Warrigal's Way by Warrigal Anderson

can’t kick and it’s got no teeth. How hard can it be?”
    â€œWe’ll see when you leap aboard. Not as easy as it looks, first go,” said Simon wisely, but of course I was too stupid to listen.
    â€œHere, give us that bike and I’ll ride its spots off,” I said to Simon. I gave him Shorty’s rein, cocky as all get-out. If some town kid can ride one of those things, it would be not trouble to me. Balance was nothing, I had that naturally. But there’s two kinds of bike—free-wheelers and fixed wheelers—and of course Simon’s bike had to be a fixed wheeler, which meant you had to keep pedalling. You couldn’t stop, and the more you pedalled the faster you went. And of course the brakes ceased to exist about a year before I happened to climb aboard it. But being you, cocky,and as thick as a brick, having no brakes was a minor thing, a mere bagatelle, not even noticed.
    I held the bike by the handlebars, stood on the left-hand side, and admired the silver and blue lines, the prettiest thing I had seen in a long time. I grabbed it with both hands and sort of scootered for a bit, rising up and down on the pedals as the wheels went around. Seeing Simon ride off on Shorty was the goad I needed to mount this thing properly, and ride it to a standstill. I hate to admit this, but over the first fifty yards I was in difficulty, the ten yards after that, real trouble, beyond that, dire straits.
    The corner to the main road was rushing to meet me and I had absolutely no idea what to do. I couldn’t stop—no brakes—and I couldn’t turn. Frozen in horror I could only watch as the corner got closer, and cars, trucks, trains, aeroplanes and rocket ships seemed to be spewing down the main road at three hundred miles an hour, and I was going to hurtle out into the middle of it. I was so scared I couldn’t even close my eyes. About twenty feet from the corner I caught a blurr out of the corner of my eye. It was Simon. He rushed in and gave me a good push. I turned violently left and ended up in a tangle of fence pickets—me, the bike, yards of skin and buckets of blood, all mine. I got up feeling myself and spitting teeth. Other than losing two teeth, I broke my left wrist. I had to stuff Ted on one side and Hugh on the other, the doctor ripping up them and them ripping up me, searing my earholes, while the doctor wrapped this dirty big heap of plaster bandage from wrist to elbow.
    You know, I went right off pushbikes after that. Same as Simon went off horses. Shorty threw him so high he reckoned he could count the sheets of tin on the pub roof, and he wasn’t too keen on repeating the act. I had to wear that plaster for six weeks before I could take it off.

10
My place in the pecking order
    One time we were camped just outside of Charleville, waiting for a mob that wasn’t quite ready. So we got into town quite a bit. On one occasion I went in with Mike and Ted, who went to the pub, and I got a real good biffing from the town bully. He was all over me like a heavy dose of the measles. Whenever I lifted my head he punched my nose. I had a fat lip and a dinner plate for a nose, and a black eye Joe Louis would have considered a good day’s work. And hurt! Man, I invented hurt. There was usually a bully in each town around the bush. Fighting was manly, and each town had its pecking order, so if you were a stranger you fought the local champ to find your place in the pecking order. Anyway, this Oscar was about fifteen, and I think he had ten arms. I was beginning to wonder if I would see my thirteenth birthday. I think he just got sick of hitting me. I had never had a fight, except for the time the fat kid in Sydney tried to pinch my port, but I won that with my feet.
    I was sponging my face with cold water, when Ted said to me, “No use lookin’ glum, boy. It’s high time you learned the finer arts of the knuckle.”
    â€œThe what?” I