by Nevil Shute
On landing he had been sent to a reception camp for a few days, but as he was unattached and spoke tolerable English he had been sent on quickly to Lamirra, and he had been there ever since. He knew a good deal about camps and how to be comfortable in them, and he settled down quite happily to work out his two years in the woods he loved.
He had little regret for the loss of his medical profession. After his two years in the woods were over he would have to do something else; he did not quite know what, but in this prosperous country he was confident that he could earn a living somehow or other. In the meantime he was well clothed and fed, paid highly by the European standard, and given so much leisure that he could get in two days’ trout fishing every week. Better than lying dead and putrefying in the Pripet marshes or the fields round Caen, where he had left so many of his friends. That was the old world; he was glad to put it all behind him and enjoy the new.
He left the camp at about seven o’clock that Saturday morning before the day grew hot, with his rucksack on his back and his fly rod in his hand in its cloth case. He got to the river soon after ten and put up his rod and began to fish down-stream, wading in the cool water in his normal working boots and trousers.
He caught a rainbow trout after ten minutes’ fishing, a good fish about two pounds in weight that leaped into the air repeatedly to shake the fly out of its mouth. He kept his line taut and played the fish out, and landed it upon a little shoal with one hand in its gills; he never burdened himself with a net. He caught a brown trout a few minutes later; then, as the day warmed up, the fish went off the feed, and he caught nothing more.
He got to Billy’s place about midday. The forest ranger lived in a clearing by the river, in a long, single-storeyed building with a veranda, built, of course, of timber with an iron roof. There was a living-room which was the kitchen, with a harness room opening out of it, which in turn communicated with the stable; in winter when the snow was lying in the valley Billy Slim could feed his horses without going out into the snow. His own bedroom opened out of the living-room, and there were two bunkrooms off the veranda. He kept his house very neat and clean, having little else to do.
In one corner of the living-room there was a radio telephone set run off a large battery, with which the ranger could communicate with his headquarters in case of forest fires or similar disasters. When Carl Zlinter walked in, Billy was seated talking to the microphone, he raised a hand in greeting, then knitted his brows and bent again to his work. Giving his weekly time sheet to the girl operator on Saturday mornings was always a trouble and a perplexity to him.
“Aw, look, Florence,” he was saying. “Tuesday … Oh, yes—look—Tuesday I went upstream to Little Bend and then over the spur to the Sickle, that’s down on the Jamieson River. There was a party went in there last week from Lamirra.”
“Know who they were, Billy?”
“Naw—I didn’t see them. There was four of them on horses, and two pack horses, and one of the horses was Ted Sloan’s blue roan, so Ted must have been there. One of the horses dropped a shoe and went lame on the way out. They shot a few wallabies and camped three nights. They lit fires which they didn’t ought to; I’ll see Ted about that.” He paused. “Wednesday I had to go into the Jig to pick up a couple of sacks of horse feed. Thursday I stayed home; I wasn’t feeling too good. Got that, Florence? Over.”
The loudspeaker said, “Thursday’s a working day, Billy. What’ll I tell Mr. Bennett? I don’t like to put down you got sick again. Why can’t you do your drinking at the week-end? Over.”
“Aw, look, Florence,” the ranger said, “I didn’t drink nothing down at the Jig. You know me—I wouldn’t of a Wednesday. I got one of my bad goes on the Thursday, in the stomach, terrible griping pains. Real bad I was. Over.”
“I don’t like to put it down, Billy. Didn’t you do anything about the house that we could say? Over.”
“Aw, right … look, Florence. I did a bit on the paddock fence in the afternoon. Put down, Repairs to homestead and stockyards, for Thursday. Yesterday, that’s Friday, I was out all day. I went up around Mount Buller as far as the Youth Hostel hut and then down to the King River and along by Mount Cobbler and the Rose River; I didn’t get back till after nine last night. Today Jack Dorman’s coming out with Alec Fisher from Banbury, and there’s Carl Zlinter here, one of the lumbermen from Lamirra. Over.”
The loudspeaker said, “That’ll be right, Billy—I can make it up from that. That’s all I have for you. Over.”
“Bye-bye, Florence,” said the ranger. “Closing down now. Out.”
He shut the set off with a sigh of relief, and turned to Carl Zlinter. “Come fishing?”
“If I may, I would like to spend the night.”
“You’ll be right. Put your stuff in the end room; I got Jack Dorman coming over, with Alec Fisher. Know them?”
Zlinter shook his head. “I do not know them.”
“Aw, well, Jack Dorman, he’s got a property just by the Jig. Thought maybe you might know him. Alec Fisher, he’s agent for the Australian Mercantile in Banbury. They’re coming out to do a bit of fishing.”
Zlinter smiled. “We shall crowd you out tonight with a large party.”
“Too right. Makes a change to have a bit of company now and then.”
“Will they come on horses?”
“Might do. Alec Fisher’s got a Land Rover; they can get over the track with that. I’d never sit astride a bloody horse if I’d got a Land Rover to ride in. I’d have thought that they’d be here by now.”
Carl Zlinter left his rucksack in the end room and went down to the river, cleaned the two fish, and left them in Billy’s larder for the evening. He had brought a sandwich lunch with him from the camp canteen; he went down to the river again and fished on downstream for a little. No fish were moving in the heat of the day; he gave it up after half an hour, and found a shade tree standing in the middle of a grassy sward by the river, and sat down under it to eat his lunch.
It was very quiet in the forest; a hot, windless day. A cockatoo screamed once or twice in the distance, and near at hand there was a rippling noise of water from a little fall in the river. Presently the quiet was broken by the low grinding of a vehicle coming down the horse track into the valley in low gear; he guessed that it would be the Land Rover. It passed along the track a few hundred yards upstream from him and he heard the water as it went splashing through the ford; he heard it breast the rise up from the river to the ranger’s house, and then the engine stopped, and there was quiet again.
He went down to the river and drank from it after his meal, cupping up the water in his hands; then he went back and sat down under the tree again, and lit a cigerette. What a good country this was! It had all the charm of the Bohemian forests that he had loved as a young man, plus the advantage of being English. He had not learned to differentiate between English people and Australians; to him this was an English country, and England had the knack of being on the winning side in all her wars. He dislike and distrusted Russians, and his own land was gone for ever into the Russian grip. He liked south Germans and got on well with them and spoke the language fluently, more fluently than he spoke English. The Germans, however, had an unfortunate record for starting wars and losing them, which made Germany a bad country to live in, Australia had everything for Carl Zlinter; the type of country that he loved, freedom, good wages, and no war; he would willingly forgo his medical career for those good things. He revelled in the country, like a man enjoying a warm bath.
He stubbed his cigarette out on a stone, or what he took to be a stone, in the meadow beneath the tree. He looked at the stone curiously, and it was not a stone at all, but a piece of brick.
He looked about him with interest. Half buried in the grass was a low rubble of brick. Beside it, on the level grassy sward, was a series of rectangular patterns, hardly to be described as mounds, more like discolourations of the pasture. He studied these for a minute while his mind, accustomed to the solitude o
f the Howqua, refused to accept the evidence. Then he woke up to the realisation of the fact that there had been a house there at one time.
Even when he appreciated the evidence, it still seemed incredible, and for a very definite reason. He knew that this part of Australia had been first explored barely a hundred years before; he had found out sufficient of the history of the country to have become aware that it was most unlikely that the Howqua valley had seen any white man before 1850. If the evidence upon the ground before him were to be believed, a house built wholly or partly of brick had been built and lived in, and deserted, and so entirely ruined that only a bare trace upon the sward remained, all in less than a hundred years.
It did not seem possible. He stood looking at the grass for a time, deeply puzzled; then he put it out of his mind for the time being, and walked over to the stream, and stepped out into the shallows and began to cast his fly. He would ask Billy Slim about it that evening.
He fished on down the river; he caught no fish and hardly expected to until the sun began to drop. He stopped presently and smoked a cigarette, and lay on his back under the gum trees, and slept for a little. When he woke up it was about five o’clock; he began to fish back up the river towards the forest ranger’s house, and at once he began to catch fish, mostly small undersized brown trout that he tired as little as possible and put them back into the river. Then he caught a couple of takeable fish, each about a pound and a quarter, and with that he gave up, and took down his rod, and walked back along the forest path in the gloaming.
When he got to the shack the two newcomers were there, a heavy man of fifty-five or sixty that was Jack Dorman, and a younger man, perhaps of forty-five, Alec Fisher. They greeted him shortly; they were not unfriendly, but waiting for this New Australian from the lumber camp to disclose himself before showing themselves particularly cordial. They represented the permanent population of the countryside, the men with an enduring stake in the land. The lumbermen were here today and gone tomorrow, frequently drunk and a nuisance to the station people; many of them were New Australians who came for their two years’ sentence on arrival from Europe and fled to the towns as soon as they got their release, and anyway the camps themselves were transient affairs, to be moved on to some other district as soon as all the ripe timber from that forest had been taken out.
Carl Zlinter raised the matter of his discovery with the forest ranger over supper. “I have found what seems to have been formerly a house,” he said. “In a pasture, where two horses are. There is a big tree, and under there are bricks, all in grass and very old. Was there a house at one time?”
The ranger said, “You mean, where the river makes a turn under a big granite bluff? About a quarter of a mile down?”
“That is the place. There is a fast, dark pool.”
“Too right, there was a house,” the ranger said. “That was the hotel. My dad kept it, but that was before I was born.”
Jack Dorman said, “Your dad kept the hotel, did he? I never knew that.”
“One of them,” the ranger said. “There was three hotels. He kept the best one, the Buller Arms. Two storeys, it was, with bedrooms. Used day and night, those bedrooms were, from what I’ve heard.”
“Like that, was it?” said Alec Fisher.
“My word,” the ranger said, “these gold towns were all the same. Booze and dancing girls and all sorts.”
Carl Zlinter said, “Was there a town then?”
“My word,” the ranger said again. “It was a big place at one time, over three hundred people. You’ll find the adit to the mine up in the trees there, back of the house paddock. It’s blocked now; it only goes in a few feet. The battery is still there down by the dam, in that clump of peppermint gums. There was houses all over in this valley flat.”
“I knew there was a town here,” Alec Fisher said. “What happened? Did the gold run out?”
“Aw, look,” the ranger said. “I don’t think there was ever much gold there. In 1893 it started, when they found a trace of gold in the conglomerate. The Rand mine in South Africa, that was conglomerate, so they called this one the Rand and floated a company in Melbourne,” He paused, and ate a mouthful of trout. “They got a little gold out, just enough to make it look a good bet. But it never really paid. It ran on for ten years and then it bust, in 1903.”
“That’s right,” said Fisher. “Everyone was gold mad at that time.”
“My old dad,” the ranger said, “he came out from home when he was just a kid, back in the ’eighties some time. He came from a place called Northallerton in England, ’n got a job in the police. Well, then when they found gold here he gave the police away and came and started the hotel. He was a fine, big chap ’n handy with his fists, which you needed running a hotel in these parts in those days. He sold out in ’98 or ’99 and went to Jamieson ’n got married. I was born in Jamieson.”
“How did they get all the stuff in?” asked Jack Dorman. “The track’s not so good.”
“Aw, it was better then,” said Slim. “They had a regular road up from the Jig, and brought it in bullock wagons. I remember the road in here when I was a boy; you could have driven a car in down it, easy. But trees grow up pretty quick, ’n nobody came in here when the mine shut down.”
“People all went away,” said Fisher.
“That’s right. There wouldn’t have been many left here after that. There’s not enough flat land to make a station, and it’s a long way from the town.”
Carl Zlinter asked, “What happened to the houses?”
“Aw, look,” said the ranger. “There’s been a fire through the valley twice at least, in 1910 and 1939. I come here first when I was just a nipper, in the first war some time. I don’t remember seeing any houses. There’s not much left of houses after a fire’s been through,” he said. “Only just the brick chimneys, and they soon fall down. Most of the places would have had a wooden chimney, too.”
“I remember the fire here in 1939,” said Dorman. “A bit too close to home it was, for my liking.”
“My word,” the ranger said thoughtfully. “A fair cow, that one. Just after I joined the Forest Service, that one was. The house was on the other side of the river then; we rebuilt it after on this side, because the land was flatter, ’n better for the paddock.” He turned to Fisher. “Days ’n days of hot sun, ’n not a breath of wind down in the valley here. It got so that you couldn’t hardly breathe for the scent from the gum leaves; it made your eyes smart, sort of distilling out in the hot sun, ’n no wind to carry it away. And then one morning I was out in the paddock lighting my pipe although I didn’t really want it for the way the air made you choke, and when I lit the match the flame burned blue. There wasn’t any yellow in the flame, just kind of blue, out in the open air, dead still, in the middle of the paddock.”
The men stared at him. “My word,” said Dorman softly.
“We hadn’t got no radio in those days,” the ranger said. “I put that match out quick and saddled up, ’n rode out to the Jig. Mr. Considine, he was superintendent then, ’n I got on the telephone and told him that my match burned blue, out in the open air, ’n he as good as said that I was drunk. And then he said the fire on Buller was heading down my way, ’n I’d better get anybody in the Howqua out, ’n get my own stuff out.”
He paused. “Well, there was nobody else in, that I knew about, and nothing in the house I thought a lot of but my gun, that I got from my Dad. An English gun it was, a good one that some toff had give my dad, a twelve-bore made by a firm called Cogswell and Harrison. Well, I rode back towards the Howqua, and when I got up on the ridge I could see the fire on Buller, and it was a whole lot closer now, not more’n seven or eight miles away. I sat on the horse and thought about the air down in the valley where the match went blue; it was hot as hell, ’n not a breath of wind. I didn’t like to go down there a bit, my word I didn’t.”
“Not worth it for a gun,” said Alec Fisher.
“I tell you,” said the ranger, “I
wouldn’t have gone down for the gun. I’d have given it away. But I’d got three horses down there in the paddock, ’n I’d got to get them out. So down I went, and by the river here the air was worse than ever, sort of choking. I just grabbed the gun and left everything else, ’n let the fence rail down and drove the horses out ahead of me and up the track. I never been so frightened, oh my word.”
“Lucky to get away with it,” Jack Dorman said.
“Too right. Well, I got back on to the ridge in Jock McDougall’s pasture with my horses and the gun, and there I stayed a while. I wasn’t going to stay down in the valley, but I’d a right to stay as near as I could to where I ought to be. So I stayed there on the ridge for a while. And about three in the afternoon, that fire on Buller, she began to jump. She come down this valley in leaps about two mile each time. She’d be blazing way off up the valley, ’n then there’d be a sort of flash and you’d see everything alight and burning two miles closer on. Then she’d rest a while, and then she’d leap on another mile or two mile down the valley. In a sort of flash.”
Alec Fisher said in wonder, “The whole air was exploding?”
“That’s right,” the ranger said. “The whole air was exploding. That’s how the old house come to be burned down. After that we built this one, next year.”
Carl Zlinter said, “Let me understand. It was hot, so hot that the sun evaporate the eucalyptus oil out of the trees, and that explodes?”
“That’s right,” said Jack Dorman. “I’ve heard of that happening over in East Gippsland, by Buchan in the Cave Country.”
“But that is terrifying!”
“Too right,” said the ranger. “It terrified me.”
“You can’t do anything about a thing like that,” said Fisher. “You can’t stop a fire from spreading when it jumps two miles.”
The forest ranger said, “Folks down in the city think you can stop a forest fire by spitting on it. They come along after and ask why you didn’t put it out. Maybe you can do a bit to stop one starting, like getting campers not to light a fire in January. But only God can put it out when it gets hold.”