Mosquito Creek

by Robert Engwerda

  ‘Whatever you reckon,’ Alec said.

  ‘I mean it. If you think you can put one over me, if the gold isn’t there or is somewhere else then you’re trying to fool the wrong person. I’m not stupid.’

  ‘I never said you were.’

  ‘Lord almighty! Burying the bloody gold back where it came from in the first place!’

  This time Alec let it pass.

  He suggested they walk a spell, see what the other two parties were doing. Merriman only reluctantly agreed.

  Pushing their way through the prickly scrub they made hard work of the fifty yards to the north-east side of their island, where the Geelong shearer, his nephew and Jim Spearitt were squatting around their camp, each picking a chop clean with greasy fingers.

  The shearer, Silas, stood by way of greeting. ‘What do you bastards want?’

  ‘Come on. Nothing for us here,’ Alec mumbled to Merriman, whose fists opened and clenched before he followed Alec away. ‘See what the other ones are up to?’

  Heading west, they found Bill and Kentucky foraging among some fallen timber.

  ‘Any sign of Ship?’ Alec asked carefully.

  Both men shook their heads.

  ‘Still could be all right somewhere,’ Alec offered hopefully.

  Kentucky pulled a decaying log over with his hands, flicking black beetles off the log with his long fingers, a rank wetness everywhere.

  ‘He’s gone, has poor old Ship, and we ain’t got no more food. What about you blokes?’

  ‘We haven’t much left either,’ Merriman said evasively.

  ‘Well, we better hope this water goes down quick. We’re starvin’ already,’ Kentucky said.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Alec asked.

  ‘Might find grubs or something. The blacks say you can eat some of them,’ Bill said.

  ‘Not me.’ Merriman dismissed the notion. ‘I’d die before I ate insects.’

  ‘If you’re hungry enough …’ Bill mumbled, dragging a length of bark over.

  ‘Are you from America?’ Alec asked Kentucky.

  The tall, lanky digger looked up. ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘It’s just the way you talk. I suppose that’s how you got your name, where you came from. Kentucky.’

  The digger drew himself to his full height. ‘I was born over there, but I ain’t been there a long time. And Kentucky, I never ever been there. People think it’s funny, but it ain’t. This is my country now.’

  ‘If I were you, I would’ve stayed over there,’ Merriman said, looking around.

  ‘We were goin’ all right till all this.’ Kentucky waved his arm towards the river.

  ‘There’s still a good chance the water will go down soon,’ Alec said. ‘It can’t stay high like this forever.’

  He and Merriman soon wandered back to their own camp.

  ‘We’ve still got a bit of tucker left. Enough for two meals if we go easy on it,’ Alec said.

  Merriman said nothing.

  Back at their claim Alec coaxed a fire to life from some coals wrapped up in bark before pulling away some short branches hiding their camp oven.

  ‘Here we go. I’m hungry now. How about you?’

  ‘I could have something,’ Merriman said as he watched Alec drag the lid off the black cast-iron pot and stare into it.

  ‘Hey, what happened to the mutton?’

  Alec swivelled on his haunches to face Merriman.

  ‘What mutton?’

  ‘ “What mutton”? Don’t talk rubbish to me, Jack. The mutton I’d left in the pot before.’

  ‘I didn’t see it.’

  ‘The mutton! The mutton was there before. A piece like this!’ Alec measured with his hands.

  ‘Well, I didn’t see any,’ Merriman protested again.

  ‘It was there this morning. A piece we had left over from last night that we were going to share.’

  ‘Perhaps you ate it.’

  Alec stood up awkwardly. ‘And when would I have eaten it?’

  The Englishman looked off into the distance. ‘You’re telling the story. You tell me.’

  ‘It was supposed to be for both of us!’ Alec snapped.

  ‘Well I didn’t eat it.’

  ‘Who did then?’

  Merriman poked at their meagre fire with a twist of stick. ‘Who knows? Maybe there was none.’

  Alec strode away a few paces and then back. ‘And you’re the one not trusting me to look after the gold when I can’t even leave you alone with a piece of meat for a minute. And raw!’

  Merriman began pacing too. ‘I told you!’ he said through whistling teeth. ‘I told you! I didn’t take your wretched mutton.’ He put his hands to his hips. ‘And what would it matter anyway if I did? What difference is it going to make? We’ll be here a day or two more. The food gets eaten now or it gets eaten later on. So what?’

  ‘ “So what”? You think more food is going to drop out of the sky? Just like magic? You don’t know anything! We could be stuck here a long time. And what are we going to eat? Dirt and leaves?’

  ‘You see that water over there?’ Merriman shouted, jabbing wildly at the river. ‘It’s just sitting there over the land till the river hurries on and makes some space for it to drain into. That’s all it is. That’s a flood. It’s science. When the water runs away we’ll walk off this island.’

  ‘Science? There’s miles of water there. Miles and miles and miles. Far as you or anyone else can see. And up there. More and more rain. We don’t even know what’s happening where the river starts. It could be worse than here. You’re a fool!’

  ‘I’m not a fool,’ Merriman shot back. ‘Don’t call me a fool!’

  ‘You took the meat!’ Alec pointed fiercely at the pot in which all that remained was a wrinkled potato and half an onion. ‘So what else would you be? That was for now and some for tomorrow. Now all we’ve got is this!’

  Merriman was bouncing on his feet. ‘We’ll see who’s a fool! The waters’ll bloody go and then you’re on your own.’ He strode off and disappeared into the scrub.

  Alec watched the break between two bushes into which Merriman had vanished, as if he might suddenly materialise there again, but he didn’t.

  Left to his own devices by the fire Alec bent and snatched a short length of stick from under the canvas fly of their tent, snapping it across his knee. Then he took another and another, feeding them into the fire. What reasonably dry timber he could find he drew around the flames, the larger, damper pieces throwing off smoke the minute he arranged them close to the blaze.

  As he worked rain began falling again, first as spatters and then lightly but more insistently. He rigged a shelter of branches and cut poles to shield the flames from the worst of it. Satisfied, he gazed towards the water.

  It was a foreign country here, strange as Africa. There were no maps to show what was where. Every grab of land surfacing through the flood was a new land, every quick run of water a new river. Last night he thought he heard a voice calling through the night. But it may have been one of his fellow prisoners crying out or wind cutting over black water, or some mewling creature stranded on a patch of ground even smaller than their own. This morning perhaps seventy yards to the north he had seen a miserable-looking black-headed wallaby crouching on a pocket of earth.

  He looked at the dripping gums across the water, imagining black storm clouds smoking through them. It already felt as though they’d been stuck on the island weeks instead of the two, three days, whatever it was. There was no sign of anything out through the trees when he peered, no sign of anyone coming for them. Shouldn’t there have been a boat or something on the lookout for people such as themselves? Punts plied the river in normal times and even now might still be. But most boats were probably moored somewhere tight. There was too much floating debris for anyone to risk such a trip. And that was the other thing, he thought, even the normal run of the river and its islands would have been hidden by the flood. Boatmen would be able to find few of
their normal landmarks.

  He wondered if anyone had thought of them. What about McMurphy and his other former partners? When might they start to wonder what had happened to him? They knew he was going to dig on this side of the river. Or were they still crooked on him for trying his luck somewhere else? He pondered on which one of that party might be most likely to raise the alarm. Certainly it wouldn’t have been McMurphy, who only ever worried about himself, just like Merriman. All Brown and Bagley ever thought about was gold and where to find it. And that left only Oriente, who had confided the day he left that he might be away very soon too. And Oriente was an unusual sort of bloke. For days he might say next to nothing and then one evening wander over to your fire and blurt out the strangest things. Like he did once about the commissioner, Stanfield. Oriente said he was a bad egg, and he knew because he travelled with him on the same ship, the Whitby. He reckoned the commissioner had it in for him.

  How true was all of that? Alec wondered. Probably none of it. Why would a goldfields commissioner have anything to do with a digger in the first place? And especially one like Oriente, who made up all kinds of lies. He was an artist, he claimed, and an actor who could make good money doing both those things. Which raised the question from those around him – Why don’t you, then, instead of doing this? In these times, when most of the gold was gone, the diggings were home to dreamers, wanderers and misfits, braggarts and thieves; people with nothing and people on their last chance. And Alec knew it was like that for himself, that this was his last chance. And perhaps it had already passed.

  He wondered now, though, what was in that letter he had buried in the tin.

  When he turned back towards the tent he found Merriman crouching by the fire, appearing out of thin air.

  ‘Onion or potato?’ his partner asked without looking at him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you want the onion or the potato?’

  In the weak flames of the fire the vegetables were battling to cook inside the camp oven.

  ‘I wanted both,’ Alec said, ‘since you ate the lamb. But I guess we’ll share them.’

  Merriman looked at him uncertainly. ‘I don’t eat onions. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll have the potato.’

  He was still his animal self, any politeness in the words only.

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’ll eat the onion,’ Alec muttered.

  And with that Merriman drew a fork from his pocket and speared the potato, lifting it straight to his face and blowing on it even though it was only half-cooked.

  Alec turned his head in disgust.

  14

  ‘What about this place?’ Niall asked Smales and the other trooper with him, Charlie Lightbody.

  During the ride out here to find a suitable site for a quarantine station they’d ridden past two properties already, both scrubby affairs where they hadn’t been able to rouse a single person. But this place more than a mile and a half from the diggings looked like it might be something.

  Niall held his men back at a distance as he surveyed two sturdy huts built amid a thin stand of eucalypt, one a great dwelling more like a house. A good, high place, he thought. He also noticed temporary railings creating a pen and a decent-sized yard. In the course of his policing he’d ridden out this way a number of times, recognising the Irish owner by sight if not by name.

  He felt uneasy though. He just wanted to find a place to house the sick quickly and then get to the bottom of what was causing the outbreak before it ran all over the top of them. That was in addition to the havoc caused by the floods – the trapped diggers, now Stanfield was roping him in to be responsible for them too. Then there was Phillip Oriente and his conversation with the alcoholic miner. How far could he trust someone like that? There was a fair chance he’d never see that pound again.

  ‘Well, boys?’ Niall asked the troopers again after they failed to answer him the first time. ‘What do you think?’

  The Irish settler had spent some time making the area liveable, that much was clear. It didn’t have the slapdash of most huts and pastoral runs.

  ‘Looks all right to me,’ Smales offered.

  Niall glanced to Lightbody, a tall fellow with fair hair and an easygoing, gangling way about him.

  ‘To me too,’ Lightbody said.

  ‘Think you’d be able to keep everyone safe here?’

  ‘Depends how many,’ Smales said. It wasn’t often the sergeant asked him for his opinion so he was milking it now. He stared at the huts. ‘You’ve also got to remember the people who’ll have to look after them.’

  ‘Good point. It looks like they’re a decent size though. You’d get enough of the really sick ones in there. They’re not one-room hutches.’

  ‘And the rest could go under canvas.’

  ‘They could,’ Niall agreed. They had to act quickly now. Typhoid, if that’s what it was, could cut down a goldfield in no time once it was loose. ‘What do you think, Charlie?’

  ‘It’s a goer,’ the trooper reckoned.

  A pair of magpies alighted in a gum nearby, calling back and forth with throaty, watery insistence.

  ‘Why didn’t we just dump everyone out here now, straight away?’ Smales asked.

  ‘I want to be happy we’ve got the right place first,’ Niall said. ‘Let’s see who’s home.’

  He thumped on the door of the larger dwelling, built with well-sawn timbers, paned windows in wooden frames and a stone and cement chimney that itself would have been the work of days.

  It took several minutes to encourage an answer but finally the settler Niall had seen here before appeared from a gap between the door and its frame.

  ‘What do yer want?’ he demanded.

  Niall offered his hand but the Irishman, who looked about sixty, ignored it. If not for the police uniforms, Niall guessed, the bloke would’ve barked them on their way in quick fashion. He looked like he was used to doing so.

  ‘Are you the owner of this place?’ Niall asked.

  His fellow troopers stood back a pace and to the side so all three were clearly visible from the hut door.

  ‘Who else would I be? Joan of Arc?’

  He was bald with a smooth but speckled pinkish head, red cheeks and only wisps of white hair above his ears. Muscular and with broad shoulders, he displayed the strength of someone who had worked outside all his life. He threw shrewd, suspicious glances at each of his visitors, with sharp grey eyes. When he spoke it was as if he had a mouthful of gravel, everything coming out in a rumbling slur.

  There was something else, though. Niall knew in an instant that the man had served time somewhere or other. It showed in the way he almost bared his teeth, like a convict did when he was about to set upon someone or defend himself from a beating. It was also in the way he carried himself. As he emerged from the doorway the settler presented himself front-on to all three of them in turn, in the silent challenge of the prison yard.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Niall demanded.

  A woman appeared in the doorway. She was younger, much younger, surprising Niall. She had to be a daughter, he guessed, though men often had much younger wives out in the bush. Whichever she was, she pushed through to stand in front of the settler.

  ‘What’s yours?’

  She said it confidently and the way she stood made it clear she too was used to sending layabouts on their way. Now he could see her better, Niall found she appeared neither young nor old but approaching an age where other women may have already marked her for a spinster. She was probably about thirty. From what Niall could see she was a worker with broad shoulders too. Her sleeves were pulled back to reveal brown arms and strong hands. Her hair was long and unkempt, black and Irish. But she was pleasant-looking too. She had the same grey, compelling eyes as her father – he could now see the family resemblance – with fine skin and full lips.

  Niall tried peering into the house but the pair deliberately obscured most of what was behind them.

  ‘Fair eno
ugh. I’m Sergeant Niall Kennedy from the diggings. Part of the force under Commissioner Stanfield, here to —’

  ‘Yes, we’ve heard of him,’ the daughter interrupted. ‘Englishman.’

  ‘What’s that?’ the old man asked, turning side-on to his daughter.

  She drew her face close to tell him.

  ‘We’re here on business,’ Niall said.

  ‘What sort of business?’ she demanded. When she spoke she waved her hands about, part of her language.

  ‘How about your father says something for himself?’

  ‘If he could hear what you were saying, there might be some point to that. As he can’t, you can tell me.’

  She was taking stock of him, Niall knew. He felt her eyes piercing him in a way he found unnerving.

  ‘He can hear you.’

  ‘That’s me. He’s used to me.’

  ‘All right, then.’

  The settler continued glaring at him, and in turn down his nose at Smales in such a way the trooper began taking offence.

  ‘Old bastard’s lost his marbles as well as his hair,’ Smales muttered to Lightbody.

  ‘What?’ The settler moved threateningly forward towards Smales.

  ‘Deaf prick! You heard that!’

  ‘Hey!’ the woman yelled.

  ‘I’ll show yer who’s the old bastard!’

  The settler charged Smales, sending him reeling backwards in fright. The trooper skipped just out of harm’s way as his sergeant stepped in between the pair, separating them and pushing the old man back.

  ‘Smales! You and Charlie drop back a bit,’ Niall ordered. ‘Give the horses a bit of a wander. You,’ he pointed at the Irishman, ‘you get back to the house!’

  The two troopers moved away reluctantly while Niall shrugged his shoulders. The ruddy-faced settler stood alongside his daughter, heaving with anger.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Niall said to them, immediately regretting taking a backward step himself when he already knew the two of them weren’t going to be happy about having to give up their farm. ‘We’re here on business,’ he continued, keeping an eye on the troopers, ‘and we aim to do it. If we all agree to be pleasant that’ll make it easier for everyone.’