June 6, 2008
“He gave everything he had just to save what he thought was left of all he knew… Yet, in the end only ash was in his hands.”
Christian, that was what they’d named him when they’d taken him from his home at twelve summers age, Christian White. A perverted attempt at making him into a reject copy of their own imbalanced society. Invaders from a far off land, what did they know about life in this place? They tried at taming this wilderness to make it like their own, taming its people, and ended up destroying both.
He had fought what they were doing to him, tried to run away, but he was caught every time. Finally, he gave in, the animal spirit biding it’s time for a chance at escape, the bars gnawing at self. There was nothing to be done.
Seeing that they had been successful, they released him, civilized. Yet, none would take him. He tried their way, doing as they had conditioned him to. Every step he was cut down by prejudice and fear. His own would not accept him. He was no longer one of them, tainted. Not one, and not the other, a lost generation, a stolen generation.
So it was that he ended up where it all began. An abandoned patch of barren earth he had once called home. He crouched at the edge of the fire pit, the only sign the place had once been a human habitation. Ashes stained his hands, and his old life blew away over the red dirt wasteland.
A lone dingo skirted the edge of the camp, drawn by the lingering scent of meat, and urine and sweat, of life. I knowing glance passed between two beasts: The hardship of life, the pain of hunger, the unfairness of it all. It was a different hunger that Christian felt. He yearned for belonging, for the balance that had once been, for right. The dingo had something he would give anything for.
Broken, he lay down next to the last remnants of his origins. The afternoon winds pelted his bare chest as the sun scorched the land from above. He wished the dingo would come finish him off and eat him, at least then some part of him would be right. As he lapsed into midday darkness, a metallic clang wakened his inner animal. Raising her head she stared at the source of the strange noise. One of the bars was gone. The elements of the wilderness had rusted through the cage. Cautiously, she stuck her head out of the new door, jaded by years of mistreatment. Then, free. Two dingoes trotted over the rich blood of the Australian outback.