Monday, October 30, 2006

Dreamtime Story--THE CASE OF THE MOTH


This is a sorrowful and feelingful dreamtime story!
The story about long long ago a Queensland hunter went on a long journey and taking his small son with him. It was hard for the little boy , and day by day he felt very weak . Then the rains came. They weren't stopping until rivers rose and the land became a vast swamp. The little boy got ill. The hunter built a rough shelter of bark and branches of trees to keep the rain off the boy. Their food had long been exhausted, and the man knew that his son would die if he was not given food quickly.
So he tucked the boy up in his kangaroo-skin rug and splashed through the marsh and searched quarries. It was not easy to find in the marsh, but after several days he found a possum and killed it with his spear. He hurried back to the gunyah he had built because he was scared that his son lying there dead from starvation.
He arrived at the clearing, he couldn't find his gunyah and his son . He could not understand what had happened. He had been prepared to find his son's body, but last he imagined was that it, and the little gunyah have disappeared as through by magic.
He leaned against a tree. His hand contacted with a loose knob of bark and twigs on the trunk. He looked at it idly and then, with a sudden sense of shock, more closely, for it was a replica of the little gunyah he had built to shelter his son. He opened it with trembling fingers. Inside the case lay the white body of a grub, and he knew that the spirits had taken pity on the boy and saved him from death.
To this day the grub of the Case-moth always has a gunyah which it builds to protect it, and remind it of how, long ago, a father cared enough for his son to build a shelter for him while he sought for food.

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