Chapter Four
The Birdman
There was an old man who lived in a caravan. The owners of the large
cattle property had allowed him to live out his retirement there by the creek.
Those owners sold-up and the new owners weren’t so keen on having the old
man stay on. He was somewhat ill and emaciated but the main reason the new
owners didn’t want him there was because he was, at times, to them, a highly
chaotic character.
His caravan by the creek, quite remote from the homestead and the visual
splendour of the greater property, was stuck away in a narrow gully. This old
man, who I choose to call the Birdman, lived there with two dogs, one rooster
named Sam, and a dozen or so wild, free range and free thinking chickens. The
potential over-populating nature of the lusty rooster was kept in check by the
two dogs. We think that our human lives are uncertain… well, that’s peanuts
compared to the uncertainty faced by the young chickens or chickerlings as the Birdman called them.
His most frequent visitors there in his gully-nirvana were wombats. He
was also occasionally visited by small lost wallabies. The wallabies were
usually transformed through a particular form of mysticism, after one clean rifle-shot,
into stew.
The new owners were concerned with the Birdman’s general appearance. It
was pretty shocking… a gaunt, aesthenic, weathered man who was usually bent
over, spitting. I’ve never met a man who could spit so much. He was a river to
his people.
They were also taken aback by his vocabulary, which was quite profound
when it came to swearing.
He had the capacity, when sorely-tested, to use the most creative and
unpleasant words far more often, and far more frequently than he used any other
words at all…even ‘the’ and ‘a’… and life itself sorely-tested the
Birdman every minute, as it had always done.
He had always risen to deal with this test and lived his life as he chose
it. His verbal skills were magnificent and incendiary. He could offend anyone.
He could offend deaf people from hundreds of yards away.
He had a good double-barrel pump-action 12 gauge shotgun and a very nice Argentinean
single-barrel 410 gauge shotgun. He had a very impressive extra-long barrelled
stock 22 single shot rifle with very good telescopic sights. He used the rifle
just for rabbits. He liked rabbits. The rabbit kittens were particularly sweet
for dinner.
He would haul himself downwind of them, out of sight, and would wait. He
would load his polished gun with the one single sub-sonic bullet. There was
nothing, not one thing, in the life of the Birdman that was polished apart from
his guns… except maybe his vocal chords when he really cut loose with swearing.
The extra long barrel on his rifle kept the underpowered bullet
well-guided to its soft destination. The real joy for him, of course, was in
the fact that the subsonic nature of the bullet meant that the rabbits didn’t
hear the shot.
He would just pick them off, one at a time, as they happily relaxed
outside of their little underground ‘condominiums’, totally unawares, dropping
one at a time, as if it was just natural. He had perfect eye-sight.
When he had culled enough there, he would scarper down to the warren,
pick them up by the fluffy ears, and take them home to cook.
It was good food. Especially the kittens… and, you didn’t have to dig out
the bits of lead that you’d have to do if you did this kind of hunting with a
shotgun. They were killed fresh and without a fear, just going about the usual
business of being young happy fornicating rabbits.
He had started swearing a year before he started smoking, at nine, when
he went to work for his uncle on a bullock-train hauling cut logs through the
mountains there. He had lived his whole life in the scrub and forests
thereabouts. He was born with no ‘original sin’. He earned them all, himself,
every one, every day, and he liked them.
In retirement sometime he would sit on the step of his caravan door with
a long piece of wire and trip over a chicken before grabbing it quickly, snapping
its neck, plucking it, and cooking it. He was a master at survival. He had excellent
vision, he was very fast over short distances, and he also knew how to wait for
hours until the moment was right and ripe.
When it came to his gully, he was the master of that universe… and he was
the contentment of it. He was Alpha and Omega to all things there.
The new owners eventually told him he’d have to leave. This direct order
came to him after a certain incident. He had sent his two gifted dogs, Mutt and
Jeff, to chase up and chase down a wild pig… and they failed in their task to
bail up the creature. So, he shot them.
To him it was a sensible decision based upon how many chickens they ate
and how much quarry they brought home. It was mathematical and nothing
personal. They weren’t bad dogs.
To the new owners, well, this was something unacceptable. They considered
him to be a great danger to himself and to all other creatures. The paramedics
grabbed him en route to the local dog-pound where he intended to pick out two
new hunting dogs… as pups…and give them food and train them well in all the
things he knew best about living in the world.
At least, I suppose in retrospect, it was good that the paramedics didn’t
just shoot him. They brought him to
our Hospice instead.
He didn’t really fit into the mould of a Palliative Care patient. Sure,
he would eventually die, but probably through lack of good, well trained
hunting dogs rather than through any human illness. He was very tough. He had
some organ failure but, knowing him, he’d find his way around all that… and
he’d find his way around all of us as well, as it best suited him.
He was the most alive person I’ve met on Earth. His awareness of the
natural world and of weather, of the way in which each breeze bent down each
blade of grass, of the way each animal must behave, because it loved its own
nature, was phenomenal.
It was not phenomenal to him. It was natural enough for him for he had
only ever lived in that realm. Being in the Hospice, well, it was the only
building he had been in for thirty years apart from his small caravan there by
the small clear stream.
His eyes were very bright. There were galaxies of clarity in them. We
didn’t have to do much for the Birdman, no one ever did, or could, or had to.
He was right enough as he was. He was ‘right as rain’. He didn’t mind being at
the Hospice, the bed was comfortable enough, just as long as he could be
outside most of the time.
He would just sit there in the garden atrium of the ward with a bit of
string and a small loop and he would snare the occasional pigeon… but only the
slow, fat, dopey ones.
He snapped their necks as soon as he caught them and presented them to
one of the nurses or the kitchen staff. Good eating.
“Well, thanks,
Mr… um, that’s unusually considerate of you… um, look, maybe we should talk
about this…um, no, not now. Just… um… thanks… and… take it easy, eh. Oh, and
can you just spit outside?”
He didn’t die during the time I was there although a good number of dopey
pigeons did. We sought out more suitable places for him to live but the most
suitable place, his golden gully, was lost to him. All treasure is lost. We all
know this. It is why we cling to it.
The medieval meaning of a Hospice… a place on the way for pilgrims…
suited what the place meant to the Birdman. It wasn’t bad. It was comfortable
enough and people didn’t bother him. It was something along the way.
I learned quite a bit about pain control and symptom management during my
time at the country Hospice. I learned a fair bit about drug half-life ratios
and known, believable, disease trajectory.
I learned about counselling and the basic function of grief. I learned
that each death involves the re-ordering of life and reality. I learned how
reality is not constant, but is flux itself, and I learned that meaning cannot
be prescribed from the outside.
I also learned how to catch a nice, slow fat pigeon with a bit of string.
It’s always a potentially useful skill to have up one’s sleeve. I have yet to
use it in hospital ward staff-meetings, especially those to do with issues
related to nursing theory, seamless integration and holistic corporate
practice, having well resisted any such temptation.
As times pass and things change then we will all see what part of learning
is most useful at each juncture.
I don’t think the Birdman was ever a fringe dweller. He never lived on
any edge. I think we do. I expect the Birdman outlived, and still outlives, us
all by leaps and bounds of wonder in the mystery and natural meaning of all of
this.
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