The billabong was the only water for a day’s walk.
Tom Keller had been told the rule before he left the station track. He was forty, a fencer who took the long jobs because the short ones were already spoken for, and the old Aboriginal stockman at the last gate had said it once, not as gossip. Do not drink from the billabong. Not that one. The water looks clean. It is not clean in the way a man means. Something lives in it. If you are thirsty, wait for the tank at the far bore. If you hear it call, do not go down to see.
Tom had two liters and a long afternoon. He nodded, because nodding is cheaper than arguing, and he walked. By dusk the two liters were gone and the billabong was there, black under the dead gums, the moon just up, the bank trodden by things that were not cattle. He told himself the warning had been about salt, or about a sick beast upstream, or about the ordinary risk of water a stranger does not know. He knelt. The water smelled of mud and of nothing worse. He drank.
It was cold in a way tank water is not. It sat in his mouth with a sweetness under the mud, gone before he could name it. He drank again, because a man who has walked all day does not stop at one mouthful, and because the rule had not said the first sip was the offense. It had said do not drink. He had already broken it. The second swallow felt like finishing a thing.
The call came while he was still on his knees.
Not a bird. A bellow, low, from under the water rather than across it, the sound a throat makes when the throat is larger than a man’s and has been waiting. The surface did not break. The dead gums did not shake. The sound rolled up the bank and into his chest and stopped, as if it had found the water he had just taken and recognized it.
Bunyip, the stockman had said, and then he had not said the name again. The thing in the billabong. The descriptions do not agree, because the people who see it do not stay to compare. A body like a seal. A head too long, like a horse that learned to swim. Dark fur, wet and matted. Eyes that take the moon and give back nothing. It does not need to hunt in the open. It waits where thirst brings the living to the edge, and the drink is how it knows you are there.
Tom stood. Standing is not leaving. He capped the bottle he had not needed and took one step back from the mud. The bellow came again, closer, and this time the water moved. Not a splash. A rise, as if something large had set a shoulder under the surface and decided the night was ready. A head broke the skin of the billabong. Long. Dark. Small ears laid flat. The eyes were the only bright thing, and they were not bright with light. They were bright with the moon copied badly. One forelimb followed, heavy, clawed, set on the bank where his knees had been. The rest of it stayed in the water, seal-broad, fur streaming, too big for the hole it occupied.
He did not run at first. Running on that bank is how a boot sticks and how a story ends in the mud. He walked backward toward the rise where he had left his swag, and he did not take his eyes off the limb on the bank. The bunyip did not chase. It drank, or it seemed to, the long head lowering to the place his mouth had been, tasting the edge he had used. Then the head lifted, and the eyes found him, and the bellow this time was not a call. It was an answer. He had drunk. It had noticed. The transaction was complete.
The clawed limb pushed. The body came farther onto the mud than a thing that size should have managed without a struggle. There was no struggle. The billabong let it go. Tom reached the swag and did not pick it up. Swags are how you stay. He left it. He found the track by the pale of the moon on the broken fence line, and he did not look back until the gums were between him and the water. When he did look, the bank was empty. The water was flat. The bellow had stopped, which did not mean the thing had gone down. It meant he was no longer at the edge.
He walked until the bore tank was a dark square on posts, and he did not drink from it until morning, and even then he smelled the water first, like a man who has learned a new courtesy too late. In the afternoon he went back for the swag because a poor man does not leave a swag. It was where he had dropped it. The lower edge was wet, though the ground there was dry, and the wet smelled of the billabong. He did not sleep in that swag again. He burned it at the station and told the boss the rats had got it.
The stockman was at the gate when Tom came in. He looked at Tom’s mouth, not his eyes, the way a man looks at a thing that has been used. He did not ask if Tom had drunk. He said, you heard it. Tom said yes. The stockman nodded once and opened the gate, and that was the end of the conversation, because the rule does not need a second telling once it has been broken and survived.
Tom still takes the long jobs. He carries more water than the distance requires. He does not kneel at a billabong, not even the ones the maps mark as tanks. When the night is still and a low sound comes off the water, he does not go down to see which bird it is. He already knows it is not a bird.
The rule is older than the fence line.
If the water is the only water, wait.
If you drink, the drink is a knock.
If the billabong answers, do not go back to the edge to apologize.
The bunyip does not need to leave the water.
It waits where thirst brings a man to his knees, and the ones who drink learn that the sweetness under the mud was never the water.
It was the taste of being noticed.
