Sticking with Pigs by Mary-anne Scott

Author:Mary-anne Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OneTree House Publishers
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

A stick, Jem had said, but of course there were no decent sticks anywhere. Wolf had probably stumbled over hundreds of suitable sticks that day, but now when he needed a flagpole there was nothing but a jungle of vines and twigs in the undergrowth.

Nerves, tiredness and anger gripped at his stomach making Wolf double up in pain. He slipped deeper into the thick bush and dug a hole in the ground with the heel of his boot to fashion a makeshift dunny. He dropped his daks and squatted over the hole. As he got on with his business, he surveyed the plants around him and couldn’t help smiling to himself. Yeah, Davey, bushman’s toilet paper. ‘It’ll be there if you need it,’ Davey had written on his fact sheet, and it sure was. ‘Brachyglottis repanda,’ he said to himself.

Davey had put the plant into most of his ‘exam’ questions and Wolf had never been able to remember its name. Now it came to him as surely as the toilet paper did, and he was able to reach out and tear off the large, velvety leaves as Davey had predicted.

‘One big walk, Davey and I’ll be out of here. Sun setting on my left and follow the compass north. How hard can that be?’ He listened for a moment, wishing his words could get through but there was no sign of Davey hearing him. He buried his crap and was walking back to Jem when he found the perfect stick.

It was as tall as Wolf and dry and strong and straight. Wolf dragged it back to their base. ‘Good work,’ Jem said. ‘Now take a rock and bash it into the ground out there on the exposed hilltop.’ Jem had the pack open and all the contents lay around him. ‘I’m sorting out the supplies here.’

Bashing a thick piece of wood into a dry, hard landscape is not easy at the best of times. Wolf had to pull out a prickly sticky plant by wrapping his jacket around the plant’s base and it left, as he’d hoped, a patch of soft dirt and a head start on the hole.

He drove the stick in and brought the rock down on the top of it several times. The stick was too tall, the ground too hard and the rock was useless. He wanted to kick the whole lot down the hill. ‘Why am I doing this?’ Wolf yelled out to Jem.

Jem slithered forward to peer out at Wolf before he answered. ‘There’s no way I can walk out of here, so the flag is an indicator in case I’m lucky enough to be found by search and rescue.’

‘Of course you’ll be found,’ Wolf said, but the reality of their situation clouted Wolf on the head like the rock he’d been bashing into the ground.

‘Keep going. You’re making progress,’ Jem shouted.

Like hell, I am. Wolf brought the rock down with several hard blows to show Jem how hopeless it was, then he felt and saw the stick slide into the earth at least four inches.

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