Motherheart Dragon Priest

Chapter 10b - The Woodsman

He looked across the beach. The usual pandanus and coconut scrub covered most of the foreshore holding it together against the storms of the wet season that came with sufficient force to lift a man and throw him out to sea. A rough track cut its way diagonally through the dunes leading off into the scrubby forest behind them.

Moon slung his baskets onto his old bamboo pole such as carried by any woodsman of the Temple, hefted it over his shoulder and trudged off. The track was heavily overgrown and he had to push his way through.

 “No need starting work on this track if it isn’t the right one”, he said to himself as he thought about the amount of work needed to clear it. He pushed through a fallen teatree that lay across the track and came out into a clearing.

Father Sun and Mother Earth had finished their morning prayer and the mists of their loving now lifted. Father Sun now rose higher in the sky guiding the living and Moon stretched his back feeling the warmth as he stood taking in the view.

A low hill lay before him where some of the small local Longfoot animals were grazing, cropping the grass short and maintaining a clearing that extended off to his right and over the brow of the hill. He moved slowly in the way that did not threaten these little pouched children of the Mother. The males sat back on their tails and watched him cautiously, coughing softly to each other.

A couple of low huts lay off to his left a little way up the slope. They appeared to be the usual form constructed as priests’ sleeping quarters and as they were unoccupied Moon left his baskets at one of these.

He moved further up the slope towards a shoulder high limeleaf hedge seemingly planted as the first barrier to keep animals out of the Temple grounds. As was the protocol with Temple landscaping, a series of hedges were used each more robust than the previous to keep out unwanted animals from the Temple food gardens.

Moon recognised some of the smaller pouched children of the Mother as the little Woylie longfoot and the little Wankurra burrowtail hopped away from him. He quickly hand counted them, his thumb tapping the inter digit spaces, as two fingers of larger Narbelek shortpaw hopped off into the scrub.

These little children of the Mother had been introduced to the island as a food source for the acolytes sent here for training. By the size of the limeleaf hedge, none of the larger animals so common on the mainland had been brought to the island, for they needed hedges and barriers an arm length higher than a man and just as wide. The little pouched ones watched him with lazy caution but showed no obvious fear.

There were signs that scrubfowl flew into the gardens occasionally. Any damage from them was compensated for by the ease of collecting their eggs and of collecting material from their mounds with which to fertilise the gardens.

Stragglers from the wet season migrations of Garrumati, the black and white goose, would also stop off at such a well vegetated island but these would be some months away yet for the rains still seemed some way off.

Upturned bamboo baskets were enough to prevent such feathered children from eating their way through any crops. The island had no predators other than people and the Mother’s smaller children lived in innocence as shown by the lack of obvious wariness.

As he hurdled the style in the limeleaf hedge he heard a laugh from the forest further around to his left. Before him lay the crest of the hill. Around it was a bamboo hedge as tall as he was and behind it the bamboo-shingled roofs of the Temple buildings. For the amount of trouble these two witches had caused, they had been sent to the best, Moon thought as he quietly studied the terrain and the usual array of Temple buildings.

If it was Moon’s choice such rebels as these two witches would have just been sent off into the desert to tend dragon nests. Moon paused, the laughter echoing in his ears. Such a task as this that I have been given by my master must mean that these two are of great importance to the Temple. Oh well then, to work. He put his hands to his mouth and called out.