The emus were an ornery bunch. True, they had been more or less domesticated by the koalas almost three hundred years earlier, even before the koalas had begun to speak a developed language. No-one knows who the first koala was who came up with the idea of climbing up on an emu's back and trying to ride him, but there's no doubt that he didn't find it easy, and may well have received a powerful peck, a smarting snap, or a swift kick from the enraged bird once he was thrown off. Yet as the years passed, the emus in Southern Koalaland, who had migrated from a grove off to the south into koala territory, had become used to living with the koalas, and had lost any aversion they had had to being mounted. As a matter of fact, they also occasionally served to pull small carts that were used to travel between Koalaville and Koalatown, and that could hold three koalas, including the driver, although the anteaters were almost always preferred for pulling carts and wagons of all varieties, since their four legs gave them more drawing power.
Not that the emus were mere beasts of burden in the ordinary sense. Every koala knew that their feathered friends were in fact quite intelligent, and if they collaborated with the koalas, they no doubt had good reasons for doing so.
There were many stories of how an emu had shown extraordinary cleverness, and they had excellent memories. On one occasion, an emu simply walked up to a koala and gave him a painful peck on his head, causing loud laments on the part of the victim. Nobody knew why the bird had attacked, until the koala himself admitted that some two years earlier, he had used his slingshot to shoot at that very emu, and had hit him on the left side of the head – the exact spot where the koala had received the peck!
Since the language of the emu was so very different from that of the koala, the two species were unable to communicate very well. Only after the Great Migration would Bashful Koala learn the emu tongue, and begin to serve as translator for his grove.
Yet even before that, there was remarkable proof of the intellectual prowess of certain emus, most especially William. That was not what the other emus called him, of course, but since his name in the emu language was impossible for any koala to pronounce, they simply decided to call him William, that being a bit similar to the squawking sound of his name in emu.
William had always shown a love of music, which was rather peculiar, considering the fact that the emus had, as far as anyone knew, no musical culture of their own. But from the time he was a baby bird, he had liked to walk over to where the musician koalas were practicing, and spend long hours listening to the tunes they played on their drums, their stringed instruments of different sizes – that were usually played with bows, and greatly resembled our violins and cellos (though they were naturally of a smaller size) – their flutes, and various other wind instruments.
Having noticed that the musicians were staring at pieces if paper when playing – the musical scores – William got into the habit of getting close to them, where he, too, could look at the page. He deduced that they were somehow reading the music from the page, and this completely fascinated him. He especially liked to stand next to Amaty, musician and instrument maker, who played an instrument very similar to the viola da gamba.
William loved the smooth, mellow, melancholy sound it produced. Amaty noticed the interest the bird showed in the score, and soon began to teach him the connections between the printed notes and the musical sounds. This was no mean task, of course, since the two had no common language, but within just a few weeks, William had recognized the connections between the symbols and the sounds. This he demonstrated in a most amazing manner.
One afternoon, William was with Amaty, and suddenly, he began to scratch something into the dirt. It was a set of six parallel lines that ran left to right. (Our system of musical notation uses the pentagram, a system of five lines; the koalas, however, use six.) Then, as Amaty watched with ever-growing curiosity, William bent down and began to use his beak to peck dots onto, and between, those lines. When he was finished, Amaty sat on his chair, placed his instrument between his legs, picked up his bow and began to play what William had written. It was a miracle: the emu had just composed one of the most beautiful melodies that Amaty – or any of his musician friends, for that matter – had ever heard in their lives.
This was only the beginning. William composed much more music, always writing it in the dirt (since he had no hand with which to use a pen), after which a koala would copy it onto paper. Apparently becoming bored with monophony (a single musical line) after a month or so, he soon started to compose polyphonic (multi-voiced) music, far more complex than the simple melody-accompaniment scheme that the koalas had been accustomed to.
William had soon established an incredible reputation for being the most musically talented creature in Southern, and probably all, of Koalaland. He could compose a melody without giving it any forethought. A more extended work, with three or even four independent voices, required only a day or two of his time, and all the musicians opined that if William had been able to use a pen to notate his music, he would be tossing off fine compositions at an even faster pace, an opinion that later proved true, when someone finally thought of sticking a pen in the bird's beak, placing an ink bottle in front of him, showing him how to dip the pen into the ink, and then to jot down the notes on a piece of lined paper.
Unfortunately for William, however, not all the koalas had the refinement to fully enjoy his compositions. They were not at all popular, for example, in Koalatown, for the koalas there thought that music without drums wasn't really music at all, and William, in general, preferred to employ the more subtle instruments in his works, obviously feeling that the excessive use of drums was somewhat primitive.
The koalas whose musical tastes had reached a higher level of refinement, however, were always astonished when one of William's compositions was played, and were often moved to tears by the two qualities that permeated his works most often: nostalgic melancholy, combined with sublime dignity. And though only connoisseurs could fully appreciate his creations, William couldn't have cared less: for him, expressing himself through his art was all that was important. Whoever could understand him would do so, and whoever couldn't, wasn't worth trying to please, as far as he was concerned.
This attitude was perhaps part and parcel of his emu character, for as we insinuated earlier, the emus were not the friendliest creatures around. Often seeming to be in a perpetually bad mood, they could get rough if crossed or treated badly, as some koalas had discovered when they were rudely squawked at, or even pecked, after offending an emu in some way or another.
It is said that in the early days of emu-koala collaboration, such attacks were quite common, perhaps because the two species were suspicious of each other's motives, but such violence was later rather rare, once each had learned how to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the other, in order to live in relative harmony.
The first great battle with the hyenas is now considered to be a milestone in the relations between koalas and emus. Some 256 years ago, when a large horde of hyenas, over a period of several months, launched a series of devastating attacks on Southern Koalaland, killing many of its inhabitants, it was the legendary leader Gimpy Koala who first organized the 'emu cavalry'.
Koalas who had learned to ride emus practiced using slingshots, spears, and bows and arrows while mounted on the big birds, and were, in the end, able to fight off the hyenas, killing almost half of the invaders in the process. After that, it was years before the hyenas dared to show their ugly faces in Koalaland again. The emus had a natural hatred of these beasts anyway, and when they saw the koalas' determination to fight them, the birds were impressed by the great courage of their little friends, and were, for their part, most willing to help by carrying them into battle, during which they also fought, using their beaks to peck out the eyes of hyenas who got too close, or else by delivering powerful kicks to the sensitive areas of the aggressors' bodies.
After that, the emu cavalry, as it had come to be called, was a most potent weapon in the koalas' defense arsenal, though it had virtually disappeared by modern times, no doubt because hyena attacks had become rare events.
Though there was, at times, still tension between emus and koalas, they had learned to accept, and even to respect, one another, and this good will ultimately helped to smooth out any differences they occasionally had. Once verbal communication between the two species became possible through translators, their relationship would improve with leaps and bounds, and within a year after the Great Migration, a new level of understanding and tolerance would be achieved between the furry koalas, and their large, feathered friends. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.