There is a bird who makes her home in a tree above a hairpin bend in the road, high in the little mountains of Gippsland.
She is a bush pigeon, or something. She is brown-feathered and plump. She busies herself in the hollows beneath the ferns, beneath the reigning eucalypts, snapping at insects and preening her feathers, ferrying twigs and fronds up to her nest.
Sometimes she has a partner to help her and pretty blue eggs to sit on, and then mouths to feed; but often she is alone when she hears the growl of a motor. They're uncommon on this slender mountain road, and when she hears them in the distance she flutters up to her bough and cocks her head.
As the grumbling becomes an automobile she watches it, and sometimes when the fancy takes her she hunkers out and shits on it, but not often. Generally she watches it pass, and pipes once or twice. Then she dives back to her bugs and the business of her feathers.
Less frequently, with her head at an angle and the motor not yet a car, she hears a second motor. Then she drops to the side of the road. One car will appear and make the turn, and down the road encounter the other car. They will slow, and slow-dance their way around each other, and perhaps she will bob her head, but let's say she doesn't, or let's say it doesn't mean anything.
Still, once or twice a season or a year, she will hear the twin rumblings of engines at just such a distance, just such a speed. She is already on the ground, strutting out onto the road, right into the middle of the one-forty-degree bend, to where she can see both cars equally, approaching her implacably.
She will sit there longer than a wise bird would, until the cars have seen her, until in the nature of cars they have slowed to shoo her, even patting their horns irritably to warn her.
When this happens, and their honks fill the air, or they have come almost to a standstill, she scurries off into the black gully.
Leaving us, with our hands upon our wheels and a little relief on our faces, to swing around each other and drive on through Gippsland, intact, unmet.
This is a way we've never met. It joins other ways, like tapping on your window, by indirect routes, and on a mission, with a little bird food.