by Lucy Walker
One man on the other side of the ring, holding a sheep dog, was suddenly looking at Mardie closely. ‘You were over there talking to him, weren’t you? What does he talk about anyway? What they’re doing out there at the Dig-in?’
‘Oh no,’ Mardie said quickly. ‘We were talking about the helicopter. And Mister Falldown.’
A woman with a striped ginger cat in a basket laughed. ‘Well … if he ever does talk about what they find out there … beside who’s who with that girl who seems to run them all … you’ll let us in on the know, won’t you? They’ve pegged half of our station as mineral claims so we’re entitled to be in on it if they make a good strike.’
The animals were suddenly forgotten and for the next ten minutes Mardie heard more about companies pegging claims on other people’s station, of nickel strikes, and of oil finds than she’d dreamed possible. The newspapers had been full of it for months, of course, but it had been something over her head. Now she learned for the first time that, when you owned a sheep station, you only owned what grew or was placed on the top nine inches of the soil. Anyone could peg a claim to explore what was under the ground, provided the Warden’s Court agreed the applicants were the first to claim and were not over-pegging someone else’s claim.
‘The big lurk,’ one man explained ‒ in between talking to his pair of caged cockatoos ‒ ‘is when the night raiders move in and shift the pegs a mile or two off and put their own pegs in. You can’t map your claim in miles in these areas. You have to map by taking bearings from some permanent landmark like Dead Man’s Well or Mount Best Mesa. Half the Warden’s time is taken up settling rows over who claimed what and where, first.’
‘The place seems to have gone mineral mad,’ Mardie said, shaking her head doubtfully.
‘Well, when there’s a mining boom on, that’s it! It was the same in the big gold-prospecting days. That’s how The Breakaway came about. It built up out of nowhere to service the gold prospectors. Same as now, I guess, some of your best customers are the nickel and oil boys. Eh?’
Yes, Mardie had to agree to that, but she was careful to be tactful how she acknowledged it. These people attending the Vet’s session were mostly station people and they, too, were possibly Breakaway’s customers at some time or other. She hadn’t asked their names, so wasn’t able to equate them with her account books.
The brown cotton flop hat ‒ and the helicopter ‒ had given Jard Hunter’s occupation away. Perhaps it was for that reason he sat apart from the others over there under the shade of the plane’s wing. He and these pastoralists were almost natural enemies unless he ‒ with the possibility of inside information ‒ let them in on the chance to buy shares if the Dig-in made a really rich strike.
But it’s a marvellous world outback, all the same! she thought to herself. She hadn’t dreamed, so alone back there in the city, that anything in the outback could be such fun ‒ with so much friendly talk ‒ as this gathering ‘at the Vet’s’ on the corner of a million-acre paddock! All rather wonderful.
Specially as presently Jard Hunter might take her for a ride in that helicopter.
The invalid animals and birds, one by one, were attended to by the Vet. Even the bull, which like one or two other animals, had been staked, had had his attention. Mister Falldown’s doggie ‒ now Mister-Digger ‒ had a lengthwise crack in his hind leg and not a cross break. So the Vet pinned it, then bound it.
‘Watch the binding and keep it on for three days, then change it,’ he advised. ‘If I splint it he’ll gnaw the splints awry. Even break them off. This way he won’t worry it. If you keep a watch on the binding the bone will mend itself, given time.’ He gave Mardie an extra plastic package of the special kind of binding used. There was no cost, which surprised her very much. The Veterinary Service was a voluntary one supported by a rich endowment from a group of wealthy pastoralists.
‘If there’s a war on between pastoralists and explorers,’ Mardie said to Jard later as he helped her up into the helicopter, ‘I’m temporarily on the side of the pastoralists. They care about animals, don’t they?’
‘Some of them,’ he replied cryptically. He strapped her in, then strapped himself. His eyes caught hers, and again he wore that slow half-smile that was so puzzling. ‘One and all of them sitting there would have taken a pot shot at the dingo pup if they’d had a chance,’ he finished.
‘Why do you care about it then? They are killers, the dingoes, aren’t they?’
‘Nasty killers if you don’t guard your sheep.’
‘Then why did you bring him to the Vet?’
‘Because he’s Mister Falldown’s pup. And he asked me to bring him in. Moreover ‒ killers or not ‒ they’re magnificent dogs, as wild dogs go.’
‘It’s as simple as that?’
‘As simple as that.’
Strange, strange! Mardie thought. He cares about Mister Falldown. Like the police care about him. And all the other people know about him and perhaps, in their own way, care about him too! A brown-black hermit in the bush. Yet they cared. It was a good world ‒ this outback!
Funny, but she too, and the Richies, cared about Mister Falldown. There must be good in human nature after all.
‘In fact, it’s all very remarkable,’ she said aloud. Jard did not hear her because they were lifting and the wind the ’copter made was swishing a wild circle all around as they left the ground. It made a grizzly grinding noise too. When this noise faded out into a routine engine sound Jard was speaking on his two-way to someone somewhere else, perhaps miles and miles away across the stony semi-desert, and island stretches of bushland.
She could not hear what he was saying because he spoke into a tiny tube hung to his neck. When he had finished he glanced at her again.
‘What’s it feel like to be a bird?’ he asked. He had a smile in his eyes.
‘Wonderful. Here am I flying in the sky. Sort of hovering, and wind-borne like a bird. It’s different from flying in a plane, isn’t it?’
‘Exactly. In a plane you think you’re standing still in the air and it’s the ground underneath that’s moving. In a helicopter you know it’s you who’s flying.’
‘It’s good of you to take me.’ Mardie looked at him curiously. ‘Why are you taking me, Jard? I may call you Jard?’
‘Yes. I call you Mardie, don’t I? Fair exchange. Call me Jard. Why am I taking you? Because I thought you might like to come.’
‘It’s as simple as that?’
‘Simple as that.’
They both laughed. That word ‘simple’ was becoming routine speech between them.
He had a beautiful shining look about his face when he laughed. Mardie wondered why ‒ in a way ‒ it made her feel sad as well as glad. Something gained? Something lost? A friend for a moment. When that moment was gone ‒ what next?
The whirligig blades above them carried them over the mulga and stony ground. Then over freaked-out lines that scored and broke the manilla-brown earth like long or short fissures in a moon world. In fact like one of the moon walkers had said ‒ ‘Magnificent desolation’. Later they hovered across a wide stretch of low scrubland. Next they were ascending ‒ up, up and up. They were nearing the mesas.
These flat-topped mountains were green all over where everywhere else had been brown. Up and down and angle-wise across the mesa sides were wide rude gashes, leaving the iron-red boulder-strewn soil like weals wide-striped across the living green of the low spinifex grass and scrub.
‘Costeans,’ Jard explained. ‘Those are long trenches made by the Exploration Company, using the dragline dredges to break the surface so that the mesas will yield up their mineral secrets ‒ if any.’
‘If any? Yet there’s no one there. Nobody in sight.’
‘No surface indications of mineralization either. You may say they were a “no-find”. Such an explicit description that. So the dragline has gone elsewhere. You’ll see it presently when we cross over.’
‘And it leaves behind those great hideous ga
shes to spoil the range.’
‘A mountain range is not a living thing in the same way as your Digger or Mister Falldown’s dingo pup, Mardie.’
‘But it’s not a dead thing either. Trees and bush scrub and grass are living …’
‘Exactly. They will grow again. Not this season, but maybe next. The scar will cover up. You have to be realistic if you live in this part of the world. Minerals mean wealth and wealth means schools, hospitals, homes for the poor as well as the rich.’
Jard suddenly pushed his hat to the back of his head and looked obliquely up at the sky. He narrowed his eyes, seeing something Mardie herself could not see.
‘Talking about living things,’ he said ominously, ‘there’s a couple of wedge-tailed eagles up there.’
‘Where? I can’t see them.’
‘Your sight is not used to looking into distances. But they’re there, and they’re not a helicopter’s best friend.’
‘Why?’
‘They follow and hang around. They have a nuisance value ‒ and that’s all.’
Mardie’s spirits dropped just that fraction. She didn’t want Jard to think this way ‒ sort of callous about giant gashes in the sides of lovely mountains, and almost murderous about wide-winged wild birds just because they ‘hung around’. Why were they a nuisance? They were huge birds she knew but not all that big. That is, they couldn’t damage a metal monster like a helicopter, could they?
Minutes later they were flying over the Dig-in’s encampment.
‘There! Coming up on your port side, Mardie. Those white dots spilled along the base ‒ east side of the east mesa.’
The white dots became small rectangular camp huts. Bunk houses they called them. Some were larger than others. They stood in an irregular line. Further along eastwards was a drilling rig ‒ a giant piece out of a Meccano set. It was clearly being worked, for there were men down there, watching something being hoist upwards towards a platform on which stood more men.
Those small earth-bound beings had heard, then seen the helicopter. Some of them waved their hats, then set them firmly back on their heads and went on with their work. Nearby, smoke was puffing lazily upwards from yet another, larger, white hut.
‘The cook house and mess,’ Jard said.
‘Where do you suppose Joanna is?’ Mardie asked lightly. ‘In the cook house or on the rig.’
‘Neither,’ Jard replied laconically. ‘She’s out along the strike line today, I imagine. Her jeep’s missing. The gossan her team is working on runs crosswise between those two rises to the west.’
There were, down there, a number of jeeps standing about.
He’d looked for hers and noticed it was gone. Somewhere in those low hills Joanna ‒ being in her geologist role today ‒ would have heard the ’copter and perhaps would be looking upwards to catch sight of it. They were flying low so that Mardie could see the details of the encampment and wherever Joanna was she might see who was Jard’s passenger. Would she mind?
Mardie remembered that sharp, upwards glance and the firm statement Joanna had made the day she had come to The Breakaway. What was hers was hers. So hands off. It hadn’t been in those words but that was what she had meant.
‘I’m glad I’ve seen it,’ Mardie said as the ’copter swung away and gained height again. ‘Thank you so much for bringing me. Do you think we’d better turn back to the crossroads again? I’ve thirty miles to drive back and the Richies might begin to get anxious.’
Jard’s slow smile was at work again. ‘You can’t get lost on the bitumen, Mardie,’ he said. ‘And the Richies know that. It’s people who take to the bush tracks who strike trouble.’
‘Not people who take to helicopters?’ Mardie asked with a laugh.
‘Well, you would come.’
‘Well, you would ask me.’
He glanced sideways at her.
‘Do you always go where you’re asked? Is it a habit of yours?’
Mardie was leaning sideways watching the ground ‒ the patches of spinifex here and there, the odd claypans that made picturesque patterns laid out like a psychedelic map of strange shapes. Then she saw the kangaroos.
‘Look … for heaven’s sake!’ she exclaimed. ‘There must be thousands of them.’ They were, from this height, little grey animals, not thousands but hundreds of them racing through the bush and over the spinifex in a bobhopping way ‒ all streaming off in the one direction. Then, on the other side of the ’copter, she could see the emus. Not so many of them but still scores. They seemed to keep in line with the helicopter as if, from their lowly earth-bound situation, they were racing this big sky bird.
‘That’s just what they are doing,’ Jard explained. ‘They have a mental attitude to speed. If anything’s going fast they’ll go faster. It’s a way of life with them.’
‘But where are they all going? And those hundreds of kangaroos? Are they scared by the ’copter?’
Jard shrugged. ‘Could be. More likely they’ve eaten out their last paddock and are off to eat out the next one.’
‘You are not a conservationist, are you?’ Mardie said accusingly. ‘I don’t think you feel anything for those creatures down there.’
‘I do,’ he said bluntly. ‘I also feel for the thousands of dead sheep lying around after the drought. Who does the eating? The kangaroos or the sheep, Mardie? And who makes the choice?’
She sat back and thought. Her face was sad because she thought they all should eat. Choice? She was glad it was not hers to make.
There was quite a long silence between them. Then she noticed the sun had begun its westering course … way over her left shoulder.
‘Where are we going now?’ she asked, more to change the subject than anything else.
‘Since this may be your only chance ever to take a ride in a ’copter, Mardie, I thought I’d take you a bit up northward so that you can see the one place round these parts where the underground water comes up in the kind of lake nobody has ever been able to explain. Below another line of mesas. You’ll see thick bush there.’
‘But that is your work, isn’t it? Explaining underground water?’
‘Oh, I can explain the water all right. But not what’s growing round it. Palms. Dozens of them, and very beautiful. Palms are not indigenous to Australia. The riddle is … how did they get there?’
‘Someone years ago planted them?’
He shook his head. ‘Not out here in the nowhere. The earliest pioneers who went through here wrote about the palms in their diaries. No white people had ever been through here before.’
‘Then brown people … from Asia?’
‘Well, that’s a theory, of course. But no other evidence of any kind or description has ever been found that Asians might at one time have inhabited the inland of Australia. That is before the blue eyes came with a Mr William Dampier, pirate, and a Captain Cook, Navy Officer.’
‘The early Afghan camel-drivers?’
He shook his head again. ‘They came after blue eyes, the white people. And for the white people ‒ to carry their stores, goods and chattels.’
‘Then it’s a mystery?’
‘Yes, but a beautiful one. Wait till you see them.’
He suddenly swung the helicopter to starboard, then straight ahead again. He said ‘Damn’ in a forceful way.
Something was wrong. She sensed this, but did not ask. Jard’s expression was one of complete concentration as he manoeuvred the machine to west, then east. Lessened height, then gained it.
Suddenly Mardie saw what it was he was trying to avoid. The huge eagles. Their wing span must have been yards wide, at least nine or ten feet anyway. They were rushing at and attacking the ’copter as if it was some deadly enemy.
A minute later it happened.
Jard had increased height to avoid one charge. They were over trees and thick bushland now. Then there came a shattering grinding thump. A terrible sound. The ’copter veered sideways and Mardie was thrown against Jard. His chin was down and he w
as working at the controls. An eagle slammed through the windscreen ‒ its beak straight at Jard’s head. There were feathers everywhere.
‘Put your hands over your forehead, Mardie. Lean forward head down against the panel.’ Jard seemed to speak in a mumble. ‘NOW. Do as you’re told.’
Mardie obeyed. She leaned forward, her hands and arms protecting her forehead as she pressed it against the panel.
Some knowledge in her was crying out: He can’t protect himself. He has to keep at the controls. The eagle hit him. The windscreen’s broken.
He was bringing the ’copter down.
Then above ‒ over the roof ‒ came another terrible unearthly grinding sound. The ’copter ceased its quiet descent.
It fell.
She heard the windscreen smash as a tree branch broke through.
She was thrown about ‒ this way, that.
Every bone in her body was shaken. Was she alive? Or dead?
Jard?
Her head whizzed.
I didn’t see the palms after all. Then suddenly her mind went blank.
She couldn’t think so she stared at Jard. He was slumped forwards, his head pinned down by the tree branch … and bleeding.
Seconds, minutes, she sat there. Or hours? Her mind wouldn’t think.
But she must think. She had to think.
Was Jard dead?
Oh, please, dear God … make me think. Help me to think. I’ve always believed in You. Somewhere You …
The dizziness came over her again. She had to have will power …
The dizziness receded and slowly, inch by inch, she straightened up. No ‒ her bones weren’t broken. She moved her legs, her arms, her hands. Ever so gently she turned her head this way, then that.
She was talking to herself.
‘Carefully, Mardie, carefully. You’re alive so you have to be the one. It’s up to you. Try yourself out. Your back? It’s okay. It’s up to you … if Jard is alive.’
Chapter Seven
Mardie never afterwards remembered how she did it. Inch by inch she tested her capacity to move. She put her hand on Jard’s head. It was warm.