Golden Soak

by Hammond Innes

  The fortnight before my release had been relatively crowded. Three days after I had finished my manuscript Kennie came to see me. He was on his way back from a survey down near Yornup in the South West. He had a letter from his mother telling him that she was still on her own and that his rather was at Nullagine trying to organize an expedition in the Gibson. ‘That letter was written on the 2nd, so he’s probably out there now. There’s talk, you see, that the pegging ban will be lifted soon.’ And he added, ‘I’d hate to think Pa and that partner of his are going to grab the Monster while you’re stuck in here awaiting trial.’ He had guessed that Kadek had had something to do with my arrest and he felt sorry for me, which somehow annoyed me. And he annoyed me even more when he said he had been to see Janet the day after we reached Ml Newman. ‘She took it badly, you know. The old man’s death. Have you heard from her at all?’

  ‘No.’

  He gave that irritating little laugh of his. ‘Oh well, not surprising really. She’d been so sure you’d bring him back. And then being told of his death like that on the radio. I did my best to make her realize you’d done all you could.’

  I wondered about that. If he was in love with her … but I didn’t ask him. Instead, I found myself asking about the station, what she had done about the cattle, and his face brightened. ‘It worked, your suggestion about bringing them into the gully.’ Apparently water from the lower levels of the mine had been forced to the surface. Neighbouring station owners had lent her boys and she had spent the week we had been in the Gibson mustering and driving the cattle out of the Pukara to water at channels they had cut in the old costeans. ‘But there’s precious little feed for them, of course.’ And the drought still on, not a drop of rain all the time I had been in prison.

  It was seeing Kennie that started me thinking again about the Monster, and then two days later I was brought into the interview room to find Freeman and another man sitting there. He bounced to his feet and came towards me, his short stocky body radiating vitality, his hand held out and his round, smooth face strangely jubilant. ‘Soon as I got the news I got the first plane out of Sydney.’ He was smiling as he gripped my hand, but a little uncertainly, the uncertainty reflected in the nervous blinking of his eyes. ‘I just wanted to say I was sorry. We’re withdrawing the charges, of course, and we’ll work some form of compensation. That’s why I’ve got my lawyer with me.’ He introduced the other man - Ian Macclesfield. ‘But the first thing was to see you and apologize personally.’

  All this in a rush of words that left me feeling slightly dazed. ‘What’s this all about?’ I asked.

  He stared at me, and then he suddenly laughed. ‘Oh, my goodness,’ he said. ‘I forgot for a moment where I was. With everybody talking about it and the shares over five dollars And then he told me. As a final resort, before abandoning the Blackridge prospect altogether, they had Petersen do an IP, and the survey had shown a strong anomalous formation at a depth of just over 1,500 feet, almost underneath the poppet head of the old mine. The first drill-hole had been completed three days ago. ‘Petersen cabled me the core sample analysis yesterday — 4.2 nickel between 1,530 and 1,553 feet. So you were right, you see. I made an immediate press release. That’s what put the price of the shares up.’

  ‘And you’re withdrawing the charges?’

  ‘Of course. It doesn’t matter to me whether you’re Alec Falls or Bill Smith. It’s not my business how you got into the country. I don’t even care whether you’re a mining consultant or not. You were right. That’s all I’m interested in, and I’m sorry — I wanted you to know that straight away, and I hope you’ll accept my apologies.’

  ‘And you flew straight here?’

  ‘Yes, I got the night plane.’

  I went over to the table and sat down in the vacant chair, feeling suddenly a little weak. He’d taken the night plane, come all that way, two thousand miles, to apologize. I wanted to laugh, or cry, anything to express my feeling of relief. I could hardly believe my luck. So many times these last months I had remembered Petersen’s words: So everything you touch … remembering them as a bad joke. And now Freeman was here telling me Blackridge of all unlikely prospects had come out trumps. I really did believe for a moment that I was born lucky.

  ‘No hard feelings, I hope.’ I remembered Westrop, so long ago it was almost unreal, and Freeman hovering there, misunderstanding my silence. I didn’t say anything, feeling dazed and thinking of the future. It was ages since I dared to think of that. And Kadek … I wondered what Kadek would do, the ground cut from under his feet. And suddenly I was laughing wildly and uncontrollably, and Les Freeman and his lawyer standing there in an embarrassed silence.

  In the end I told him the whole story of the Blackridge deal. They didn’t believe it at first, but when I called the warder and got my manuscript, they believed me then all right. Not that there was much they could do about it, but it served its purpose. It opened Freeman’s eyes to Kadek and got me the backing I needed if I did eventually go back into the Gibson.

  In the event, it wasn’t money that held me up, but the claims ban. Freeman had paid my lawyer’s fees and given me a draft on the Company’s bank for $10,000. In addition, I still had the 5,000 shares acquired when I exercised my option, and though the market had broken by the time I reached Kalgoorlie, Lone Minerals were still firm at $9.72, so that my total capital at that moment was more than enough to mount a small-scale prospecting expedition.

  Culpin was still in the North West and Kennie living with his mother again. But I didn’t stay with them. I stayed with Jim and Edwina Norris. They were as kind and hospitable as ever, and it was Jim who put me on to a long-wheelbase Land-Rover that was almost brand new, owned by a survey outfit that was cutting back. The nickel fever was dying down, the Palace bar less crowded. Iron and copper, that was the future of Australia, according to the wise boys, and any day now the pegging ban would be lifted. Rumour had it that there would be changed claim requirements so that all those who had jumped the gun would have to peg again. ‘It’s going to be like the old gold-rush days,’ Kennie said, as I sat with him once more on the battered verandah, the hens pecking in the dust at our feet and his mother singing softly as she got our supper ready. ‘Laverton in particular. They’ll be lined up, waiting for the off - waiting for the mine wardens to announce the new pegging regulations. But this time there’ll be men in helicopters coming down from the skies. Nearly six months’ backlog, it’ll be like an army on the move.’ His voice was excited, his mood one of intense anticipation, and he kept on glancing at me, knowing why I had come, waiting to be asked.

  I suppose it was all my fault in a way. Chris Culpin was still somewhere in the Pilbara, and though Kennie had heard he was now concentrating on a prospect in the Bamboo Springs area, I had an uneasy feeling that Kadek would have notified him that I was out of prison and told him to keep an eye on me. I should have warned Kennie. I should have made it absolutely clear to him that a confrontation with his father was a distinct possibility if he persisted in accompanying me to the Gibson. But I didn’t. He was a trained geologist, and now that he had been in the desert, now that he knew what it was like, just the two of us in the empty desolation of that vast area of sand, I preferred to have him with me rather than somebody I didn’t know. And he wanted to come. The moment I had arrived back in Kalgoorlie he had been pestering me to take him. It wasn’t only that he was fascinated, almost obsessed, by the idea of discovering whether the Monster existed or not, I think it was also the challenge that appealed to him. And we were in winter now, the going would be easier, the heat and the flies less exhausting.

  It was settled that evening after supper. Edith Culpin knew why I was there. She was very quiet during the meal, but she knew her son had got to make it his own way, and I think she liked me. ‘You’re going back into the Gibson, are you?’ She was sitting facing me in the Victorian parlour, the best tea service in front of her, the antimacassars white in the lamp light, the furniture and the b
ric-a-brac all gleaming.

  ‘Not immediately,’ I said. There was no hurry since I was the only person alive who knew the location. And now that I had a prospector’s licence there was something I wanted to do first. But I didn’t tell her that I was going to peg the Coonde wanna claim. She was a loyal little woman and I was afraid she might tell her husband.

  ‘And Kennie?’ She was looking at her son, not apprehensively, but her face looked sad and the loneliness showed. ‘He’s going with you, isn’t he? That’s why you’re here.’ And I realized that she had been bottling this up, consciously keeping herself in check all through the meal.

  Kennie laughed, that quick nervous laugh I remembered so well. ‘Alec hasn’t asked me yet, Mum.’ His eyes were on me, a pleading look.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’m asking you now. I’d like you with me if you can manage it.’ I was watching his mother and I saw the blank look in her eyes.

  But she said at once, ‘I think you should go, Kennie.’ And then she turned to me again. ‘But don’t take any chances, please. Chris always said the Gibson was about the worst. And you ought to have two vehicles.’

  ‘We will have two,’ I said. And I told her about the Land-Rover waiting for us at the Kurrajong Soak, Ed Garrety’s old Land-Rover. All it needed was a new fuel line and carburettor union.

  ‘And when will you be in the desert, so’s I know?’ Her voice was low, the nervousness well under control.

  ‘The middle of June I would think.’ The pegging ban was being lifted at noon on June 5. The new regulations would be published in the Government Gazette that day and we might have to start from Marble Bar in order to get the full details from the Mining Registrar’s office. Even if they were broadcast over the radio, we would still have to go to Marble Bar to register the Coondewanna claim.

  Edith Culpin didn’t say much after that. She had accepted that Kennie would go with me, but she needed time to get used to the idea. And Kennie, now it was settled, was full of questions, plans, the things we would need. He had the sense not to ask me about the location, but I showed him the battered wallet that had belonged to McIlroy. ‘It was in here was it - the location?’ He was turning it over in his hand. And then he opened it and peered inside. There were a few old Australian pounds there, that was all, and he looked at me, his eyes questioning.

  ‘I destroyed it,’ I said. ‘It’s all in here now.’ And I tapped my head.

  He smiled. ‘Safest place, I reck’n.’ He passed the wallet to his mother, who held it for a moment in her hands, gingerly, as though it were a tiger snake. ‘Won’t bite you, Mum,’ he said, laughing.

  She looked at him, and then down at the wallet again. ‘So this was Pat McIlroy’s — his actual wallet.’ She turned it over in her dry, neat hands that were almost as worn as the leather. ‘Well I never - all these years. You know, Chris would have given his eyes to get hold of this. Once those rumours started, he could hardly think of anything else.’

  ‘You tell him to lay off, Mum. That don’t belong to him. that belongs to Janet Garrety now her father’s dead.’

  She nodded. ‘I expect you’re right, but Chris wouldn’t see it that way and no good telling your father what he ought to do.’ She handed it back to me carefully, as though it were a museum piece. ‘That’s two men it’s killed,’ she said, so quietly that I hardly heard her. ‘Don’t let you be the third.’

  I put it back in my pocket, thinking of only Ed Garrety and his young hopes for Jarra Jarra, and three days later we left for the Pilbara, just the two of us in my new Land-Rover.

  * * * *

  Before leaving we checked that ABC would be broadcasting details of the new pegging requirements, and at noon on June 5 we were back on the shoulder of Mt Coondewanna with our portable radio tuned into the Kalgoorlie station. We had reached Golden Soak just before seven the previous evening and in the dusk the scene around the old mineworkings in the entrance to the gully had been appalling, the flyblown carcases of dead cattle everywhere and those that were alive so gaunt, so bone-staringly thin as to be resemble nothing less than a horrible cartoon of famine. Water they now had — not much of it, but enough. It welled out of the ground in the hollows of the caved-in costeans. But cattle can’t survive on water alone and now all the flat land below the mine buildings was a desert, the arid vegetation eaten out, the mulgas stripped of bark, even the spinifex gnawed to its roots. Many of the beasts were too weak to move, lying thick in the gully so that it was only possible to get the Land-Rover through by the horrible process of terrifying them with shouts and the blaring of our horn so they were forced to their feet.

  This gully had now become the graveyard of Jarra Jarra and all Ed Garrety’s hopes. God knows how many head were starving to death there. The sick reek of it hung in the air and one wretched cow, still just alive and lying with its starved udder draped like a pancake over a boulder, blocked our way so completely that I had to get out and shoot it and then drive over it. I switched on my headlights in the gloom of the gully, and lying sleepless for a long time that night under the stars I could still see its eyes, enormous in the bony skull and crawling with flies, a sad patience in their expression as it waited motionless for the end.

  We had seen nobody on the drive down to Golden Soak and when we reached the shoulder of Coondewanna the hollow was deserted, the little piles of dust samples still there around the hole Duhamel’s rig had drilled. And now, as we waited for the broadcast with our portable standing on the tailboard of the Land-Rover, I was thankful that Culpin had not returned to re-peg his claim. Presumably the Bamboo Springs prospect had proved more promising. The newscaster’s voice, tinny and unnatural in that wild, remote setting, began reading the details from the Government Gazette as they were phoned through from Perth. The new regulations called for corner pegs 5-foot high and 6-foot trenches in addition to the substantial 3-foot comer posts Culpin had erected and the 4-foot angled trenches he had dug. And further pegs or cairns 3-foot high set in 4-foot long trenches were required at 15-chain intervals. The ABC announcer had read slowly enough for us to take it all down, and when he had finished, we read it through and then checked our stock of timber. Even allowing for the use of Culpin’s posts, we hadn’t enough to fill in along the sides of the claim every 330 yards.

  ‘We could peg at the corners, register the claim and fix the intermediary pegs later,’ Kennie suggested. But I shook my head. I wasn’t taking any chances this time. ‘Okay. Then we need some more timber.’ He was looking at me and I knew what he was thinking, what we were both thinking, that there would be fence posts available at the Garrety homestead.

  ‘You going, or shall I?’

  ‘You,’ I said. I didn’t want to face Janet, not yet — not until I’d got this claim pegged and had been into the Gibson again.

  He nodded. ‘You start on the trenches then. I’ll be back in time to give you a hand with the corner pegs. At least we’ll get those in before dark.’ He was already offloading the timber, and then as he started to get behind the wheel, he paused. ‘Any message?’

  I shook my head. What the hell message could I send her? And as I stood watching him drive off the shoulder into die gully, I was thinking that it hurt that she hadn’t written, hadn’t even bothered to answer my letters.

  He was back just as I hammered the last corner peg and was starting on the intermediary trenches. ‘No fence posts,’ he said. ‘But I got some shed timbers.’

  ‘You saw her, did you?’

  He nodded, staring at me rather strangely.

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Yes, she’s all right.’ But he didn’t sound very sure.

  ‘You told her what we were doing?’

  ‘Yes. She said we could do what the hell we liked. It didn’t make any difference and she didn’t care now.’

  ‘Did you tell her we were pegging it for Jarra Jarra?’

  ‘Sure. But I don’t think it registered.’ He hesitated, still with a strange look in his eyes. ‘Tell you t
he truth,’ he said, ‘she seemed sort of dried-up inside.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  He shrugged. ‘Oh, I dunno. Scared maybe - about the cattle, the future. But she seemed dazed, half dead if you like -‘sthough nothing mattered any more. But she let me take all I needed from one of the old sheds.’

  If I hadn’t been so anxious to get the claim registered, I’d have driven up to the homestead myself. As it was, we went right on into the dark, working by the Land-Rover’s headlights. We finished pegging just after ten, had some food and started straight away, headed for Marble Bar.

  Driving through the night along that ribbed highway, I had plenty of time to think about what Kennie had told me. The hell of it was Coondewanna still had to be proved, and the Monster, even if we found it, would take years to develop. Mining prospects don’t bring rain. They don’t put green growth back into a drought-ridden land. And all the wealth in the world cannot bring a dead man to life again.

  Dried-up inside Kennie had described her, and now that I was in the outback again I could appreciate how she must feel, the loneliness of her solitary life eating into her like a canker, destroying the natural resilience of youth. God knows, I now knew what loneliness was like, but strangely enough, the loneliness of a prison cell is quite different from the loneliness of a vast empty country. There is a curious protectiveness in four walls. Prison shuts you off from the world outside. Here, in this dusty, arid, desert world, the exposure to elemental forces was total and crushing.

  I was tired when we finally got into Marble Bar. We both were, for the ribbed dirt road and the speed at which we’d been driving had made it difficult to sleep. Trucks and Land-Rovers were parked both sides of the sloped tarmac of the main street and there was a queue for breakfast at the Ironclad. There was a crowd, too, garnered outside the Mines Department building, waiting for the office to open. We parked just off the tarmac at the bottom of the slope and cooked breakfast. I didn’t notice Culpin until we had joined the queue of prospectors and he came out after registering his claim. He had Smithie with him and he walked straight past us, a quick sideways glance of his eyes the only sign of recognition.