01/04/2026
A little different to my normal poetry. This writing, Short story prose, is new to me. 'Words woke me' again, when i heard the call of a Magpie in the dead of night.
Title :- And the magpie warbled her Lullaby.
She’d not had a chance to breed yet, we would check her pouch, when she was forever still.
Her resting place for those last few painful days was a shady tree on the east side of the property. A cool, yet dry part of the young Roo’s playground. She sat there, seemingly unperturbed by her fatal predicament. The golden bush flies buzzed around her, some as big as Death Valley buzzards, waiting impatiently for inevitability.
An Inevitability we would soon hasten.
The ranger approached her with a blanket. One that had been used before, a use that its fibres could not possibly ever get used to.
With a couple of fearful warning grunts, she tried to get to her once powerful hind legs. Just a few days ago, she would have escaped us with one quick bound. Today she fell, hopelessly, sideways.
She tried again, but the damage in her ankle was just too much. She fell a second time.
We could see small slithers of bone protruding through a patch of rotting fur. Fur that served her well during the winter chill and the summer heat. The sickly colour of infection was being encouraged to spread by maggots already eating away at exposed flesh. The ankle now twice its normal size, could no longer take the weight. The slender Roo’s foot hung precariously, seemingly holding by a thread.
He approaches her sweetly and carefully, all the time encouraging calm and peace. Talking lowly in a trusting tone. The blanket like a shield, right at the eyes of the fearful girl.
In a flash he threw the blanket like he was making a bed, covering and calming the Roo. She lay there motionless in her darkness. A motion she would soon adopt for eternity. I wonder what she was thinking, was she content, was she petrified. Only she knows.
Still serenading the Roo, in his calming tone, the ankle was examined. There was no hope. Her leg was beyond repair.
What looked like a small can of Pringles was garnered from the ranger’s bag. The cylinder of death, I thought.
He warned me I’d hear a loud pop as he positioned the device on the head of the nearly deceased, pointed at the brain stem. ‘It won’t kill her’, he said, ‘it will make her brain dead, and she will pass away quietly, in no more pain. She’ll just stop breathing’.
POP, not a bang like a gun. It was the sound of a rifles little brother. A sound like a muffled car backfire, a sound like a wet towel slapped powerfully on the pavement. A sound of death. She was gone. The steel rod, smashing through the skull did the job, quickly and succinctly. Her powerful hind legs giving one last jump, seemingly oblivious to her smashed ankle. In her mind, one last fence hurdle, I thought. Her being flew out of the rangers’ arms, maybe a meter, maybe two.
Still wrapped in the blanket of death, its fibres now surely standing on end, blood trickled from her mouth and one last breath was exhaled. I think I could see her breath; I could hear it.
As we checked one last time for heartbeat and breath, somehow, through her bloodied teeth I could see a look of peace, of contentment, of comfort and finality.
She was passed.
In the end, a quick but painless passing.
I wondered how she came to be this way.
Was it my fault. Were my fences to blame. I’d see the mob often bound the fences with ease; the smaller ones would crawl under.
I recall one particular Joey, I aptly named Speedy Gonzales. From the moment she took her first bound, she would tear around the property with such speed and joy, changing direction at a whim, teasing her mum as she sped straight toward her and then bound away. I think I could see the mother doe smile! I was always fearful she’d hurt herself. I also wondered, was the girl we’d just assisted the one that I would sit and watch. Was this little Speedy? I’m hoping that it wasn’t the wire that caught her foot. Maybe it was simply just a bushland accident where her ankle snapped in a playful youthful pursuit?
I’ll never know.
Her dead weight was just too much for us to carry, even for both of us.
It seemed wrong to drag her through the back yard by the tail, her limp neck bouncing over the exposed pine tree roots, but we wanted to find her a fitting resting place. After all, this was her home. Her ancestors had been here long before me. We had to find the right place.
We found a lovely tree in the middle of her ancestral land. Some fallen tree branches would be her cover. This was her land; this is where she would have fallen and left the land if the ankle had befallen a playful pursuit anyway.
A fitting tree for her final resting place.
The stench of death filled the bush paddock on firewood collecting day a few days later. A faint breeze carried the smell in waves. Like the warm currents filter through the cold sea water. Death was here. Death was moving on.
The scream of the chainsaw seemed no place now in this sacred bush setting. This was her home; this was her resting place. This was her peace. I left the woodcutting for another day. For a time when her spirit had moved on.
In the dead of night, a few nights later, A lone magpie warbled its tune of honor to say goodbye, as the lone trumpeter might honor the fallen on Anzac Day. It was a beautiful, humbling moment. A moment when I knew that nature, the beautiful nature that I live amongst, is far more wondrous than I can understand. I felt the Roo’s spirit was leaving through that night song. It was a simple, surreal moment of my existence.
A solemn but beautiful song delivered for the trumpeters fallen bush cousin.
As the young Roo’s spirit, carried by the magpie’s chorus, filtered through the leaves, being escorted by glistening reflections of moonlight off the gums, she was gone in body but forever entwined in the gum leaves. Always here. I look up now and see her bounding through my paddock, forever young.
And the magpie warbled its spiritual tune.
© Stephen Jones 2026
