By Monday the floods had subsided. I was standing before the class, lecturing, when I saw their attention move, as one, toward the south windows, the camp side. Three men rushed out from among the houses, armed with sticks, and began searching in the grass.
‘Sir, kangaroos hide.’
‘Okay everyone, all eyes to me.’ It is embarrassing to recall. I was new. I wanted some control. Eyes wavered toward me. But my attention, too, was out the window where the men were searching through the grass. More men came, and some dogs.
Suddenly a kangaroo broke cover. It was a small one. With its body almost parallel to the ground, and visibly straining for speed, it disappeared from the right side of the frame provided by the classroom windows on that wall. The students leapt from their seats yelling, ‘Sir, ’ere, ’im this way!’ I had moved to the south windows and was peering awkwardly in the direction the ’roo had disappeared, like a child trying to see within a television screen. They beckoned me from the other side of the room, at the other windows, where the kangaroo, having circled around the western end of the building, could be seen coming from that way, left of screen. Some of my students called again, impatiently, ‘’Ere!’
‘Too boggy for ’im that way,’ someone explained, excitedly.
‘Go Jamesy. Aiee!’
‘Ha ha! Get ’im fat man!’
‘Throw it. Now. No. Now!’
A middle-aged man, with his big belly bouncing above his small shorts, chased the kangaroo. He had a large stick in one hand. He threw the stick. It missed. The classroom was noisy with the hooting and shouting and laughter. Some of the older men jogged across the muddy ground, way behind the kangaroo. A pack of their dogs raced past Jamesy, spinning him around like a top with their speed and excited barking.
‘Look at ’im. Alphonse! The powerhouse!’
Down by the powerhouse Alphonse, by far the youngest of all these hunters, waited, stick in hand, as the ’roo approached. But his dog broke off toward the ’roo, which veered off at right angles and headed for the scrub further to the north. Dogs now formed two sides of a yapping triangle behind it. Our class was silent for a moment. I had been shouting also.
The dogs’ barking grew fainter and they fell out of formation. The men strung out further behind them slowed, and stopped. They mouthed excuses and allocated blame, and the kangaroo disappeared into the scrub. The kids agreed that it had got away.