I watch quenda the southern brown bandicoot work his way through the sword sedges, and down onto the lush green ground cover covered with small blue flowers and the low-down working of bees. He moves along, burying his long-thin snouty nose and front feet in one spot after another, little ears listening, going down for the good dirt, digging. His fur is all brown and hair, smooth though made up of hundreds of finer points. He hops along like a little kangaroo, though more bent to the ground, stretched out along it, cultivating.

And from the edges of my observing I see kooli the buff banded rail emerge from where he so often figures from. His back all turtle patterned and brown, his underside a kind of zebra patterning, his chest and eye a sort of rusted orangey-brown, what the birders call ‘buff’. He moves along, occasionally flicking his tail as he pushes his beak into place after place along the soil of the dryer bank by the rushes. His feathers are all neatly folded over one another, giving him the patterning and colours, feather-ends all rounded and fine, each tip planted within his skin. 

And I watch him, kooli, and quenda the bandicoot get slowly closer in their foraging, until they are about to cross directions, about 30 centimetres apart. And I wonder who will make way for who. And then, at the same moment, they both hop a little past each other and away, keeping their distance, neither advancing towards the other, a kind of mirroring of one another’s movements. 

And I can’t help wondering about the forming of each on this the edge of the lake, here at the edge of the world. The dry lake shoreline of birak summertime has fashioned from out of its edges these two creatures, one a bird, one a mammal, though so similar in their workings, in their doings—as if there hovered above each a kind of bright shadow, out of which one day one was fashioned, out of which the next day the other. A kind of lake shoreline cultivation shadow, condensing into quenda, condensing into kooli, the way ice condenses from water into different forms; same water; each coming from the same spring; a common languaging before it fell into these here terms. Quenda the southern bandicoot. Kooli the buff banded rail.