One day a young man went out hunting. His family warned him to watch out for Mimih Spirits, the tall spirits who live in the Stone Country and can steal people away into their caves. And so he went off with his spear and spear thrower into the escarpment.
Now at the same time, a Mimih spirit was about to leave for a day’s hunting. He left his cave and put his pet kangaroo out on the grass. Mimih Spirits have rock kangaroos like barrk (black wallaroos) as pets. He took his spear and went further up into the rocks.
The young man approached the very place where the Mimih had left his pet kangaroo. He took out his djalaban (a type of spear with a flat ironwood head) and went to spear the kangaroo. At that point the Mimih, ho had been watching from up in the rocks, called out. “Duruk ngarduk!” he said. “That’s my dog!”(Mimihs call their pet kangaroos their dogs). “What’s that?” the young man called out in fright. He started shaking. “Kokok marneyime” called out the Mimih. “You can call me brother”. “I’ll call you older brother, and you can call me younger brother”.
And the man saw the Mimih standing up there, very tall and thin and pale. Mimihs are very skinny, and have to watch out that their thin necks don’t break in the wind. But he took the Mimih up on his offer, and they became brothers.
“Let’s meet at the same place tomorrow” said the Mimih. “We can go hunting together”.
So the man went back to his family, who were down at a spring preparing karrbarda (long yams). He told them he didn’t catch anything, and that he’d try a different place tomorrow. But he was only tricking them. He intended to go back to the same place the next day to go hunting with his brother the Mimih.
So the next day he got up and went up into the rocks, to the very same place. There were kangaroos everywhere! And his brother was there too. “Wow, there are lots of kangaroos here” he told him. “Spear one”, said the Mimih. He wanted to see how the man used a spear. So the man snuck up, but was surprised to see the kangaroo seemed totally unafraid. He thought to himself the Mimih must have blown in their ears to deaden their hearing. He threw his djalaban and hit the kangaroo. The Mimih saw how he threw his spear the normal human way.
Next it was the Mimih’s turn but the young man was surprised to see the Mimih throwing the spear behind his head. This is how the Mimihs do it. “What do you call that spear?” he asked him. “I call it Mandanj”, the Mimih said. This is their word for their spears, with two sharp spikes on the end. “And this spearthrower I call Galpu”. “My spear is a Djalaban”, said the young man, “And my spearthrower I call Borndok”. And so they got to know each other, and were curious about each other. So much so that they decided to swap spears and spearthrowers. “Don’t worry” said the man “I won’t show my family.” “I’ll hide them halfway in the bush”. “I’ll do the same”, the Mimih said. And so they swapped their hunting equipment, took their kangaroos and arranged to meet the next day.
But the man didn’t keep his word. He walked back to camp and proudly put his kangaroo on the ground, and stuck his spear in the earth. “That’s not your spear!” said his family. And so he explained to them everything that had happened. Now they were curious, and begged him to bring the Mimih down so they could see him.
And first the young man refused, but then he relented. “We’ll hide in the thick jungle where the water comes off the escarpment” they told him. “You bring him down from the rocks.” “OK” said the man. “But you guys stay quiet. Don’t let him know you’ve seen him”.
The next day, the man went back up to the Stone Country to meet the Mimih. “There’s lots of kangaroos just down there!” he told him, gesturing down the escarpment. At first the Mimih followed his brother trustingly. But as they started to go down to where the man’s clan was hiding, the Mimih started to think “He’s leading me to the wrong place! He’s tricking me!”. And he stood still.
But it was too late. The man’s clan, hiding in the jungle thicket, saw the tall, skinny, white figure standing up on the rocks. “Waaah!” they screamed. They through perhaps they had been tricked themselves, and it was a Namarnde Spirit who would kill them all.
“Waaaaw!” cried the Mimih. He realised he had been seen, and ran away screaming. He slept two nights before he went back to his family, his stomach knotted in anguish and fear, his body scratched. His father healed him with an ironwood branch. But he never let on that he had been seen by people. He kept that his secret. But he wanted revenge. “I won’t call him kokok (brother) anymore”, he said to himself. “I’m going to hunt him”.
So the next day he went back to where he had dutifully hidden the man’s djalaban spear and borndok spearthrower, and went off. And in fact it wasn’t long before he saw the man, hunting kangaroos again. But this time he didn’t call out to him. Silently he fitted the spear and threw it straight at the man who had been his brother.
“Rdarda kanyameng!” the man called out. “Little brother, you’ve speared me!”. “Yiwarreni, kankoweng” said the Mimih. “You deceived me, you did wrong”. “Marram ngunkukngun”. “The whistling kites will eat you. And that’s how your family will find your body”. And with that the Mimih went back to his cave. He opened the rocks by blowing on them (warddebuhmeng) in the fashion of Mimihs. The rocks parted, and he went back inside.