The further we went, the more confident I felt. This, our first day out, was most clement, and the natural exuberance of my surroundings, the valleys of boulders and forested ridges, eased me along.
We awoke in our blankets the next dawn to the annoyance of drizzle and low cloud. ‘It will burn off,’ Long promised me. Yet the sky remained low and vile all day, and the sheep moved amongst ghostly gums in vaporous air. We depended on our dogs to sniff out those who would lose themselves from the flanks and vanish from the flock. The afternoon turned freezing and snow was aching to fall on the steep hills over which we took the sheep. In that air we found an abandoned hut of patchy construction – Long surmised it might have been a place used sometimes by the absconders. I had a sense that he had all the time known where it was. We crowded in, more or less cosily, except for those who had the first shift with the flock. By a mutton-fat light Felix got out his trigonometry text and began studying, and I felt a sting of tears on my lashes. I had introduced him to Horace and geometry as if they were unmitigated goods, instead of traps for the young voyager. We stayed there that night, and as wind howled, we drew our possum-skin rugs close. I moved my blanket to a halfway point of the hut, so that I might be Felix’s rampart. As I settled, I was aware of Long, close to me.
‘They reckon Goldspink is over where we are pointed. In the region named Treloar’s Suggan Buggan station. There that rascal sits!’
I could feel the urgency in Long. Maybe it was urgency for land, rather than grievance at Goldspink’s deceits. Here was Long, with his soberness of character, that commixture of skill and sense, and his awareness that the land though immense was not infinite, and might be all taken up soon.
‘I hope we would not need Goldspink’s hospitality on the other side of the peaks,’ I said.
He would not say though whether he wished the same or not.
We moved the sheep along in calm first light, south through a gradual but wooded and fairly gloomy pass. At nine o’clock, at the top of the pass, with a narrow high valley ahead of us, the snow came on as I had never seen it before. Even though from Nugan Ganway I could distantly see snow upon these mountains, I had considered it more decorative than dangerous. I was now astounded to see it blown into drifts amongst these trees. By noon my sheep waded to their chests, and the light turned the colour of a dirty pearl, and all was lost in it except the black dart of an occasional alarmed dog and the sight of Felix riding at my side. I could not give the order to return to the hut – it was likely my flock would perish there from cold. Our better hope was to keep them moving to the far side, where the wind should slacken and the snow ease.
But in the afternoon the snow increased and blinded us. All we could do was find each other in the stinging dimness of a failing day. Unsure where any of our stock were and with the dogs reduced to whimpering, we made a miserable little tent by draping our blankets artfully around some snow-choked scrub. Within this bivouac we lit a little fire. I now saw by its dim light that Felix was too thinly clothed. Long and I took turns loaning him our heavy coats, and an awful, scaldingly cold and profound darkness came on. I knew that tomorrow I would need to ride ahead of the flocks and get Felix to Goldspink’s. I had looked on such an arrival as contemptible. Now I longed to see Treloar’s despised overseer.
In the morning, in unabated blizzard, we managed to light a fire somehow. Felix said little but shivered and muttered incoherently. We fed him tea and cold damper, and then I set him on the saddle before me, encircling him with my arms.
‘Are you still well?’ I asked above the wind.
‘Yes, Mr Bettany. You are too kind.’
I asked Long to accompany me, and left Clancy, Presscart and the other men to find any protection they could. I presumed my sheep would perish, but I was prepared to yield up this portion of my stock to such a hungry storm if Felix could be saved. Following Long, who after all knew this country no more competently than I but who had assumed command, I had to dismount and drag my Hobbes and Felix’s horse Whitey along, with Felix tottering in the saddle. It struck me that perhaps Long was leading us eastwards, and from my own guilt, I could not remove from my mind a suspicion that he was not acting in good faith.
‘Are we not travelling too easterly?’ I shouted at him.
‘Yes, yes,’ he called back. ‘That is the way of it. The way to the rivers down here.’
Felix slipped into an uneasy, prattling sleep. At last, as the light icily cleared, Long indicated the way downhill, through fallen trees near buried in snow. Ahead lay stockyards and a little hut by a snow-choked river.
We hammered on the door, and there suddenly was a somewhat aged Goldspink, who nonetheless behaved as if he had been expecting us. He told us where to put the horses. Seeing my arm around Felix, and Long behind me, he grinned. ‘Old friends,’ he said, and Long said, above the wind, ‘Yes. If that’s what you want. Old friends.’
We moved Felix, who only said, ‘Don’t push me too far since I’ll break,’ into the hut, where the fire raged. Goldspink was on his own, and seemed drunk or in a fever himself. ‘You hold the boy tenderly,’ he said as Long and I carried Felix towards the fire. ‘People always thought he was your boy, you know, Bettany. He has the manners.’
‘Don’t be an insulting bastard!’ Long told him, and conversation waned.
We had no strength for a dispute with Goldspink anyhow, and his few square feet were the only place for Felix, and indeed us, to be. So I wrapped Felix up in whatever rugs we could find and fed him tea, and I heard him whisper, ‘So kind, so kind.’ We ourselves ate mutton and damper ravenously, and made halting conversation with Goldspink. Then we wrapped ourselves in our rugs and were happy to sleep, though as the wind raged we wondered about those we had left behind in their small tabernacle of blankets by Clancy’s wagon.
With Goldspink still sitting up drinking rum, Long murmured to me as we settled, ‘It’s a matter of wonder he doesn’t ask us to pay for our meal now, in the event we perish by night.’
I felt desolate, eroded to a shiver of dry wood by the storm. I wanted, with the simplest and most utter hunger, to be with Bernard. The fire raged and the hut had sometimes a fevered, sometimes an icy atmosphere. In the morning I bought a little of Goldspink’s store of rum, flour, sugar and beef, and packed my bags to take all this as relief to my men who might in their snowy isolation use some of these comforts. I would need to find them myself – not, I believed, a hard task but one which if I fulfilled it might help re-establish me as head of this droving enterprise and of where it had begun, Nugan Ganway. Thus, I fancied, I was beginning to think like a master, a boss, again.
I told Long, ‘I am sure, Sean, you’d rather be friends with the gale than with present company.’ This late-season blizzard had done wonders in making us companions.
‘Yes, sir, but you must know I’ll do my best to ignore the blackguard.’
And that was how, the snow not being too heavy on that side of the mountain, I set off back uphill on Hobbes, laden with the comfort of supplies, in snow still falling but under a sky which gave some promise of clearing from the west.
It is curious how quick is the way back from places arduously departed from in anxiety and under adverse winds. Nonetheless I found Clancy and the stockmen very worried, huddled together under their makeshift blanket tent and without a fire. The admirable Merino sheep, however, the majority of whom could have been expected to die, had everywhere struggled up out of the snow and were now trying to dig down into it with their hooves, searching for buried pasture.
Seeing me coming, Presscart yelled, ‘We’ll have you to pasture soon, darlings.’
We roused the living sheep from the drifts and shuffled them down the ridge in cold afternoon sunlight. My stockmen had been cheered by a pannikin of the rum I had brought with me, and Clancy began singing pleasantly in baritone. Some hundreds of my flock were left dead beneath the snow, but Presscart, who had an eye for estimating stock en masse, argued that as many as 3000 still hardi
ly travelled with us. A clear night of no wind overtook us on a platform of patchy snow, where we slept comfortably beneath intense stars and by a huge fire.
When, next morning, we found Goldspink’s place, we could perceive, from above and through the thicket of trees which surrounded the hut and stockyards, some not quite decipherable activity, a mixture of the mobile and the static. As we rode closer, the sheep gratefully descending into warmer air, it proved to be Long, digging a pit in the red and black soil of the yard. The earth moved easily, for a warm morning had softened it with melted snow.
A little closer and I was shocked that the work he was engaged in was the digging of a grave. Nearby, wrapped in wool sacks, a figure awaited interment. At the sight, the fragile security the journey had restored to me vanished utterly. I galloped downhill in a panic, and the sheep rushed behind me.
‘Felix?’ I cried, hauling myself off Hobbes’s back.
‘No sir, it’s Goldspink, gone to hell.’
I released a breath and covered my face with my hands. ‘How?’ I asked. ‘How gone to hell?’
‘He has been hit about the head, again and again, I think. A whole number of times.’
Indeed I could see a bloody mess on the burlap which covered the head. Clancy arrived with the wagon, went to the shrouded mess, lifted the woolsacks and looked underneath at the corpse. ‘Jesus. It’s Goldspink transformed. He looks better.’
‘Is Felix recovered?’ I asked further.
Long stopped digging and looked uncomfortable. ‘I fear he’s gone, sir. With proper clothing this time – the big sheepskin coat he found here. I think you might find him at one of Goldspink’s outer huts. I’m sure he’s well. But frightened.’
Naturally, since he had a stunned but intimate association with what had happened, I brought him out of his dazed labour of grave-digging by insisting he tell me events in order.
As first light came on that morning, said Long, having been wakeful all night, he fell profoundly asleep. When he woke the hut was empty. He came outside and found Felix’s horse, the mare Whitey, gone. Goldspink, the night before, had mentioned that he needed to visit some of his out-station shepherds, to see how the hard weather had affected their flocks. Could it be believed that he and Felix had ridden off on the one horse to make this excursion? For Goldspink’s big mare was still in the stockyard.
Long unhobbled and saddled his own horse and followed the tracks of Felix’s horse where they led with fairly hectic directness north-east over a ground of grassland and rock in which no shrubs grew to confuse the issue. But he had not ridden more than two hundred yards when he found Goldspink lying dead at the base of a trunk, with his head beaten front and back repeatedly. A thick coachwood branch on the ground nearby seemed to have much blood on it, and it accounted for the injuries to the brow. But then the back of the head seemed, by the signs on the tree, to have been thudded repeatedly against the base of the trunk.
Covering the broken head with his possum-skin jacket, Long had spent some hours following Felix’s tracks – there was no mistaking Long’s avuncular concern for what might have befallen his protégé in terms of horsemanship, mine in terms of Horace. Losing the tracks at a stream full of snow-melt, he reassured himself that the boy, however appalled and stampeded at what he might have witnessed that morning, possessed the skills to reach shelter somewhere. He thus returned to bury Goldspink’s body, a task at which he was willing.
Long had been working at a pace, and during his recitation of this tale his face glistened with his cold sweat. He wanted to be off again, looking for Felix in a more considered way. I got Clancy and Presscart to take over the digging and took Long aside.
‘Sean,’ I told him, ‘you must be calm.’ Though he could have said, ‘Nice talk from you!’ he merely nodded.
‘Are you telling me Felix witnessed this? Or that he did this?’
‘God knows he is strong enough, sir. Or else Goldspink was at last jumped on by a tyrannised shepherd. It cannot have been natives, though they like the hardwood club. But it is not their season.’
‘And … forgive me … you did not do it?’
‘Oh,’ he agreed softly, ‘better me than Felix, that’s certain. I had proposed to myself having a few deadly things out with him this morning. But you see, I did not get around to it.’
‘But why would Felix do such a thing?’
‘I couldn’t start to surmise,’ Long told me.
‘And why did you drag Goldspink back here?’
‘I put him on my horse. It wasn’t the right thing to bury even such as him under a tree with the blood of his murder on it.’
‘Look, Sean,’ I said. ‘there is no magistrate here. This is cisalpine New South Wales, and the only law is you and me and the other lads with us. In fairness to Treloar, the shepherds will need to be told. Treloar himself can be told. But it is all very confused. One of Treloar’s stockmen may have stalked him and done it. Who, in Goulburn say, or in Sydney, can tell? Let’s be calm, and find Felix.’
We inspected Goldspink again, and verified he was certainly dead. This man who had shown me Nugan Ganway, this ambiguous messenger of the gods, as I had once thought of him. He deserved the recitation of a psalm, for in guiding me to my country he had awarded me both a great earthly asset and a great earthly burden. I perversely gave him Psalm 10, which seemed to relate as much to the situation of the living as of the dead. ‘Lord, thou hast heard the desire of the humble: thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear: to judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the man of the earth may no longer oppress.’ No one seemed to find my choice curious.
After the burial I left the flock on Goldspink’s (and thus Treloar’s) home pasture in the care of two of my men, and the rest of us rode off behind Long, following the line he had taken that morning. From the far side, in country with great verticals of timber, we formed a long, sweeping line and called for Felix. But Felix did not answer, and Long was sure Felix was not there. He would surely have answered to my voice, Long fancied, and the bark of the dogs he loved.
We spent a further day searching for him, some of my men even scouring caves in escarpments to the east. Had anything bad befallen him, we believed, our dogs would surely run to the scent of his familiar blood. We found some high pasture huts of the kind generally occupied only in summer, but Felix was not sheltering in them. In the afternoon of the second day we gave it up and rode back as fast as we could to the flock at the Suggan Buggan River, Goldspink’s place.
Long seemed to have his hopes restored by the very absence of Felix in the country we had scoured. ‘He is fled home,’ Long told me, ‘and there we’ll find him, drinking tea with Bernard.’
Returning to Goldspink’s house we found it full of his shepherds – nine of them, drinking rum, using the death of their overseer as a pretext. They were not mourning. They were telling tales of Goldspink’s favourite weapon of discipline, a knout of rope enclosing a shard of flint. One of them had a facial scar from it, and said merrily that Goldspink had nearly taken out his eye. Then there was the short-rationing, they told me. Goldspink liked to store up tea, flour, sugar and tobacco, so that he might have plenty to buy native women with in the summer.
I remembered Felix’s mother. The absconders’ misused woman? Or Goldspink’s?
Now the question arose of what was to be done. I sent one of my stockmen, a reliable Scot from the Border country, the sort of rustic with a lifetime behind him of lonely rides in harsh climates, riding home alone, to give the news, see if Felix were there, and if not, search for him. Should he find the Port Phillip Pass blocked by snow and was concerned for his safety, he was to camp and wait for conditions to improve or for the rest of us to arrive.
I had no choice but to take my flock westwards towards my brother’s, and we started out. I dreamed at night, in the camps in the middle of our flocks, that Felix presented himself with a small wound in his hand, which he presented to me for inspection, and rejoined an expe
dition in which snow and precipices were the only peril. Even in dreams I did not fear for him as one would fear for someone who abandoned a scene of violence in Van Diemen’s Land or say, Nottingham. A killing so far beyond the Limits of Location was a killing beyond the purview of authority, even if it could be shown to be Felix’s work. We would find him somewhere soon, and all he would need to be rescued from was the weight of maligned Goldspink’s blood.
At my brother’s Broken River station we did not even pause a night. The place looked comfortless, for Elizabeth had departed on her journey to England, taking my little niece with her. I had time for a quick meeting with my father, who though he looked balder and more crooked in the legs, retained a young man’s briskness. ‘You would not believe how the book prospers, Jonathan,’ he assured me, then lowered his voice. ‘Simon is a generous son, but too long a contact with one’s father may become tiresome. I may visit you.’ His eyes flashed. ‘Simon has heard a rumour you console your solitary state with the companionship of a handsome felon. Eh, is it true?’
I stammered, and left him while he was still laughing.
We were all dismayed to find Felix had not returned to Nugan Ganway. That fact diminished the joy of my reunion with Bernard. How much freer, however, could affection be now that I had shown myself I could continue to exist outside her salutary presence. Since Long was particularly full of self-reproach, I needed to take the unusual role of comforter. He is not dead in the mountains, I assured Long. He may be in some town, sheltering with a clergyman.
Within the next day, my less-than-confident guess proved itself correct. A note arrived in the forenoon from the Reverend Paltinglass at Cooma Creek, brought by the sixteen-year-old son of the surveyor there. The note said simply, ‘Bettany, Please come at your earliest chance. There is someone harbouring here who much wishes to see you.’
Bettany's Book Page 62