It was one of those oft-repeated family stories that just wouldn’t go away. My parents loved me dearly, but did they have to tell the neighbours, repetitiously, at every opportunity? “Moloch is so clever”, “Moloch never misses his classes”, Moloch this, Moloch that, blah. It was an embarrassment and as I got older, I took on the added baggage of my surname. Moloch Horridus, it was like I was carrying an extra tonne on my back.
We lived in the Outback desert, 600 kilometres northwest of Alice Springs. The days were warm to hot, nights usually cool, although when the sun was away off in the north, things changed dramatically. The ground would freeze overnight and the family usually spent long periods in our underground cave, avoiding the worst of the weather. We even retreated there on the hottest summer days. It was like the family was embalmed – we all just slowed things down, hunkered, and waited for things to moderate!
I had a couple of friends to play with, we took lessons together every day of those first few months. But one of my mates, the guy sometimes called a rogue by the elders, suddenly disappeared. One moment we were in class, the next, there was a great commotion, a big black presence swooped, and he was gone!
You might think drinking water would be a problem in the desert, but the family had developed tricks. Generations of my forebears had learnt to harvest the dew, dew settling on the plants, even dew that condensed on our skin, with a method honed over the millennia, of increasing the water’s viscosity, so enabling it to be channelled, without loss, towards our mouths – problem solved.
We learnt how to avoid potential enemies. There were several elements to learn, my mate had been too smart to learn them! They were clever. I was taught to inflate my body to look bigger, also to duck my head down between my front legs, exposing a headlike bump on my neck, as a decoy.
Then there was the trick of changing my skin colour. This was the one I liked best, surreptitiously watching the look of irritation on the faces of my attacker. One moment a light yellowy-orange, then with a flick of a switch, I could change to dark greeny-grey. While my nemesis was contemplating the camouflage, I was slipping away! I learnt that we borrowed this trick ages ago, from our distant cousins, still living in South America.
Hang on. There’s more. I also learnt to adopt a staggered gait. If threatened, I was to walk slowly, stopping often, swaying back and forth and again, creating bewilderment, as the cover for flight. Easy peasy.
And tucker – mobs of it. I was taught to plant myself adjacent to an ant trail – they were everywhere – extend my sticky tongue, and hey presto, thousands of ants, every day, just for the taking.
For a Thorny, problems were a distant consideration. If lessons are followed, life’s good.