Croc Country

by Kerry McGinnis

  Chapter Nineteen

  Firewood could only be collected beyond a five-kilometre radius of the camp, which meant they had to drive to find it.

  ‘And we only put out a day’s supply at a time,’ Tilly explained, dusting off her hands, ‘so I think that’ll be plenty. Of course, the sensible thing, if the WPA was starting the place from scratch, would be to have the rangers actually living at the camp. It would save all this ferrying of stuff to and fro.’

  ‘So when did Binboona switch from cattle station to protectorate?’ Connor asked.

  ‘Oh, twenty-five years ago at least – maybe longer.’ Tilly frowned. ‘I know they took the cattle off in sixty-eight and started ripping down some of the fences a couple of years after that, but the camp wouldn’t have opened immediately. And when it did, the staff would have been operating from the homestead – because it was there, I guess. It mightn’t be exactly where you’d want it, but the company wouldn’t put itself to the expense of building more accommodation. I know Sophie’s always on about keeping costs down.’

  ‘It’s an expensive world,’ Connor agreed, tossing a rope across the load of firewood and tying it off on the siderail. ‘Especially out here – distance, freight . . . Right. Got your lunch? Shall we go then?’

  They drove east with the morning sun glinting on the windscreen and warming the cab. Tilly donned sunglasses and shed her jacket, enchanted by the crisp newness of the day. The tracks of Matt’s vehicle stood up in tiny patterned rills on the road, and the leaves of trees shone in the sunlight. Viewed through her dark lenses, the sky had a purple tinge and the wildlife they saw – a feeding wallaby, one ear lopped back to his surroundings, a skein of ibis rising above the timber, a plains turkey-cock with his throat bladder enlarged – looked like exotic cut-outs against a painted background.

  ‘If Matt’s on his tracks, your night driver seems to be heading straight through,’ Connor commented. ‘From memory of Sophie’s map, this road will get him onto the wet-weather track that crosses the river.’

  ‘Will it? I’ve never been that far,’ Tilly said. She stared at the passing scenery. ‘I think we’re getting close to the turnoff to the springs. When Luke and I came, I remember it was all graded along here and the escarpment looks about right too.’

  ‘Yep, coming up. We turn at the bloodwood there – hang about.’ He slowed and braked, and Tilly saw that while Matt’s vehicle tracks continued straight ahead, the set beneath his had plainly turned right onto the ungraded road to Sandstone Springs, where they themselves were headed. ‘You said he was going to follow them.’

  ‘It’s what he told me.’ Tilly pulled her shades off as if disbelieving what they showed her. ‘The tracks are as plain as print! Even I can see he’s turned off, but Matt’s just driven on. I wonder why?’

  ‘Well, let’s find out. They went in but they haven’t come out again. Either Matt’s lost them – and I don’t see how anyone with eyes could miss that – or he knows something we don’t about the country and is trying to cut them off by going straight for the river?’

  Tilly shrugged helplessly. ‘I can’t tell. I don’t know enough about the roads.’ She wished she had paid more attention to the map.

  Connor’s shades flashed as he turned his head towards her. ‘Let’s see where they go then.’ The back wheel crashed into a hole and he winced. ‘Sorry. Pity the grader didn’t make it this far.’

  The vehicle lurched and bumped its way along, with Connor skirting around the first fallen tree as Luke had also done, and Tilly pointing out where the second one had been deliberately felled. ‘You can see we wouldn’t have got past without the winch to tow it away.’

  ‘Looks like somebody was trying to discourage travellers,’ he agreed. ‘So that green patch way over against the cliff – that’s Sandstone Springs?’

  ‘Yes. I thought you’d been here before. There were certainly tracks under ours when we came – we thought they were yours.’

  ‘No. Something came up and I didn’t make it out after all.’

  His voice had changed – he almost sounded guilty, Tilly thought – and a sudden memory made her ask. ‘That wouldn’t be the day you turned those people back from the shed, would it? The ones with the dog?’

  He shot her a quick glance. ‘Could be.’

  ‘Only they didn’t have a dog, or at least not according to Matt, when he gave them a hand with a flat tyre. So, which of you is telling porkies?’ she demanded.

  ‘All right, it was me,’ he said unhappily. ‘They were coppers. I didn’t want them blundering in on the op. They weren’t pleased about me warning them off, but I told them if there was a leak or anyone worked out who they were, the chief inspector would have their guts for garters. I’m sorry about the lie, Tilly, but I thought it necessary at the time. If it had happened today I’d have told you straight off.’

  Strangely, she believed him. ‘Was it because you didn’t trust them personally, or . . .?’

  He shrugged. ‘They were straight enough, as far as I know, but cops are like anyone else. They talk about stuff, about ops that are running, and it could get to the wrong ears. This one’s supposed to be watertight, on a strict need-to-know basis. I rang the inspector straight after they left – he’ll have had a word with them, so hopefully they’ve kept their mouths shut. One of them was actually from the op, so he’s solid. He was showing initiative, I guess.’ He was gazing ahead at the spread of vivid green bush. ‘Hmm, pretty big area by the looks of it. A lot of water then?’

  ‘Tons of it. Coming straight out of the cliff face. Luke says it dries back to a trickle but never actually stops flowing, even late in the year. The ground’s quite boggy all around the perimeter. You have to walk in, starting from about where those anthills are.’

  ‘We might give it a miss for now, unless our quarry has stopped. Doesn’t seem to have though.’

  ‘No.’ The tracks ran straight on, following the rudimentary road as it curved south-west along the face of the escarpment, the height of which gradually decreased, running low to the horizon in a series of yellow and ochre hills bearing none of the grandeur of the cliffs along the Nutt River. The soil changed until they were driving on red gravel, which glittered in the sun. A family of wallabies broke from their camp beneath a wattle bush, and Tilly remembered what Matt has said about ticks. She reached to pull her socks over the legs of her jeans and then pointed at several dark hollows in the hills. ‘Is that them?’

  ‘Looks like it.’ Connor scanned the surrounding barren slopes and low scrub, then leant out his window to study the tracks. ‘They stopped here, and yep, headed for the caves. Then they’ve gone off over the ridge there. What’s out that way?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. A place they call the Lost City is somewhere behind the range, but why would they go there?’

  ‘We’ll follow them and see. But first, let’s find out what they were up to here.’ He pulled up and pushed his door open, then pointed at the tracks. ‘Two men, see? Been back and forth a few times – fetching something, or leaving it here. So let’s have a squiz. There’s a torch in the glove box – can you grab it?’

  ‘Of course.’ She handed it to him and they stood for a moment inspecting the hillside. The opening of the closest cave was quite small – she’d need to stoop to enter it, Tilly thought, and Connor would be bent double. The entrance looked black in contrast to the yellowed rock. She felt a momentary reluctance at forsaking the bright day for the gloom within, but Connor was heading for it and she followed him willy-nilly. She’d wanted to be here, she told herself, so it was silly to be intimidated by mere darkness.

  The first thing that struck her was the surprising size of the hollowed area once they were within it, for the roof rose and the sides widened almost immediately. There was an earthy smell and the air, surprisingly, was oppressively warm and heavy with humidity. ‘Whew! It’s stifling!’ she exclaimed. ‘I thought caves were cold.’

  Connor was playing the torchlight over the walls, the
moving beam glistening on the rock. ‘It’s wet.’ He touched it, then peered closer. ‘Must be constant seepage. It accounts for the humidity – that and the small entrance, I suppose. There’s moss and liverworts growing, and some sort of fungus that gives off light.’ Without warning he switched the torch off, plunging them into darkness. Tilly gasped but then she could see it too, a faint, barely discernable bluish glow, almost not there in the stygian blackness. She felt the sweat beading on her face and gasped in the soggy air.

  Abruptly the beam of light returned. ‘Boy, sure is muggy.’ Connor was moving away, deeper into the cave as he spoke, his footsteps muffled. ‘The mass of the hill must hold the heat in. The stone soaks it up and releases it inwards, I guess.’

  ‘How far back does it go?’ Tilly hurried after him, resisting the urge to grab his arm. She liked nothing about this place – not the darkness, nor the booming echo that followed her question, or the sudden flurry of leathery wings above her head. She swallowed a cry, managing only to squeak, ‘Bats!’ They were harmless, she told herself firmly, as Connor flashed the light up on the whirring cloud of tiny creatures they had disturbed from their roosts on the rocky ledges and roof of the cave. ‘Luke would love this,’ she said, determined to act like a proper ranger. ‘We’ve got flying foxes, of course – thousands of them – and we see ghost bats sometimes when the moon’s full, but I’ve never noticed little ones before.’

  ‘They’re common enough around Darwin.’ Connor sounded preoccupied. ‘What were they up to? They’ve been back and forward, all over the place.’ The torch beam jerked down at the muddle of footprints across the guano-laden floor, then suddenly stilled on a hump parked on a ledge jutting from the side of the cave. ‘What’s that?’ Stepping towards it, he stumbled on something, swore and jerked the torch down to disclose a household brick. ‘What the hell’s that doing here?’

  ‘Connor!’ Tilly hissed. ‘It’s moving.’ She strained forward to see and, as the torch light returned, jerked back with a cry of alarm. ‘It’s a snake!’

  ‘Yes, I see. But it’s okay. It’s just a python – it’s come in after the bats, I expect.’

  It was a big one, its body as thick as Tilly’s wrist, the pattern on it slipping through the yellow beam of light as it slid away. She stood rooted, but Connor was moving after it, his gaze on a dark object further back on the shelf.

  ‘Come and see,’ he called and reluctantly, her skin prickling against the touch of imaginary reptiles, Tilly stepped forward.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A box. A cage. I think this is where both that brick and the python came from. Look at the top. It’s hinged but there’s no latch – that’s what the brick was for, to hold the lid down, only the snake was stronger and must’ve shoved it off.’ Connor moved the torchlight along the shelf. ‘Yeah, the impressions are plain as print. That’s three, six, eight, I count, without this one. They’ve been using the cave as a depot, bringing them in until they had a full load to shift. Right under your noses, the cheeky bastards.’

  ‘What?’ Tilly demanded. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your wildlife traffickers,’ he said. ‘That’s who was here. See the marks where the other cages have stood? They were sneaking through in the night because they came to pick ’em up. The cockies and finches and lizards – whatever it was they had. Nine cages full. They’ll be long gone, and your wildlife with them, I’m afraid.’

  Tilly stared at him. ‘But how could they keep them here? Birds, animals – they need food and water every day. Well, maybe snakes don’t . . . If they left them longer than overnight, there ought to be vehicles coming and going every day. There’s no point stealing them if you can’t keep them alive.’

  ‘I know. It’s a bit of a puzzle.’ Connor stepped further in, waving the torch about to find the back of the cave. ‘Here’s where it ends. All in all it’s a pretty large space.’ The beam lit on the python again, its head lying flat on its coils at the base of the wall. ‘Okay, old fella, stay there.’ He moved back towards Tilly and added, ‘I think we should check out the other two caves while we’re here. Not that there’s likely to be anything in them.’

  ‘Whatever.’ Tilly wiped her streaming face and pulled at the damp cotton of her shirt. ‘I just want to get out. It must be forty degrees in here.’

  His assessment was correct. The next opening in the hill was no more than a split in the rock that ran only a metre or so deep. Like the larger cave, it dripped moisture and due, Tilly thought, to the greater amount of light it received, it had a lusher supply of ferny growth on its walls. The third was a shallow shelter with a wide opening and a sloping roof that met the floor within a half-dozen paces, the space between threaded with the twisted roots of trees growing on the hillside above.

  ‘Just the one possibility then,’ Connor mused, rubbing his chin with the end of the torch. ‘Makes you wonder how they came to stumble across it. The racket could’ve been going for years, of course. Does your husband have much bush savvy, Tilly? Could he find his way around this sort of country?’

  ‘Gerry’s a fisherman,’ Tilly said. ‘I suppose that our fishing camp was in the bush, but he isn’t Crocodile Dundee. Anyway, I thought you suspected him of running drugs, not poaching.’

  ‘No reason why he couldn’t do both. And we know that he’s been at Binboona recently.’ He turned aside. ‘Well, what do you think – lunchtime? My stomach seems to think so. Do you want to go back to the springs to eat?’

  ‘No,’ she said definitely. ‘Too many march flies. We can eat in the vehicle, then I think we should follow those tracks as far as we can. Like they say, knowledge is power and prevention’s better than cure. If we can find out where and how they’re getting away, then maybe we can stop them.’

  ‘Under that ironwood tree then,’ Connor said, adding with a little smile, ‘You see, I do know the timber and a lot of the plants in the area. It’s why I chose to pose as a botanist.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t convince Matt,’ she retorted, handing him his sandwiches. She hesitated. ‘He’s a bit of an oddball, suspicious of anything different. He’s a hard man to know with his prejudices and silence.’

  ‘But you do?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m not so sure any longer. Me changing jobs seems to have, I don’t know, annoyed or upset him. Lord knows why, but some people seem to like pigeonholing folk . . . Like life is static, when it’s anything but. The world would fossilise if it wasn’t always changing, and that includes people.’ Tilly took a bite from her sandwich, chewed and swallowed before adding, ‘It might just be that he liked his meals well cooked and on time, and his washing done for him. None of which is happening now. Well, too bad. It’s quite ridiculous that most men don’t learn to look after themselves. I haven’t met one yet that didn’t eat.’

  ‘Hey, don’t look at me.’ Connor put up his hands. ‘I make a mighty mean curry, and I can do you an omelette, and whip up a rice pudding as well.’

  ‘It’s more than Gerry could,’ Tilly said. ‘He was hopeless. He could barbecue – if you didn’t mind meat with third-degree burns – and make the coffee, and that was about it.’ It was easier to speak of him now that she knew he still lived. ‘Of course, he always had a cook on the boat – my step-dad did too. It’s a full-time job running a fishing boat, so you couldn’t cook for a crew as well.’

  ‘Could your stepfather cook?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tilly said blankly. ‘Isn’t that odd? I never thought about it. Mum did all the meals – she topped her class in domestic science at school. She always said that she wasn’t clever but she could cook. She had me wrapped in a pinny, standing on a box at the table and mixing things for her when I was five. I could make a souffle by the time I was ten. I loved it when it was just us at home in the kitchen, especially in winter.’

  ‘She certainly succeeded in passing on her skill,’ Connor said.

  Tilly smiled and inclined her head. ‘Why, thank you, sir. You know, I think Mum
might’ve gone on to become a chef if she hadn’t fallen pregnant with me. She had such a feel for the chemistry of food. It’s funny, isn’t it, the things that can happen to turn your world upside down? She wanted a career, my mum. Whoever it was who said life was uncertain was dead right.’ Especially in her own case. In the still place in her heart, Tilly heard again the echo of once and hastily gulped down the rest of her tea. ‘I suppose we should be getting on?’

  ‘Yes.’ Connor seemed to be turning something over in his mind. ‘I imagine you’re going to tell your cousin and the others about the cave?’

  ‘Well, naturally. Why?’ She shot him a quick look. ‘Is there some reason I shouldn’t?’

  He shrugged. ‘Call it paranoia of the job. We like to keep things quiet when we can. Could I ask you not to mention it to the tourists, then? You don’t know who might be doing what, and you’ve said you get repeat campers. One of them could be involved. Seriously. The people responsible would have to have someone on the ground for it to work. How else could they avoid both campers and rangers?’

  Tilly said thoughtfully, ‘Yes, I see that. But campers? Nobody stays the whole season through, Connor. It’s a week, maybe ten days if they’ve a particular interest, like a twitcher desperate to see a Gouldian finch, for instance. They’re endangered now, so it’s rare to sight them. He might hang around hoping – but not for a month.’

  ‘No. But the thieves could time it. Work out when they mean to hit the place and send somebody in a day or two beforehand. Lots of tourists travel with two-way radios. They could have a channel and a code. They’d need to pick the breeding season for the bigger birds, but they could net the smaller ones or hunt the reptiles any time. At most they’d need a week, but probably only a few days.’

  ‘I suppose.’ It gave Tilly an uneasy feeling, but she had to acknowledge the possibilities inherent in his words. After all, Gerry had been in the camp, however briefly, though whether to lie low or to act as Connor had suggested it was impossible to say. She gave a little shiver. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever view any visitor in the same light again. They’ve always seemed so friendly, thrilled to be here, you know?’