The Hunter and Other Stories of Men Read online

  THE

  HUNTER

  AND OTHER STORIES OF MEN

  THEHUNTER

  AND OTHER STORIES OF MEN

  DAVID COHEN

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  First Published 2018

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  Copyright ©David Cohen

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover image: Encyclopaedia Britannica/UIG/Bridgeman Images.

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Author photograph: Alexandra Molnar Kovacs

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  A cataloguing-entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia: trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-1-925760-12-5

  For my father

  CONTENTS

  The Hunter

  The Virus (Travel Notes)

  On the 345 to Aspley

  The Case of Nathan Gant

  Frequently Asked Questions

  Woodcutter

  Carlos

  Pioneer

  Tony’s Farewell

  Lament of a Bus Stop outside the Benrath Senior Centre

  Command Hooks

  Variations on a Theme by the Department of Transport and Main Roads

  Washing Day

  The Archive

  Shrinking

  The Man Who Looked a Bit Like George Harrison

  The Duke of Wellington

  Look for the Silver Lining

  THE HUNTER

  1.

  Clearly, the question facing us is: what are we going to do about the ibis? We can’t go in and begin construction without first removing them. Henrik, the new site manager, asks how things were allowed to get to this stage. I don’t think it can be blamed on any one person, although if I were going to blame one person, I might blame the original site manager. At least, I might if I knew where he was. We’d assumed he was keeping an eye on things; it came to our attention only recently that he hasn’t been near the site in months – or heard from at all, for that matter. But this is not the time for finger-pointing.

  2.

  Early on, soon after the project was put on hold and the trucks and earthmovers had departed, a few curious and hungry ibis appeared. Now the ground is thick with them. There are perhaps a thousand birds roaming about the site, squabbling over food scraps, squawking through the night. The wildlife expert from the local council tells us that, increasingly, ibis drift towards the cities as their traditional breeding grounds – freshwater wetlands, swamps, tidal mudflats – are gradually destroyed by drought. They congregate in rubbish dumps, public parks, recreational areas. The proximity of the site to a creek, and the steady supply of garbage blowing in from the shopping mall, make it an ideal place for the ibis. Local residents stay well away, and lately there have been complaints about the smell.

  3.

  We envisage, when the project is brought to completion, an iconic residential tower that will set a new standard in luxury. Now that new investors have been secured, we can at last get the wheels in motion again. The original site manager is, officially, a missing person; the police are investigating. Had construction gone ahead at the scheduled time, he might not have disappeared. We can only speculate. What is certain is that, were it not for the delay, the ibis wouldn’t have had a chance to proliferate. I’m not blaming the ibis for proliferating; one might as well blame the sky for being blue. Nor do I blame them for colonising the site. I suspect that if I were an ibis I would have done the same thing. No doubt a vast, semi-enclosed space filled with rubbish and devoid of humans is paradise if you’re looking at it through the eyes of an ibis. As Henrik is so fond of remarking, nature abhors a vacuum. I’m not sure he understands the precise meaning of this expression, but I know what he’s getting at. The investors are asking: ‘What are your plans vis-a-vis the ibis?’ and ‘How do you propose to tackle the problem of the ibis?’ We await further advice from the wildlife expert.

  4.

  The wildlife expert has suggested we begin with population control. We can try spraying the eggs with canola oil, cutting off the air supply to the embryos while the blissfully ignorant mother birds carry on brooding those eggs as if nothing is amiss. But the wildlife expert informs us that this may not have a significant impact; ibis are rampant breeders and live for years. We must focus our attention on the existing population. After all, landlords have every right to evict squatters, and the ibis are not only squatting, they are making a slum out of our property.

  Meanwhile, Henrik’s attempts to remove some of the garbage have met with limited success. Whenever he and his team venture onto the site, the ibis swoop down, sending everyone back to the safety of the portable site office. Given the ibis’ usual tendency to retreat at the approach of humans, this assertive behaviour comes as a surprise. The birds have cottoned on to the fact that there is strength in numbers.

  After the latest aborted clean-up mission, Henrik said: ‘I don’t know why we don’t just cut to the chase. A shot to the brain at close range with a twelve-gauge – problem solved.’ I said: ‘That’s a lot of bullets and a lot of brains. And do you think an ibis is just going to stand there while you shoot it in the head? Plus their heads are so ridiculously small – compared to their bodies, I mean.’ Henrik: ‘A chest shot, then, from a distance. Large-calibre bolt-action rifle.’ I wondered how Henrik knew so much about firearms. He must have noticed my perturbed expression. ‘I used to hunt,’ he said. Henrik is a big man, bearded. I can picture him in a khaki shirt, firing confidently from the back of a jeep as it charges across the veldt.

  5.

  The ibis have, over a relatively short time, adapted to the site’s food sources. These consist almost exclusively of packaging from nearby fast-food restaurants: pizza boxes, Subway wrappers, Happy Meal containers, plastic sushi trays. Curiously, what they like most is Starbucks. Henrik recalls that the first time he visited the site, he kept hearing a popping sound. He couldn’t figure out what it was, until he noticed one of the birds puncturing a takeaway coffee cup with its bill to get at the dregs of a mocha frappuccino. The ibis have become addicted, and it seems that all the caffeine and sugar have made them aggressive – hence the attack on Henrik’s clean-up team. Experimenting, Henrik purchased an espresso macchiato and placed the sealed cup on an upturned 44-gallon drum just metres away from the portable site office. He’d barely withdrawn his hand before the cup was torn to pieces in a frenzy of beaks and talons.

  6.

  On the advice of the wildlife expert, Henrik and his team attempted to scare the ibis away. Sonic and visual deterrents were employed. Henrik’s team stood at various points around the perimeter fence and fired several rounds from starter pistols. Hundreds of birds took to the sky, flapping and honking. But a little while later they returned and it was business as usual. Henrik experimented with other noises: gas cannons, sirens, recordings of ibis distress calls, ‘Shape of You’ by Ed Sheeran. Each time the ibis flew away, only to return later. Henrik waited until nightfall and then trained huge spotlights on the birds for three hours. By midnight the site was almost ibis-free. Jubilant and exhausted, he drove home. When he returned the next day, the birds were back – ‘Every one of the bastards!’ In a last-ditch attempt, Henrik had his team fly cheap lightweight drones over the site. The ibis seemed particularly disturbed by these unfamiliar creatures and fled en masse, only to collide with the circling
quadcopters. Several injured birds plummeted from the sky – as if shot down by a hunter’s rifle – amid a sprinkling of plastic propellers.

  7.

  Finding an efficient yet humane method of removal is not the only problem. We must also contend with a fringe group of thirty-odd environmentalist types who resist the very idea of ousting the ibis from the site. They point to certain species of ibis once common in other countries – the giant ibis from Asia, the Waldrapp ibis from Europe and North America – now nearly extinct. We must, they say, allow the Australian white ibis to occupy urban and suburban spaces or it will go the same way. These extremists sit outside the fence, holding SAVE THE IBIS placards. Some have erected tents. They organise film screenings and benefit concerts to ‘raise awareness’ of the plight of the ibis and promote biodiversity. Is it our fault that the wetlands are drying up?

  Henrik, who spends a lot of time monitoring the site, tries to convince the protesters to leave, but they are a stubborn lot. One of them treated him to an impromptu lecture on the ibis’s place in mythology and folklore. ‘Apparently,’ Henrik explained to me later, ‘it was venerated by the ancient Egyptians.’ I said: ‘In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not in ancient Egypt.’ Henrik: ‘They say that in the town of Hermopolis, millions of ibis were sacrificed to Thoth.’ Me: ‘Who the hell was Thoth?’ Henrik: ‘The moon god.’

  8.

  The ancient Egyptians may have revered the ibis, but we cannot afford to revere the ibis. The protesters aside, nobody reveres the ibis. On the contrary, we deplore their shameless scavenging. We recoil at the sight of their accordion necks. We are repelled by their black torn-stocking heads. Their downturned bills give them an expression of perpetual dissatisfaction that we find unpleasant. All they do is eat and sleep and wander about, befouling the site with their excrement. They breed like rabbits, but unlike rabbits you can’t even eat them, so toxic is their flesh from the refuse they gulp down, so riddled with pathogens are their bodies. One might say the same of a chicken or a pig, but the construction site is not swarming with chickens and pigs. The ibis is a pest; the civilised person will not serve up an ibis for dinner any more readily than they will serve up a rat. But let us be clear: I for one do not hate the ibis. No, I pity them.

  9.

  In bushland not far from the construction site, police have discovered the remains of a person they are ninety-nine per cent certain is the original site manager. Their theory is that he passed out on the site – overpowered, perhaps, by the stench of ibis, intensified by a spell of hot weather we experienced some months ago. The birds, inflamed by the prospect of a hearty meal, set upon him. He fled, but collapsed two hundred metres away. The birds descended once again with their spear-like bills. Henrik, who saw the body, says it looked like a pincushion in the shape of a man.

  10.

  News of the situation at the construction site has reached the wider community. Some people are coming out in support of the protesters. Most of these people live at least ten miles from the site, and tend to express their support via letters to the newspaper and calls to radio talkback shows. There aren’t really that many of them, but there are enough. They take the line that the ibis, although obnoxious at times, has something valuable to contribute to our culture, our national identity; that, if permitted to flourish in its natural habitat, or even outside its natural habitat, it can be a thing of beauty. But how many of these people would like a colony of ibis, or even one ibis, stepping gingerly around their backyards, nesting in their trees, flapping down onto their outdoor tables to snatch up morsels of prosciutto and fetta from under their very noses? Have any of these people visited the construction site to sing odes to the ibis? Have any of them ever actually ventured into the marshlands to marvel at the sight of ibis in their natural habitat?

  I have yet to see tourists clamouring to photograph an ibis.

  11.

  Ever since the day Henrik saw the original site manager’s body, he has been prone to morose silences, interrupted every now and then by sudden angry outbursts, along the lines of: ‘They killed him and left him to rot! Those birds will fucking pay!’ Henrik regrets ever having gone to look at the body. No-one asked him to look at the body; he just did so out of curiosity, and now he can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve suggested trauma counselling, or at least some time off, as inconvenient as that would be for us. Henrik: ‘No. I must see this through. I owe it to … I don’t even know the original site manager’s name, for fuck’s sake!’ Me: ‘I think it was Finbar.’

  12.

  Henrik seems to be his old self again – a less talkative version. He spends all day, every day, at the site, watching the birds. He wears a gasmask. Meanwhile, we are no closer to a solution. Last Tuesday when I asked him about the new action plan he claimed to be developing, he replied that it was not something that could be rushed. Me: ‘Time is money, Henrik. At least give me some idea of what you’re doing re the ibis.’ Henrik: ‘Studying them.’

  When not observing the ibis, he’s sending me useless titbits of ancient Egyptian mythology. Later that same night he emailed me a number of pictures he’d found online – various representations of Thoth, the deity one of the protesters told him about. Each picture depicted a figure with a man’s body and a disproportionately small bird’s head, from which protruded a long, curved beak. We are getting nowhere. The investors are breathing down my neck.

  13.

  The protesters have finally upped stumps. The stench became too much even for them. Now they’re pushing for the relocation of the ibis to a bird sanctuary that simulates their natural environment. Again: all very well, but which bird sanctuary? How do they propose we go about transferring a thousand-odd birds? How long is it all going to take?

  14.

  A few days ago Henrik and I had the following text exchange.

  Henrik: the name thoth comes from greek, which comes from the egyptian: ‘He who is like the ibis’.

  Me: have u given any more thought to counselling?

  Henrik: the hebrew word for ibis is maglan – name used by an israeli special forces unit, those guys dont mess around!!

  Me: what about the action plan?

  Henrik: dont worry im working on it as we speak.

  Me: care to elaborate?

  Henrik: coffee. it all comes down to coffee.

  Me: u sure u wont change yr mind about counselling?

  Henrik: be prepared.

  15.

  Yesterday a woman was woken up by the sound of what she thought were fireworks. She got out of bed, wondering what was being celebrated and why it was being celebrated at five o’clock in the morning. She soon realised that the sound was not fireworks, but gunshots. She called the police, who determined that the noise was coming from the construction site, three streets away from her house. There they found Henrik with a bolt-action rifle, taking pot shots at a few ibis flapping weakly and erratically just above the spotlit ground, which was littered with hundreds of bird corpses. The police asked him how he could have shot so many. Henrik didn’t answer directly; instead he politely offered his guests handkerchiefs to hold over their noses, and gave them a tour of the site. As the trio walked around the perimeter, Henrik drew the police officers’ attention to a succession of plain white styrofoam coffee cups lying on the ground. After about fifty of these, the exasperated officers told him to get to the point. Henrik, sounding very pleased with himself, explained that he’d worked through the night to place styrofoam cups at regular intervals, having first poured into each cup a generous quantity of coffee laced with sodium monofluoroacetate. Many of the birds were dead before he’d fired a single shot. The remainder were barely able to fly.

  As the police led Henrik away, he kept telling them: ‘If nothing else, Thoth has been appeased.’

  16.

  The bulldozers and dump trucks spent hours scooping up and carting away the carcasses. I feel terribly sad for Henrik – and, yes, for the ibis too. But if nature abhors a vacuum, as
Henrik would say, so, I believe, does real estate. I reiterate that I have nothing against the ibis, but a power far higher than me – destiny, if you want to call it that – decreed that the project must go ahead, one way or another.

  The ibis have been buried in a landfill beyond the suburban fringe. The new site manager, Henrik’s successor, oversaw the last of the disposals today. He informs me that half-a-dozen or so curious and hungry ibis – maybe survivors from the construction site, maybe new arrivals from the shrinking waterways – can already be seen wandering over the surface of the mass grave, poking at the earth with their bills.

  THE VIRUS (TRAVEL NOTES)

  The city of D is known for its hospitals in the way that London is known for its museums or Rome for its fountains. Residents boast that the hospitals in D are not only among the best in the country, but the entire southern hemisphere. To rank among the nation’s best is one thing, but there’s something about a hemisphere, any hemisphere, that catapults you into a whole new league. The people of D never fail to mention it when the subject of hospitals comes up, which it often does here. They have a way of looking at you after they’ve said ‘southern hemisphere’: a lingering, expectant look. You feel compelled to nod your head and make an impressed face, and you have to continue nodding and looking impressed until they’re satisfied you’ve appreciated the full weight of the statement. I spent my first two days here doing little else except nodding my head and emitting small whistles of admiration.

  I’d heard about the hospitals in D, but until I arrived here I’d never realised how high their status was among the general populace. My wife’s cousin Phil, a mathematics professor who has been living here for some time, tells me that it’s all due to Tyson’s Disorder. Named after the first recorded victim, Barry Tyson, this mysterious virus has become rampant in D over the last five years, and the city now funnels most of its resources into figuring out why. It seems remarkable that in a modern metropolis in the modern world, nobody can pinpoint the cause of this illness! It’s sometimes called the ‘eating disease’ because its defining symptom is a voracious appetite. The virus tampers with whatever part of the brain is responsible for telling you that you’re full. So you cheerfully carry on stuffing your face. Without proper treatment, you can eat yourself to death.