I don’t know if anyone remembers where they first heard the tale of the megarrity. It’s a story you tell camping, or on a veranda when no one switched a light on inside before the sun went down.

Gary’s grandmother Vi, who had her own reasons, told it roughly this way, with variations depending on her listeners.

Once, on a bowl of dust beneath an iron sky, there lived a man whose name I won’t tell you. This was before the great stations were cut up into farms, before there even were stations, back in the days when you could start a massacre and a war and finish both before the police arrived from a thousand miles away.

This man was tall and thin, tough as a side of old leather, but beneath the shade of his hat, his eyes were warm as a winter sky. I can’t tell you whether he was a good man, but he cleared and felled and scratched a living of sorts from that ungentled earth, and he had brought such a wife with him! Black hair and amber eyes, sharp white teeth and gold freckles like fish-scales over her face and arms, and a fat baby held at her full breast. I can’t tell you whether she was a good woman, but she knew the old ways of her own country, she worked hard and she did not question her husband when he said he was a plain, peaceful farmer, or complain when he returned from hunting with no meat, but blood (not his) on his boots and saddle blanket. So, as you see, he was more fortunate than most.

Around the rim of that little farm stood trees, and in those forests lived a clever-fingered, yellow-eyed, bronze-furred megarrity. Like many odd creatures, it had been carried idly away from its land, in a sea-chest perhaps, or on a shoulder or tangled like an albatross in rigging, or netted like a woman in rough clothes and bridal vows.

The megarrity did not know whether there was another like it anywhere in this country. It did not grieve—even far away among its own kind, it would have kept mostly to itself. For many years, all people knew of it was echoes among the trees. Megarrities, you know, are excellent mimics, while their attention holds. When this one tired of being itself, it would pass through the grass with the smoke-grey wallabies, frolic with possums along high branches, or lope like dusty dingoes between the trees.

But even a megarrity at times grows hungry and alone. The people who lived there among the hills took little notice of it, and the creatures which filled their stories had no time for a megarrity-come-lately, and turned their furred backs and their scaly tails. Besides, of late those folks had begun to avoid that stretch of country, or been driven away, or been killed by the farmer and his kind.