Golden Soak

by Hammond Innes

  It was almost eleven by the time we were through. The crowd of vehicles had thinned by then, but a Chev ute was backed close up against our roo guard, Culpin leaning against it, waiting for us. ‘Claimed above Golden Soak, did you?’ And when I didn’t say anything, he added, ‘Too bad. I missed it by a day. Remember?’ He was smiling, trying to be friendly. ‘Smithie here reckons you’re lucky. The Swede said the same.’ He came away from the side of the ute. ‘What about the Gibson? You going to be lucky there too?’

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked him.

  ‘We could team up,’ he said, his eyes squinted against the sun-glare from the tarmac. ‘I know that desert country. You don’t.’ And he added, as though it made a difference, ‘I got the use of a helicopter when I want it.’ He waited, watching me, his legs straddled and his hands thrust into his belt. A big survey truck roared passed us. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But I’m warning you. You try and go into the Gibson without me and I’ll make dam’ sure you never get beyond the Soaks. For your own good,’ he added, thrusting his head forward.

  Out of the tail of my eye I saw Kennie suddenly very tense, his face white with anger. ‘You t-try that, Pa and I’ll…’ He checked himself, and then with more control: ‘The Monster doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to —’

  ‘Belongs to nobody till a claim’s registered. You know that as well as I do.’ He swung round and was facing his son. ‘If Alec wants to risk his life, that’s his concern. No reason for you to risk yours. You stay here. Understand?’

  ‘That’s for him to decide,’ I said.

  ‘No, it bloody isn’t. I’m his father and he does what I tell him. Right?’ He wasn’t looking at me. He was watching Kennie and I think he knew this was the moment when the boy would finally rebel, for he went on quickly: ‘Now you listen to me, boy. A man’s already lost his life out there. Mebbe it wasn’t Alec’s fault. But he was alone with him at the time, and as I told his daughter, when a fortune’s at stake men don’t always act the way they should.’

  ‘You told Janet Garrety that?’ I should have beaten the daylights out of the bastard mere and then, but I was too appalled to do anything.

  And Kennie stepped forward and was standing there between me and his father, his body literally trembling with fury. ‘You ch-cheapen everything,’ he stammered. ‘You and that man Kadek. You t-talk of a fortune. You can’t think beyond your pocket. You’ve never understood there are other things in life. That’s what’s wrong with this country. It was men like you slaughtered the blacks, destroyed the ecology so that most of the land’s now desert. First the sheep, and now minerals.’ And he went on, the words pouring out of him, his lean body tense, ‘You can’t see that it’s people like you that’ll destroy Australia. Take, take, take … you never think of giving. You never have. Well, let me t-tell you this - the reason I’m going with Alec is because if he finds it he’ll do what Ed Garrety would have done. He’ll use the money to enrich the land, not himself. It’ll go to Janet and she’ll carry out her father’s wishes. You understand?’

  Culpin was staring at him open-mouthed. ‘You believe that,’ he muttered. And then he thrust his head forward, his small eyes glaring. ‘So he’s pulled the wool over your eyes the way he did Les Freeman. You can’t kid me, boy. The Gibson’s tough and nobody goes in unless there’s money in it.’

  ‘You honestly think that?’ Kennie was looking at him with disbelief. ‘There are Native Affairs officers, missionaries -there was an American professor and his wife who spent a whole year there, living with an aborigine family. You think they did it for money?’ There was a moment’s silence, and then he said, ‘You don’t understand what I’m talking about, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ his father snapped. And Smithie said, ‘Come on, Chris, we’re pegging my claim now an’ I don’t want anybody getting in ahead of me.’

  Culpin hesitated. He was watching as Kennie turned away and got into the driving seat of our Land-Rover, his heavy forehead wrinkled in a frown. He looked strangely bewildered. ‘No,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I’m buggered if I understand.’ And he turned slowly and went to his own vehicle. They drove off, taking the track that followed the course of the Cougan River towards the Comet Mine. We kept to the tarmac, on the road that led to the Highway, and then we headed south, back to Nullagine and Lynn Peak.

  We fed that evening with Andie and his family. He had seen Janet only once in the last three months. She had come in to collect the monthly supplies and cancel the order. ‘Christ knows what they’re living on now at Jarra Jarra. We’ve had a little rain. No’ verra much - just a quick storm. But I’m told they didna have a drop over to the west of here.’

  The Lynn Peak bore was still flowing and after our meal we filled up with water and got the petrol we needed. I was alone with him for a moment at the pump and I settled the Jarra Jarra account. I also gave him enough for another month’s supplies and he promised to take them over himself. ‘Do I tell her who’s paying for them?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Just tell her a friend sent them.’ He looked doubtful. ‘I’m no verra sure she’ll accept that. She’s proud, like her father, and they’re not used to charity.’

  I hesitated, thinking of the Gibson and the possibility that I might never .come out of it alive. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Tell her it’s from me - payment on account for something her father told me. That should do it.’

  ‘And do I tell her where you have gone?’ The curiosity he had been bottling up all the time we had been at the homestead showed in his eyes.

  ‘You think you know?’

  He nodded his round dark head. ‘Aye, the Gibson I reck’n.’

  ‘Well, keep it to yourself.’

  ‘And what if you get stuck out there?’

  ‘Give me to the end of the month,’ I said. ‘If we’re not back by then …’ I didn’t say any more because Kennie joined us. But Andie understood. By the end of three weeks we’d be out of water.

  We got as far as Walgun before bivouacking for the night and we started again at first light. With the vehicle we now had and driving in daylight, we made much better time. We were beyond the Soaks and into the desert by sunset. Shortly before noon the following day we actually sighted Winnecke Rock, away to the north of us, and by nightfall we were camped somewhere close to the spot where Ed Garrety had disappeared. Dusk was closing in and we did not start searching for the rira until dawn the next day.

  It should have been easy to locate, knowing roughly where it was and the whole area of that rock conglomerate extending a dozen acres and more. But nothing was easy in that rolling sand sea, our view obscured by the troughs, and even from the tops nothing visible but the next sandhill and the intervening valley floor. The directions were from the actual soak so that it was essential to find it. We operated a box search, working our way steadily eastward on a six mile front, and again it wasn’t the rira we sighted first but Ed Garrety’s abandoned Land-Rover.

  We saw it away at the end of a shallow trough. We were on the southward leg then and it was half-hidden by a new drift of sand, only the canopy showing. The broken rock of the rira started just beyond it, over a slight rise, the astonishing green of the kurrajong tree visible as soon as we walked to the top of the dune.

  I showed Kennie the rock shelter where we had huddled against the fury of the sandstorm, the soak in its rock basin marked with the dark of moisture welling to the surface. It was damper now that winter had cooled the ground, and by scraping out handfuls of sand, we were able to produce something very near to a puddle of water. At least we wouldn’t die of thirst and we celebrated with a can of beer each. But we didn’t drink it there. The soak and the rock shelter was too unhappy a place for me, the memory of Ed Garrety very strong. I wished to God he was with us now. But it had been his choice, and surely a man has a right to die in his own time.

  We had parked our Land-Rover alongside his and we drank our beer standing by the tailboard, small birds darting among the spinifex, fl
ashes of blue, and some delicate little grey birds that looked like finches. It was hot in the sun, but not as hot as I remembered it, the sky clear blue and no vestige of cloud on the horizon. ‘Where do we go from here?’ Kennie asked. And I knew by the way he said it that this was a question he’d been wanting to ask for a long time.

  ‘It’s not going to be easy,’ I said remembering how long it had taken to find the rira. ‘They’re not compass directions. They depend on the sun, some trees, and the distance a man can walk in a day.’ I had been over it in my mind so many times, but that didn’t make it less vague, more like the wishful thinking of an aborigine seeking payment for a lie. ‘From Kurrajong Soak walk short day into sunrise, find’im three ngalta. Then, facing high sun, walk till him half set. Small gibber hill, all rock him same ngalta.’ I looked at him, wondering what he’d make of it. ‘That’s all, except that McIlroy added a note to say that ngalta was how the black had described the green of the copper deposit.’

  ‘A bit vague, innit?’ Kennie’s features were creased in a frown. ‘Short day into sunrise; that’s presumably east - north of east if you take short day to mean it’s winter. How long do you reck’n a short day’s march — twenty miles?’

  ‘I doubt whether you or I would cover as much as that.’ I was remembering the two night treks I had done, the sand and the spinifex and how exhausted I had been. ‘But an aborigine might.’

  He nodded. ‘Call it fifteen then, and take a bearing on tomorrow’s sunrise. Shouldn’t be far out. But I doubt whether we’ll find the ngalta. That’s the abo word for the kurrajong tree. Right? It has water bearing roots and the blacks can practically live off the seeds when they’re ripe. Those trees will surely have disappeared after all these years.’

  ‘What about the kurrajong here?’

  ‘Could be a new one, a seedling.’

  In the end we agreed we would drive fifteen miles on our sunrise bearing, then north for eight. After that we’d start a box search working steadily eastward and hoping for the best. By then we had finished our beer, and after a quick meal, we began repairing the fuel line of Ed Garrety’s Land-Rover, watched by a goanna and interrupted periodically by flights of small birds coming into the soak. It took us the rest of the afternoon to get the engine going and clear the sand drift that had built up around the chassis. And that evening after sunset we buried the remains of Ed Garrety’s body. Kennie had found it while stalking the goanna with my rifle. It was away to the south, just beyond the edge of the rira, the covering of drifted storm sand blown away to expose the whitened bone of the skull and one skeletal hand. It was something I could have done without, and after a restless night, cold and plagued by ants and the presence of several small snakes, we took a compass bearing on the sun as it heaved itself up over the horizon like an erupting orb of red-hot metal.

  We had our first puncture that morning, but all Kennie said was, ‘Lucky it’s a drought an’ the spinifex not in seed, otherwise you’d have clogged the rad, the engine running hot - you wouldn’t be able to see either, it’d be that high. Wouldn’t worry ‘bout a little thing like a puncture then.’ He was strangely patient, almost subdued as we sweated at the cover, a spinifex wren darting flashes of blue. It took us three hours to cover the fifteen miles. We were into an area of steep sand-hills then, the vegetation sparse and all burned up, not a sign of a tree anywhere, only wattles. At noon we headed into the sun, holding on a course due north until we had covered eight miles. The same dead scene, poor scrub and no trees, and the sandhills rolling endlessly, shimmering like liquid in the afternoon heat. After a meal we began our search and by nightfall had completed two boxes, which meant that we had made three north-south runs and moved the search area eastward four miles.

  That night I remember we were both of us very tense as we sat huddled in sweaters over a miserable fire. It was surprisingly cold after the day’s heat. Kennie was smoking, a thing he seldom did, and he hardly spoke. He seemed shut up inside himself. Quite what the Monster meant to him at that moment I’m not sure. But I know it meant something much more than a geological phenomenon.

  We didn’t talk much, both of us wrapped in our own thoughts, but we did discuss the next day’s search. I think we talked about it twice, and each time his eyes shone with a strange inner light. It wasn’t just excitement. It was something more, something deeper. I don’t know what put it into my head, but suddenly I found myself remembering lines from a poem I had to learn as a boy: Nought in the distance but the evening, nought to point my footsteps farther… Burningly it came on me all at once, this was the place! And then at the end of the poem: Dauntless the slug-born to my lips I set, and blew. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’ I leaned forward, pushing a charred and blackened spike of mulga root into the fire’s glow, now almost dead with white tendrils, smiling to think that I should remember Browning when Ed Garrety, if he had been here, would have quoted Shakespeare. God help me, I didn’t realize how near I had come to understanding. Kennie was no Childe Roland, but he had developed strong moral convictions as a reaction to an unscrupulous father, and like so many young men in the process of growing up, uncertain of his physical courage, he had the need to prove himself.

  These are the afterthoughts, of course - an endeavour to explain the inevitability of what happened. But I still cannot excuse myself for not being prepared for it. I should have talked to him, there over the dying ashes of that fire. I knew that this second journey out into the desert was a self-imposed ordeal, that he was tensed up and scared. But I thought it was something physical, a weakness to be overcome, a challenge. I never appreciated his real fear. I never understood, till it was too late, that this search for a copper deposit in the Gibson Desert had become for him a sort of purification of the greed he had grown up with.

  He was awake at the first light, his eyes dark-rimmed with lack of sleep. ‘We’ll find it today, won’t we?’ his voice was high and trembling. ‘We must find it today.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘If it’s there.’ Instinctively I felt the need to damp down his intense eagerness.

  We had completed the first box by nine o’clock. The going had been bad, but it was worse on the second leg north, the sandhills steep-faced, requiring a running start flat out in four-wheel drive. I .was driving at the time, the sun in my eyes; Kennie was acting as observer. I saw him suddenly lean forward as the wheels churned at the top of a sandhill. I thought he had seen what we were looking for and I slammed on the brakes, the bonnet of the Land-Rover dipping to the sand trough below. ‘What is it?’ I was looking at him as we sat there motionless, the radiator steaming. He was still leaning forward, staring straight ahead, his eyes wide and his face drained of all colour, almost white.

  He didn’t answer and I cut the engine to let it cool, shading my eyes and staring into the sun. But the view hadn’t changed, the desert a series of giant sand swells rolling away to the horizon, an ocean of red sand patched with vegetation. And then, very faint above the boiling of the rad, I heard the sound of an engine. ‘A plane?’

  He nodded, pointing, his hands clenched and his body strained forward. The drone of it was moving across our front from left to right and a moment later I caught a glimpse of silver beyond a distant sandhill. It was flying low, literally skimming the surface. We caught another glimpse of it, a flash of sun on metal, to the right of us now and flying south. The sound of it faded. ‘Your father?’ I asked. It had looked like the same plane.

  He held up his hand, sitting listening, his body rigid. The radiator had stopped boiling and in the silence we heard it again, flying north this time. We didn’t see it. But both of us knew what the pilot was doing. He was flying a low level search, doing exactly what we were doing, but doing it faster and with much less effort.

  The sound came and went for perhaps ten minutes, and then we lost it. We didn’t hear it again until at 09.42 it passed to the north of us, a speck high in the sky flying back towards the west. We were both of us out of the Land-Rover then
, standing in the hot sun at the very top of the sandhill, and when the sound had gone and we lost sight of it, Kennie turned to me. ‘D-dogging us like that — why didn’t we do it by plane?’ He was suddenly very tense.

  ‘You think he’s found it?’

  He shrugged, his eyes still staring at the empty sky to the west.

  ‘If I’d hired a plane and we’d failed to find it, then you’d be telling me we should have done a ground search.’

  He looked at me then. ‘You can’t win, can you?’ He said it with a smile, but the tension was still there and his face looked pale.

  We didn’t say anything after that, but pressed on fast, taking a chance and moving the area of our search forward a few miles. We were then into a patch of old mulga scrub, all dead and their roots half buried in the sand, and we had two punctures in quick succession. Altogether it was a bad day with only two boxes completed from our new starting point. Clouds came up in the late afternoon and the night was very dark. Our position was now 26 miles east of the lira, and I remember thinking that the abo who had given McIlroy the directions must have been a hell of a tireless walker. Either that or the Monster didn’t exist.

  We filled up and checked our petrol before turning in. The situation was becoming critical. Each box was 13 miles of ground covered and at our present rate of consumption we had just enough fuel for five or six more box runs, unless we decided to rely on finding the rira again. We had already taken two cans from the abandoned Land-Rover, but there was still a sufficient reserve there to see us back to the Stock Route. We argued it out for some time, lying wrapped in our swags, but when we started out the next morning we had reached no definite decision.

  We need not have bothered. Our search ended that morning just as we had completed the first run north. I was driving, keeping an eye on the clock and the compass as we began the eastward mile. We were then cutting diagonally across the sandhills and for just over a third of a mile we were on the flat floor of a trough, travelling quite fast for once. Then we came to the slope beyond. I didn’t change into four-wheel drive, just kept my foot hard down. It was a mistake. I hit a soft spot near the crest and we slowed, the rear wheels digging in, the chassis slewing and tilting.