Read Online Mr Darwin's Shooter by Roger McDonald - Free Book Online

little afraid when he stood on those clifftops. Sight of the sea made him know there were things he was yet to dare, and so the sea challenged him, and he was often worse-off for his constitutional—more dissatisfied with himself than was good. Men like Covington he reckoned had faced the sea with inferior trepidation: they simply did not allow it to move them, and were lucky in that. It gave the world sailors at least.
    So MacCracken with his snobberies got away from the cliffs and hiked back to the cove he loved so dearly. It was a world unto itself where afternoon sea-changes of weather, called southerly busters, raced overhead, leaving the cove placid while whipping the waters of the harbour farther in. MacCracken liked the feeling better than the mish-mash of weather stirring Sydney Town a few miles around the shore, where they had a summery succession of hot, cold and humid, with hot prevailing after the passing of the rest in a furnace-breath of westerly wind bringing the smoke of the ever-burning bushfires. Here was a more idyllic settingfor MacCracken’s moods. Let his friends find him ‘on location’, as he said in the fashion of the day, whensoever they wished. Let the world steam over him while he hunkered down a little removed from its chops and changes, a privileged spectator on a tiled verandah, a glass of ale in his hand, and his kangaroo dog, Carl, an amiably deficient hound, lapping milk at his feet.
    All was cosy. All was right. MacCracken craved no cataclysmic dramas. He had his surgery, saw a few patients for cuts and scratches, and the rest of his time he gave to friendship, dalliance, and his literary pursuits. Nightly there came a tapping at his window-pane, and he enjoyed the close attentions of a visitor discreet as she was willing— ‘The older Miss X,’ he told his friends, ‘if you want a name at all.’
    MacCracken’s essays were his personal pride and his most abject failure. Inspired by Emerson and Thoreau, they observed nature in a genial fashion and toyed with philosophy. They made humour out of his travails. ‘ The bird was so tame I killed it with my hat ,’ he wrote of his Galapagos Islands interlude. ‘ In experimental mood, I persuaded a tortoise to haul a rock .’ He did not think the essays were bad, but though he sent them away in scrupulously tied packages, nought returned to him but silence. His soul went six months across the sea and came six months back unenthused-over. If anyone asked why he refrained from publishing in the Sydney Morning Herald in preference to Boston and Edinburgh journals, he said, ‘You know as much of colonial taste as you do of my particular style.’ But the fact was that the Sydney Morning Herald would not have him either.
    He showed an essay to Covington, who kept it an hour, then handed it back with a grunt.
    â€˜Mr Darwin was there before you.’
    â€˜Well, so he was, old bookworm, and the whole world knows it through his journal of the Beagle . I saw the birdsthat he shot, finches, hardly bigger than mosquitoes, some of them were.’ MacCracken shouted into Covington’s ear: ‘Bang! It was done.’
    Covington twisted his mouth disdainfully.
    â€˜ Obtained ,’ he said, ‘if you want the right word. Not shot.’
    â€˜What is that you say, miraculous old pedant?’
    He spoke the words to Covington’s retreating back.
    â€˜Obtained,’ Covington repeated without turning around.
    â€˜Sir?!’ pleaded MacCracken.
    Covington hauled back a leg and took aim at a coconut that MacCracken had placed on a stone as a decorative detail, and sent it flying through the doctor’s garden of shells with a well-placed kick.
    â€˜Finches!’ The word exploded into the night.
    MacCracken sighed, then went back indoors. For a minute he heard the coconut bouncing through the rocks down to the shore as Covington pursued it to destruction.
    MacCracken