Reflection of strong light on the back of the retina picks up the shine of the eyeball. Hold a torch close to your head and haunt the canopy with a beam of light and flash – something blinks, something looks back – something – a frogmouth, a spider, a leaf tailed gecko betrays itself, blinded and irrationally tortured by photons. Their eye-blood in reflective tissue marks them – two reddish dots, close together – spots in the blackness of wet leaves and shadow, like the bite of a vampire.

   Eyeshine.

   The doormat to the entrance of the soul.

   And so, children are scattered about the Malanda pub when the subject of possum spotting, hence eyeshine, comes up. Max talks to the assembled adults who fork their banquet while the children disappear into the kitchen. The four kids stand at the large brown aquarium, watching the cutlery of crayfish, their mandibles and mouthguards move invisible bits into their crusty maws. Until swish, a crayfish is removed and thrown into the boiling water, jacknifing in protest. A cook barks. The children run.

   – Why don’t we go spotting down the crater. It’s a good night tonight. I’ve got a torch in the car, said Max.

   – Won’t the kids be too tired? asks Gillian.

   – Naw, they’re pumped with all that red jelly. Look at them. I reckon its early enough, says Lydia, the Duchess of Topaz.

   A stream of children run past the outside window, and process beneath the Wheel of Fire Tree that arches upwards to the pub vehandah. Pumped. They huddle in the street, in deep conspiracy, to discuss being chased from the kitchen by a chef and a waitress. They discuss the crayfishes’ faces.

   – Gross, said Kitty.

   – Gross, they agree.

   The adults dicker about the night walk. Bill doesn’t want to go. Gillian is ambivalent because a walk might go late. Max, after a second helping of souffle, and trifle, insists. Lydia wants to walk in the dark too.

   Only Bill feels truly queasy about the plan. He’d prefer to return to the motel room and tune in to Baywatch. Bill’s protests are rudely dismissed by Max.

   The adults disembark from the pub, a little drunkenly after the fortification of bottles of Mt Pleasant and a beer or two thrown in for measured luck. And Gillians G & T bought before the onslaught of Malandans. A G & T which glistened like a crystal ball, sipped when the lounge was empty and daylight lingered.

   Before salad mountains were rendered to sweeping plains, the veggie pans were strip-mined to leave pools of cheese oil.

  The swaying adults round up children and promise them possums.

   Lydia leads the way in her little red sports car with the two boys for company. The road is a ribbon of moonlight, over the Tablelands green buttocks, up towards the rainforest preserve of the craters. Max could just see the smear of headlight where Lydia charged into the distance, and the frills of rainforest across the top of the rise.

   Not the great primordial Australian forest but remnants –  genetic corridors – allowing some flow and ebb of creatures and plants across the remaining strings of wilderness on the plateau.

   Lydia disappears behind a curve.

  – She certainly drives fast, Max says to no-one.

   Gillian, Kitty and little Rebecca agree. They find the heater warming. The Holden wagon rumbles up the hills.

   Bill says – Its like toyland here. Where’s Noddy’s little car that goes parp parp parp?

Cold movement, a brush of movement in the air possibly  the wings of a frogmouth  brush a draft against trees and whiskers … freeze, grip hard the moss at the back of the branch, tailwrapped and the munch of a prickly grub and its juices tastes sweet and wet across the tongue a grub of proportion hungry and another few and still hungry, the little ache in the belly never dies away completely.

   Bill wants to know where the crater is. What is it? A volcanic vent set in a national park. Dormant if not extinct. The fire trails round the crater, through the park, have excellent cross section of possums including rare species. With luck we’ll see a Green Possum. Thats the target. To spot a green possum in black circumstances. Bill wants to know. Sugar ants are his biggest worry in Marrickville. And German Conckroaches. The wildlife of the city, mostly dead from mortein, lead poisoning and acid rain. Half the humans, and their duco, suffering in silence.  Bill is worried about the forest at night, an agoraphobic pang centres itself.

   – Good fun, possum spotting, says Gillian to Bill.

   – Oh yeah, he answers dryly. – Possum spotting with Noddy?

   Prick, thinks Gillian. Don’t spoil it for the girls.

   Lydia, and the boys have long gone down the crater road, and the trees and canopies reach high like canyon sides, crazed by the headlights. Sometimes, when its cold, mist heightens the spookiness of the rainforest, a gauze of mystery, but tonight its clear. Max thinks it will be a beautiful night for spotting. The wilderness experience, deep in the raw, chloryphyll secrets whispered by a canopy. The place to be. Bill shivers and chews a nicorette to be on the safe side.

   Max parks beside Lydia’s little red sports car. The boys are already giving stale bread to rubbish bin possums – coppery fat possums which hang around the picnic area. Lydia and Max  practise their eyeshine techniques a metre from each dullard possum. It works – the red flash of eye blood. The fat possums seem unfazed and munch on the crusts, constipate their systems with white man’s flour.

   – Its a beautiful night for spotting, says Max, looking at a possums bum ballooning from a bin.

   – Not bad, says Lydia. Her thin face looks at branches. She’s the only credible person in the forest than evening – a biologist.

   Bill stares at the coppery brushtail, uneasy at its presence on the edge of the tin bin, balanced by a ratlike prehensile tail which, towards the end resembles a very tiny toilet brush. The tail points upwards, to god and the milky way.

   Nobody talks for a moment. Only the nattering of the boys and girls at the edge of the carpark breaks the deep of the forest. Once a huge rolling prehistory, now quarantined around lakes and in pockets where the mighty logging industry gave up on the high ridges and the mud of a hundred wet seasons.

   Pademelons watch from a safe distance, tiny relics of the marsupial age. They graze in groups on the forest floor. Max picks them out with the torch.

   – Come on boys, says Lydia to the kids.

   – I’m a girl, says Rebecca.

   – Sorry, I’m used to ordering boys around, says Lydia. 

There’s a presence,  a wall of stinks and rhythms, moving closer, near where the moonlight wedges through the leaves. The small possum’s eyes open and blood starts to rush in its ears as it listens and sniffs, sniffs and listens. A rumble, a wave of some  familiar medley of molecules, danger molecules, not of the familiar forest, of another place the possum can’t reach. Molecules of cotton and nicorette, of brut and whiskey breath, leather, pheromones, zinc plates of torch batteries, calamari belches, lux soap, childrens skin, fear molecules, anger molecules, not that the creature knows of molecules, it only feels a change, a creeping wall. Its hairs are standing on end, lips part to reveal needlepoint teeth. And noise, getting louder.

   – Shhhhhh, says Gillian.

   – Shhhhhh, says Lydia. The children are whinging. Rebecca begs a shoulder carry…I’m tired, my legs are sore daddy…Tim wants to wee behind a tree and does so, watching for jumping spiders thinking will I put my willy back in my trousers if a jumping spider goes for it even if I’m still weeing? Dale, his older brother has warned Tim about the jungle jumping spider and so has Kitty. They are very big in the rainforest said Kitty, and now Tim wants to cry. He doesn’t want a surprise jumping spider fanging him in the privates. Tim strains his tummy to push his wee through as fast as possible and then he starts to run after the adults shouting wait wait, shoving his willy hurriedly into the protection of his trousers. Its all a bit messy and wet.

   – Mummmmy….

   – Shhhhhhh, says Max.

   – Why did we bring the children? Bill asks. – Its far too late for them.

   – Why not? Its the school holidays, says Gillian.

   – Its an education, says Lydia.

   – Kids have a right to come and see wildlife, says Gillian.

   Bill is silent. He knows he’s being tetchy because he’s quite frankly, nervous, made worse by being slapped down so ferociously. He does not appreciate the treatment.

   Max and Lydia hold the torches and the little boys want a go. They scan the trees with quiet photons for gliders, tree kangaroos, coppery brushtails, Herbert River Ringtails, the fabled green possum. Pademelons.

   – Max. Lets put the lights out, says Lydia. – We might see luminous fungi on the forest floor.

   They click off their torches. Bill feels goosebumps as his rods and cones adjust to the moist dark, at the vast expanse of life around him. No hum of truck in the distance, rather a hiss in the leaves.

   – Hey look, down there, says Max with a gasp.

   A faint white glow on the ground, just in from the road.

   – Where? says somebody.

   – There.

   – Oh yes.

   They admire the luminous fungi for a few minutes, the kids squat on  their haunches watching the spooky phosforescence, ghosty white.

   – Wow, says Dale.

   – Amazing, says Kitty.

   – Turn the torch on, says Lydia – and we’ll see what the fungus looks like.

   Max switches the torch on and points at the source.

   A kleenex tissue, crumpled in a little ball, but still white.

   – Kleenexus kleenexus, some grub has chucked from their car window on the way to the crater, says Bill, relieved.

   – Probably the fermenting snot that glows, says Max after they all stop laughing and wheezing.

   The forest promenade continues.

   The boys, Dale and Tim continue up the crater road fighting imaginary foes from a video game, kickboxing musclebound ninjas in the head. Dale’s foot connects with Kittys bum.

   – Heaaungggg!

   Not hard, but enough to jog her forward.

   – Hey stop it. Hey Dale kicked me in the bum!

   Dale kicks his imaginary foe with a mighty blow, and the head explodes in a flume of blood.

   – Hyyyyanggg!!!!

   – Shut-up Dale, say Lydia crossly – We are trying to find wildlife and the noise is scaring them away. Cut it out now. See if you can spot a possum up there. Only people with X-ray eyes like Superman can see eyeshine.

   Dale turns on his x-ray eyes immediately and scours the trees for red dots.

   As soon as they walk in silence, noise begins to approach from the other direction. A broad beam of light floats down the road like a Stephen Spielberg alien spaceship. 

   Spooky! think the boys. Then, people’s voices. Max, Gillian and co, even the boys, silently watch the bobbing light, but they hear human laughter.

   A party of five swing round the corner, led by a man with a very large torch and a battery pack strapped to a belt. He has a tufty beard and wears a flanlette shirt and thick black-rimmed glasses.

   – … and the Herbert River Ringtail is extremely common further south – what I’ve always wanted to see is a mahogany glider. Recently rediscovered you know, but on the coastal strip.

   – Vill singink bring them out, asks a German tourist.

   – Try clapping, says an Englishman.

   As the noisy party passes, without a whit of recognition that eight other people are on the quiet road, two English tourists clap, shouting here possy possy, and the German has a go at Oh Tannenbaum.

   Because the guide has a stronger torch Dale, Kitty, Rebecca and Tim peel off and start following the tourists.

   – What you must realise is….oh there’s one, says the man with the mighty beam. – Oh no! It has turned away into the bush, but it was definitely a green possum, a rare green possum, I’ll see if I can pick him out. 

The possum is stalled. Heart is beating fast, it clings to the back of the trunk as if day had come out for a brief moment, the smell and the noise had struck it’s jangled senses like a branch dropping from above. Rivers of tension flow from its toenails across its back and up through its tail, the possum breathes softly, whiffling.

   – No sorry – can’t see it, but there was one there, I promise. The man has the clipped tones of an expert.

   The guide’s battery pack is enormous, and his beam is formibable. Max and Gillian shake their heads and follow the overseas tourists and the children in the hope of glimpsing a green possum.

   – There’s a ringtail.

   A surprised possum blinks back, gripping a branch with its little talons. The tourists ooh and ahh appropriately. The Guide moves on jabbering knowledgably about insectivores, giving people little time to drink in the marvel.

   – Very common, he opines.

   The English people clap.

   – I can’t stand this, says the Lydia, sotto.

   – Its like Swanston Street. Why can’t they leave the poor old possies alone, adds Gillian.

   – We’re not, says Bill under his breath. He doesn’t want an argument.

   A vehicle purrs in the distance and the forest road is suddenly illuminated by two bright headlights which wash everything in shine and black shadows. The lights dip.

   – Off the road kids, car coming, says Gillian.

The leaves are shaking as the light passes by and thinking day has arrived, the possum closes its eyes ready to sleep, the smell of exhaust is overpowering. The possum knows the smell which also happens by day, near its home, so much exhaust, the gauzed air shudders. Green possum adrenaline continues to electrify its green frame until the pang clack clack noises subside, then the light subsides and the strange molecules retreat to the familiar chemistry of trees and gently rotting humus while the possum scratches a shell pink ear with great delicacy and the real night falls again with great suddenness and left blinking, the possum tries to focus on a stick insect, but feels a bit dizzy.

   The bus with Wildtours scrawled excitingly on the side almost hits a panicking Tim who thinks he sees a jumping spider in a tuft. Tim is sure it’s a giant brown one with eight tiny red eyes. He darts onto the road to escape. Max grabs Tim’s arm and hauls him back.

   Six or seven heads are silhouetted in the bus, while an enormous light, mounted on a bracket on the drivers door, searches the canopy for possum. The drivers arm sticks out like a big white hairy grub, grasping a handle, and he sweeps branches high in the forest. The faint drift of commentary comes from the bus cabin.

   The driver aims the light like an anti-aircraft searchlight. Driving and spotting are a difficult thing to master simultaneously and he swerves the bus at a corner and almost collects the Englishmen who clap further down the track.

  – Holy hell, says Lydia

  – Is there nowhere left that not reduced to sheer farce anymore, asks Max, holding Tim’s hand.

   They walk back, chastened by the night’s events. Lydia is almost apoplectic and even the children sense the adults’ gloomy moods and walk quietly.

   In the carpark, Japanese, German, American and Aussie backpackers laugh and feed the rubbish bin possums stale bread, and take photos with flashlights.

   One of these days, says Lydia with rage in her voice, we’ll have to stick plastic replica possums in the trees around here.

   – What? A possum on a stick? asks Bill – Sounds okay. Pop him up every time a bus with a searchlight passes and flash little red electric eyes. A crowd pleaser!

   – Possums will go digital like everything else, says Max sadly.

   On the way home to the motel at Tinaroo, Bill thanks Max and Gill for the outing.

   – It was more interesting than I thought it would be, he says in a sleepy voice.

   The dashboard display is green. While the stereo jangles, Kitty and Rebecca doze, spot luminous possums in their dreams.

(Previously published in the excellent North Queensland collection of short stories, Spinning the Sun in 1995 by El Kumanand Press.)