One night a terrible storm hit their land, the temperature dived and all was icy cold. He was minding the egg, she had gone hunting. He waited for her return, but the storm passed and he did not see her. He screeched for many days:
“You-me, me-you Egg-egg!!”
“SHARP-EYE, YOU-ME, EGG-EGG!”
But she did not hear him and he did not hear her. Soon he had to go hunt or starve. As he jumped of that ledge his sorrowful screech echoed for all to feel his loss:
“Me…me... no-you…no-egg…no-me ...”
9
His loss momentarily forgotten by his hunger, he sought for prey, any would do, even … a cat.
But what he saw first was not prey it was her, she was on the ground, a thousand feet below, but she was not standing. In a flood of joy he dived screaming.
“Sharp-eye, you-me, me-you, you-me, me-you …”
As he landed she did not move. She laid there still, stiff. He approached with dread filling his fast beating chest.
“You-me, me-You … Sharp-eye?”
He tried to nudge her up with a push from his beak. But she did not move, just rocked a little from side to side.
“You-you, but not-you, not-you, not you, not … not … Sharp-eye …”
He stayed with her for hours, ignoring hunger pains, ignoring the approaching night and cold. Then as if on sudden impulse, his powerful wings took him aloft, higher and higher, toward their nest. He landed and carefully gripped the now very cold egg and almost fell out of the ledge toward where she lay. Tenderly he placed the egg-egg beside her.
“You-me, me-you, egg-egg …”
He murmured and remained beside them the rest of the freezing night.
10
In the morning hunger was king. He could not stay any longer, with one final glance he was airborne.
“HUNGRY-hungry…sad-sad…angry-angry!”
He soon spotted a cold, slow moving goanna. He dived onto it with the force and the mindless hunger and anger of a cannon ball. The reptile was dead from just the impact. He did not bother to lift it to a safer place but tore at its carcass with violence and greed and his need to hit back at the universe. It had been a large lizard but was reduced to a few bones in minutes.
His ascent was slow and lumbering as he was full in the crop but empty in his heart. He perched on the high branches of their Red Gum and remained there the rest of the day. Over the next weeks he repeated the hunt and the lonely rest many times. The only interruptions were to chase away any transgressor into his territory.
Once in a while he would visit the nest and fix any twigs that had moved a fraction of an inch, he kept the grass lining fresh. He also kept vigil on her body, discouraging all hungry scavengers that he could see, but the smallest ones he could not stop – slowly the flies, bacteria and fungi took care of her and she was soon, once again, one with the land.
11
One day, in the early spring of the next year, on his way to one of his many re-visits to the nest he spotted an intruder. This one was different. It wasn’t flying around – it was right inside his nest!
Anger and outrage bubbled inside him like lava. He dived straight for the alien thing in his, their nest. The force of the dive would have killed a bull, but at the last moment he had pulled up short as the intruder was a young female … and she wasn’t all that ugly.
Never the less she needed to be taught a lesson. He bumped he heavily aside as he landed in the nest. She had not noticed his arrival as she had been busy rearranging some of the foliage at the bottom of the nest.
“Mine!”
He had shouted at her and bumped her again. She had turned around and had assumed a submissive pose.
“Slender-tail- me.”
She had said, as if it explained everything.
“Go! Mine, you-go, go go!”
He had ignored her attempted introduction and bumped even more forcibly. She had got the message and had gone off in a whirlwind of beating wings. He had looked around and rearranged all that she had done. He could not get over her impertinence… he should have killed her. But that now she was gone and he wasn’t sure whether he was happy about it or not.
She wasn’t gone completely – he caught sight of her circling high above and still in his territory. Should he chase her away? He was unsure, and so he just sat in the nest and watched her circle.
At one point, he noticed that her circling had suddenly changed: she was now heading in a definite direction. Then he saw where she was going – there was another intruder in his territory. He was just about to take off in pursuit when he saw her dive bomb the intruder and almost knock it out of the sky. She continued her attack until the intruder thought better of it and finally left.
He was impressed.
And then she was gone, he could no longer see her. This time he knew for sure that he regretted her going. The need, the emptiness had been with him for a few weeks now, but he had ignored it. He did not want a new mate – no one could replace Sharp-eye … but Slender-tail … was brave … and not so ugly.
Suddenly, she was back. She arrived from below the ledge and stalled neatly onto the edge of the nest, in her talons was a dead rabbit and her beak was a stick. She placed the stick in the side of the nest where there seemed to be an obvious hole.
“You-me, me-you?”
She said. He looked at her for a long time. He then waddled over to the new stick and repositioned it a few millimetres and a few degrees. Then he looked up at her and agreed:
“You-me, me-you …”
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