The men pressed together, slapping each other as they fell into gales of laughter. The dead man’s chest and stomach split open disgorging a vile, black slop.
Shrieking, one of the troopers threw a stick at it as they all recoiled, falling over themselves and each other in retreat.
With the men gone, Niall had an easy escape from the edge of the clearing back into wiry undergrowth, further through it into where the bush grew denser, till in minutes he was completely lost in the security of thick scrub, working his way around to where he’d left the horse.
From what he had witnessed and from what he’d seen earlier of the renegade troopers he doubted any doctor had been sent to care for those sent here, or to attend them in their dying. Nor was there any respect being given to where the dead might rest. These men now blew as the wind and in doing so the commissioner had broken every written and unwritten law there was to protect the sick and dying.
22
Alec crouched by the water’s edge trying to estimate if it was holding, rising or falling back. The difficulty was finding a mark in the waterlogged ground or tidemarks such as you’d see on a shore. When he looked skyward he almost had to squint against a sun that had finally revealed itself.
Merriman had been difficult through the night, his wounds keeping both of them awake. When he did sleep his dreams tossed between yesterday’s beating and the pain of waking and remembering. Sometimes he moaned with hurt, crying when his injuries throbbed too long and he knew there would be no quick end to it. When exhaustion overcame him he fell into a broken sleep, sometimes murmuring, sometimes calling out or coughing.
It was his own fault, Alec thought. He’d told Merriman to leave the Geelong crowd well enough alone. They were never going to give him anything and it was a waste of time wandering over. A blind man could’ve seen that. But he felt for the man all the same. They could have just sent him away. There was no need to do what they did.
Alec determined he’d fix his bearings away from the island to gain a better estimate of the water’s height. He knew which direction north was but there wasn’t much around to tell one thing from the other. Before the floods the country beyond the meandering creeks and billabongs was ragged with stands of spindly gums and what was left of a much larger red gum forest. There were the ranges to the north hemming in what was now a vast inland lake.
As he scanned the waters around him he caught sight of the black-headed wallaby marooned on its small patch of ground. That would be his measure, he decided. If anything was to change he’d see it right there to the north. Although it was too far away to see clearly, the animal appeared to be moping, getting up from its haunches and hopping a few paces to all sides before slumping to the ground again.
He still couldn’t believe the position he was in. Any rescue now would have to come from the south, across from the other side of the river where the diggings were. When the Murray was neatly contained within its banks no one had thought twice about taking the punt at McLaren’s Crossing and prospecting on the other side. What was just over the south side of the river, they argued, should also be over there to the north. But the seams and courses of ancient rivers were fluky wherever you stood. They had found gold but not yet the ounces they’d wanted, which meant, their logic told them, that there was still a rich lode waiting to be discovered.
It was brighter now as the sun leant over the island, bathing him in sudden light. He stepped forward, raised his arms like a diver preparing to launch into water far below. It was a relief getting sunlight and air through his damp clothes; almost like getting a clean, dry change.
His stomach complained again. It was now he should be preparing his midday meal, tossing a bit of damper into the fire or whatever meat he had into a pan. The ritual of tea and food was what they all dwelt on, him as much as anyone. They dreamt of eggs, butter, fruit, prime cuts of meat and expensive bottles of drink. Outside of Sunday rest days, mealtimes were the only times to think about what lay ahead. Evenings they were too tired, all other possibilities too far away.
Now, all he could think about was rescue. He guessed it might be another day or two before someone with a boat risked the current and tried for them. It was reasonable to think anyone searching might wait till the waters dropped a foot or two, a two-foot drop making a big difference. But perhaps the weather was breaking here with this sunlight. The river could fall six feet and fall quickly. It would change everything.
Momentarily heartened, he fossicked around for what he might eat. He’d have to find something for Merriman too, a gloomy prospect when the Englishman would’ve whined if he’d been delivered a six-course meal on silver service. They could go this day without food and perhaps another but probably not much longer. Hunger married with bitterly cold nights was already wearing them down.
He was so deep in thought the men were upon him before he even heard them approaching. Only the last crackle of twigs underfoot caused him to spin around.
‘Who —?’ he blundered, as the men came up to him single file, stepping out to stand side by side.
The Geelong mob. It was the shearer, Silas, who spoke first.
‘You cooking something up with that other bloke? The one that came to steal our food yesterday?’
Alec knew him only vaguely before the floods and not much better now. He was a tough sort, big and meaty, and when he spoke it was to the point. He wasn’t going to waste his time on anything or anyone on the diggings, even in the mess they were in now.
‘It wasn’t me who took anything,’ Alec said. ‘I mind my own business.’
‘But your mate doesn’t.’
The other two, the shearer’s nephew Chris and Jim Spearitt, stood by in support, their eyes drilling into him. Whatever he thought about them or wanted to do it wasn’t going to happen right now.
‘I can’t tell him everything to do.’
‘So he just went ahead and did it all by himself?’ Spearitt questioned, his jaw forward.
‘I don’t even know what he did. He wasn’t in good shape when he came back.’
‘What he did was try to knock off our tucker. Only we were up to him.’
‘Uncle knew what he’d try to do,’ the boy nipped in.
‘Did we ever!’
‘And when we caught him sneaking back we give him what he deserved,’ Spearitt said. ‘It’ll teach him to stay clear of our claim, it will.’
‘Too right,’ the boy said.
‘He’s a fucking thief.’
‘And we give him what for.’
‘What did he take?’ Alec wanted to know.
Spearitt looked at his friends.
‘Just the point,’ he said. ‘He didn’t take anything. We didn’t give him a chance.’
‘He would’ve though,’ the boy added.
‘I’m gonna tell you blokes,’ Silas said, ‘if either of you comes around to our camp again, what happened yesterday is going to look like a picnic.’ He raised his arm and stabbed a stubby finger at Alec. ‘So you just watch it! If he comes back again – or you – you’ll be minced meat.’
With that, they strode off.
Alec stood up properly, away from the sloppy ground close by the water, watching the departing figures. They’d taken off in the direction of his camp and Merriman but he let them go without following for a while.
The madness of it was he could’ve walked a fair distance into this more calm water to the north and taken a chance on finding a path through the flood. But it was a lottery too. There were all sorts of gullies and billabongs, extinct watercourses where the river once cut erratically into the land. One minute you could be walking up to your waist in water without too many problems, a further step and you would suddenly be in over your head. And he was no swimmer. But if the water dropped a couple of feet it might reveal a way out and away from the island.
He contemplated that a few minutes before returning to camp.
The Geelong mob had passed through their tent too. Merriman was still in h
is bed, making noises more animal than human.
‘Did they do anything to you again?’ Alec questioned, looking at the disarray in the tent.
But Merriman had dragged himself further under his blankets and whatever he was saying was lost. Alec pulled the top blanket back so he could see his face.
Stronger light from outside wasn’t making him look any better. His bad eye was still hugely swollen, more a red slit with blood running into it than an eye.
‘Are you all right?’
With his good eye Merriman glanced up.
‘They didn’t touch me. Except to kick the bed,’ he said, his voice sucked in and whistling as though his lips were swollen right up, his teeth sore. ‘And this,’ he indicated, with a slight turn of his head to the tent.
Silas and his cronies had settled on anything they could find and flung it about like dervishes. Alec’s own bedding had been ransacked of blankets and tipped on its side. He retrieved odds and sods of clothing and some personal effects: razor, tin dish, his round mirror now scored with a fracture.
‘They’re animals,’ Alec said, staring vacantly at the stubble on his face in the cracked glass of the mirror.
Merriman rolled gingerly onto his side and tried focussing beyond the tent’s opening. ‘It’s day now, is it?’ he asked.
‘Yes, daytime. Nearly the middle of the day,’ Alec said, looking out himself as if to confirm it.
‘Another day full of hope and promise, eh?’
‘You shouldn’t try to talk so much. Rest is what you want.’
‘Yes, and never wake up.’ Merriman settled his head into the change of dirty clothes that made his pillow. ‘That gold we’ve got, if something happens to me, I want you to use it to bury me properly.’
‘That’s nonsense talk.’
‘With a proper headstone of some kind. With my name on it and where I come from.’
‘We’ll be off here soon. You can see it’s brighter. The floods will start falling before we know it.’
‘And say that I could cipher.’ Merriman shut his eyes again, the strain of trying to see about him causing more pain. ‘I’m bleeding inside. I can feel it.’
‘It’s probably a bruising.’
Alec righted his bed and set about getting it back in order.
‘Human filth, those shearers are,’ Merriman said. ‘Nothing more and nothing less.’
His voice was trailing off now. He could rest again, knowing Alec was there.
‘A lot can happen in a day or two,’ Alec said. ‘Even out here.’
Merriman slept again. Alec leant over him searching for a pulse in his neck, and having no success there he put his ear close to his tent mate’s face.
When he was certain Merriman was still drawing air he tidied the tent as best he could and ventured outside again to find something to eat. There might be fish, confused by the floods and trapped in shallows, or snakes or other creatures looking to escape the waters. He’d have to think about food in a different way now.
They were probably all feeling closed in, he thought, everyone on this island.
His legs, despite his exhaustion, felt like walking and walking so he decided to check the claim.
It was a wreck no different from the last time he looked. Water filled the shaft three-quarters of the way up; it was nothing more than a muddy sinkhole. It would have been a disaster in other circumstances, weeks of labour gone, but seeing their efforts washed away seemed of little consequence at the moment.
There was one stroke of luck though. He’d forgotten he’d put a pile of twigs and dry leaves under their upturned puddling tub. It was a relief finding the tinder still there. Scouting around he quickly gathered more firewood, wet as it was, carrying it back and forth to their tent and securing it under one side of the canvas fly away from the rain should it return. Once the wet bark was stripped away what he’d collected would be reasonable enough for burning, he hoped.
As he gave their claim a final glance he wondered again how McMurphy and the others might be faring, if they too might have been flooded out. If they had, would they be waiting around for the water to subside or would they have grown impatient and given it up, marched off somewhere else? Oriente might have stayed, though – otherwise why go to all the trouble of storing documents at the bank and leaving him with the envelope? Was there something of worth in those papers? Oriente said they were from the commissioner and would place him fairly and squarely in the public eye for his crimes. ‘What crimes?’ Alec had asked, to which the digger had replied, ‘Crimes he might commit against me.’ But if he was in fear of something, why had he not just cleared out?
When Alec looked up he saw black twists of smoke, slow-moving and reaching high into the windless sky, curling over the island from where Bill and Kentucky were camped.
He had to get a new fire going himself, for warmth if nothing else. He dug a fresh pit and fetched the dry tinder, building up some twigs and branches. He piled damper wood immediately around the pit, smartened up the rough shelter he had previously built as cover and then ventured off to find Bill and Kentucky and borrow some fire.
Alec spied them before they saw him approaching. The two men were crouched near their tent stripping shoots and smaller branches from two straight pieces of log. They had also pulled down an outside shelter they had to this point been using for preparing and storing food, leaving the timber and canvas jumbled in a pile.
‘Mind if I join you for a bit?’ Alec called out from a distance away so as not to startle them.
They wordlessly agreed, using their hands and a half-size axe to trim the wood straighter.
Alec crouched opposite them as they worked, rubbing some life into his hands.
‘We gonner get off this place,’ Kentucky told him. ‘We ain’t staying here a-waitin’ to die of starvation.’
‘So you’re going to make a raft or something?’
‘That’s right. You can’t just stay here for people who aren’t coming,’ Bill said. ‘You saw what happened to Ship.’
‘When did you start on it?’
‘Just now.’
But neither men looked at Alec while they spoke, engrossed as they were in their task.
‘You let me work on the poles,’ Bill ordered Kentucky. ‘You get the scissors in a minute and start cutting up the canvas. Get extra from our tent. Long strips I want.’
‘Righto.’
And finally Bill did peer up at Alec.
‘You blokes got anything left?’ he asked.
‘Coz we ain’t,’ Kentucky added.
‘Nothing,’ Alec said. The two comrades worked in silence a while before Alec began what he wanted to tell them. ‘That Geelong mob beat up Jack last night. Came through again this morning too and turned everything upside down.’
Bill raised his eyes. ‘What was that about?’
‘Jack went over to ask them for some food.’
‘And they beat him up?’
‘Good and proper.’
Bill stood. ‘He’s a royal bastard that shearer. If he comes over here, thinks he can ride on the back of our work, he’ll have another thing coming. Just you see. People should be helping each other, not doing what he’s doing. We’ve got nothing left here. You’ve got nothing left where you are. Why shouldn’t they give us something?’
‘Did you ask them too?’
‘Well, there’s nothing here so what do you expect? But they wouldn’t give us a skerrick. Anyway, watch them cry like babies when we take off.’
Bill smirked at the idea of it and set Kentucky off too, both of them grinning at each other before laughing like mad.
‘Watch them wet their pants like little babies!’ Kentucky cried, dancing a jig and waving a long piece of grass behind him like a tail.
And Bill put his arms around an imaginary woman and waltzed a few steps. ‘Ah, watch them scream and cry and call out for their mummy.’ He laughed so hard it took them several minutes before they calmed down enough to resume their work.
Bill stretched himself and paced, still laughing every now and then, sizing up his bits of timber with other lengths from the heap.
‘Now don’t think we’re forgetting you,’ he told Alec. ‘But this raft, you see, will only hold two, and even then we’ll have to be careful about the weight. But it won’t be far to the diggings so we’ll be as good as gold, no worries about that. We’ll finish it today I reckon and be off in the morning. Then we’ll be filling our gizzards over at the other side.’
The raft looked an unlikely idea to Alec, but he said nothing.
23
The commissioner pulled a favourite coat from his wardrobe, a black heavy overcoat he’d brought out from England. Usually he maintained the position of his office by keeping the uniform on show every time he emerged from his dwelling. Today though he didn’t want prying eyes on him as he went about his business. He thought about a hat too and decided he’d wear a nondescript one, also from home.
He hesitated outside the main circus tent, its canvas pulled tight and held at length by guy ropes pegged deep into the ground at a lean. Whereas yesterday there had been little sense of urgency about the place, this morning had seen a flurry of activity as Alfred Row’s workers heaved broad planks of timber into the tent, after hauling them from wagons parked in a muddy line. He was pleased to note that the rebel flag had been taken down. Row might have kept a weather eye open for whatever cause was currently popular, but he had sense enough not to continue to thumb his nose at English authority in the camp.
He found Row inside ordering the men about, unhappy with the placement of this or that run of seating, or the width between the stalls. Bare, flat ground inside was being transformed, with a first circle of seating creating the circus ring itself and concentric circles rising in height behind it. All built of timber, what would accommodate near two hundred miners tonight looked steady and solid enough to the commissioner’s eye.
But he was impatient now. There had still been no sign of Phillip Oriente or any further communication from him and he was beginning to wonder if perhaps he had misjudged the situation, whether Oriente might have taken fright again or fled from the goldfield knowing questions were being asked about him, not only by himself but through the unfortunate intrusion of Sergeant Kennedy as well.
Mosquito Creek Page 17