resting. Peter rode towards them, following a dingo track that curved round spurs and passed through valleys where the fronds of tree ferns brushed his cheek as he passed.

  All that morning he rode. He rode down the banks of creeks and up again, just because he liked riding a pony down the banks of creeks and up again. Where the creeks were shallow and stones of yellow and brown lay just beneath the surface of the water, Moonlight lowered his head to drink. He drew the cold water into his mouth and it rippled up his long neck and refreshed him. Then on he went, tossing his head and reefing at the bit.

  Peter was hungry. He stopped near some boulders by the side of a creek where the grass was long and green. While Moonlight was cropping this grass he decided to try fishing. He dismounted, took off the saddle and bridle and placed them against one of the boulders. He put Thunderbolt beside them, then felt in his pocket for the fishing line which he always carried.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said a voice. Peter looked up. A grey kangaroo was watching from behind one of the boulders, her body concealed by the huge rock.

  ‘My name is Greyfur and I was asleep,’ she went on. ‘I live here, or at least I sleep here. You, of course, sleep at night. You miss so much I wonder you don’t change the habit.’

  ‘You can’t see much at night,’ said Peter.

  ‘No, but you hear much more,’ said Greyfur. ‘Night is the time for listening. Anyway you have such little ears it is a wonder to me you can hear anything at all.’

  She hopped round from behind the rock and stood in front of Peter then leant back on her tail and began rocking to and fro as if she were sitting on a rocking chair.

  ‘I’m very fortunate,’ she explained. ‘Rocking chairs are fashionable at the moment and I have one attached. You can sit on my knee and have a rock if you wish,’ she added agreeably.

  ‘You haven’t got a knee to sit on,’ said Peter. ‘There’s really nowhere to sit when people have their knees back to front.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Greyfur. ‘One can’t have everything. At least I was courteous enough to make the offer, anyway. Now tell me, what is your trouble?’

  ‘I haven’t one,’ said Peter.

  ‘Of course you have; you are hungry.’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘What would you like to eat? Name anything. Think of your favourite meal and name it.’

  Peter thought. ‘Fried sausages and mashed potatoes with plenty of tomato sauce; a cup of tea with three teaspoons of sugar and some ice-cream.’

  ‘Right!’ said Greyfur. She thrust a hand into her pouch and pulled out a chair and a table. She dipped again and out came a tablecloth, then knives, forks and spoons, pepper and salt, and a bottle of tomato sauce. Finally, with a flourish and a bow, she pulled out a plate of sausages and mashed potatoes, a steaming cup of tea and a goblet of ice-cream.

  ‘As for myself,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll have two handfuls of kangaroo grass and a few leaves of Acacia dumoisa.’

  It took only two dips to produce her meal which she placed on the end of the table.

  ‘Now draw up your chair and eat,’ she said.

  Peter was astounded. ‘I can’t believe it. It’s impossible.’

  ‘I wouldn’t argue for one minute that it wasn’t impossible,’ said Greyfur, ‘but I do ask you to believe me.’

  ‘Certainly I believe you,’ said Peter. ‘You look a very truthful person.’

  ‘Oh, I am truthful, but I’ve had a hard life and I distrust people.’

  ‘I’ll soon cure that,’ said Peter, and he took a Magic Leaf from the little bag hanging on his chest and gave it to her. ‘How does that make you feel?’

  ‘It makes me feel wonderful,’ said Greyfur. ‘It makes me feel proud, you know—I’m not really proud but I feel that way.’ She looked at the Magic Leaf in her hand and smiled. I feel important.’ She hesitated. ‘As if I’m loved by a lot of people.’

  ‘That’s how you should feel,’ said Peter.

  ‘Where did you get the leaf?’

  ‘From the South Wind. He told me it would help me on my journey.’

  ‘How kind of you to give it to me,’ said Greyfur. ‘Would you like another plate of sausages?’

  ‘No thanks, I haven’t finished these yet.’

  ‘Well, there are plenty more,’ Greyfur assured him, as she began eating the kangaroo grass.

  But Peter’s plate was very full and when he had finished, he said, ‘I don’t think I had better have any more sausages or there won’t be room for the ice-cream.’

  ‘It is a problem,’ said Greyfur. ‘I would be the last to deny it. Stand up and jump round the table. That will settle the sausages, as it were, and leave room on top for the ice-cream.’

  Peter jumped round the table three times.

  ‘Do you think it has worked?’ she asked when he sat down again.

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter, and he ate the ice-cream without any trouble whatsoever.

  ‘Science is marvellous,’ said Greyfur, ‘there’s no doubt about it. Now we must wash up,’ she added. ‘I’ll wash and you dry.’

  She lifted a dish of hot water from her pouch, then took out a tea-towel which she handed to Peter. ‘As you dry the things, drop them into my pouch,’ she said. ‘Drop in the knives handles first—and the forks too. After all I’m human and can be cut or spiked the same as you.’

  ‘I’ll be careful,’ promised Peter, who was quite sure that there were far too many things to fit into the pouch. But the knives and forks and cups and plates just vanished when the pouch swallowed them. It was like posting letters and parcels into a pillar box. Even the table and the chair shrank and disappeared as if they had never existed.

  ‘I can’t understand why you don’t bulge,’ said Peter. ‘Where do they go?’

  ‘It’s an interesting point,’ said Greyfur, opening her pouch with her hands and looking inside. ‘I’ve often wondered that myself. But the beauty of magic is that there doesn’t have to be an explanation for anything. It just happens.’

  ‘Did all this happen when you were a little girl?’ asked Peter, who kept thinking of Greyfur as a person like himself.

  ‘Would you like to hear the story of my life?’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  ‘Well then,’ began Greyfur, who had resumed her rocking. ‘Of poor but honest parents I was born in Castlemaine.’

  ‘I seem to have heard that somewhere before.’ Peter frowned in an effort to remember.

  ‘Maybe you have; there is nothing new under the sun. Poor but honest parents are common enough and many kangaroos have been born in Castlemaine.’ Greyfur waved her hand to dismiss the interruption.

  ‘My parents were proud of me because I was the same as any other little kangaroo. If I’d looked like a horse, for instance, they wouldn’t have been proud of me.’

  ‘That’s so,’ said Peter.

  ‘I conformed and was thus accepted until one day I put my hand in my pouch and found a bunch of spring onions. From then on I was an oddity and rejected by society.’

  ‘What did you do with the onions?’ asked Peter.

  ‘I ate them.’

  ‘I like onions,’ said Peter.

  Greyfur put her hands into her pouch
and gave him one.

  ‘A silver skin,’ she said. ‘They vary.’

  Peter put it in his pocket.

  ‘I left the district,’ went on Greyfur. ‘How could normal kangaroos be friendly with me when I had a pouch so full of magic that I could take a grand piano out of it if I wished. I was so different I was suspected of being queer. You see, when I was sent to school I never had to buy pencils or rubbers or schoolbooks. I just took them out of my pouch. The other children thought I must be stealing them and hiding them in my pouch, and they told their mothers I was a thief. My mother knew I would never steal anything, but she kept saying, “I wish you were like other little kangaroos.” The children began to throw stones at me and no one would play with me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Peter.

  ‘I was sorry, too,’ said Greyfur. ‘In the end I had to run away. Kangaroos like other kangaroos to be the same as them. And I just happened to be different.’

  ‘Can you take anything you want from your pouch?’ asked Peter.

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘What about an elephant?’

  ‘You watch,’ said Greyfur. She dipped deep into her pouch, gave a terrific yank, and out came an elephant. It staggered round in circles for a moment, quite bewildered, then leaned against a tree breathing deeply.

  ‘What happened?’ it kept saying. ‘Where am I? I feel giddy.’

  ‘You’re in Australia,’ said Greyfur.

  ‘What!’ cried the elephant. ‘Not Australia! That’s the other side of the world. Get me home at once!’

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ ordered Greyfur sharply. ‘You’ve lost your dignity. What would your mother say if she could see you now?’

  ‘She’d wonder how I got here,’ said the elephant. ‘I never go anywhere without telling her where I’m going. You know how mothers worry. There I was, picking bananas in an African forest…’

  ‘Bananas don’t grow in African forests,’ corrected Peter. The elephant drew a deep breath. He was an only child and was allowed to stay up as late as he liked. And as for being contradicted…Good heavens!