To the Wild Sky

by Ivan Southall

  ‘But we haven’t really tried,’ said Gerald, ‘not really tried, have we?’

  ‘You mightn’t have done,’ Jan snapped, ‘but we have; and we’re sunk, that’s what.’

  ‘We’ll sure be sunk if you keep on saying it.’

  ‘It’s the first time I’ve said it!’ Jan was beginning to flare. ‘It’s the first time I’ve even thought it.’

  ‘O.K., O.K.,’ wailed Colin, ‘simmer down, Jan. Keep your hair on, Jan.’

  ‘I wish he’d killed us all in the aeroplane. It’d have been quicker. It’d have been easier.’

  ‘Come off it, Jan. For cryin’ out loud . . .’ Colin’s laugh was half-cry. ‘Look, we’re not dead yet.’

  ‘Well, let’s get away from this place. It gives me the horrors.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘I don’t care where. Anywhere. Let’s start walking round the beach. I don’t care.’

  ‘Gee,’ said Mark, ‘it’s not all that bad, Jan.’

  She started crying.

  ‘We can’t go, can we?’ Colin said to Gerald, almost helplessly.

  ‘Of course we can’t. It always happens when people leave the crash. They get lost. It’s the end of them. Golly, m’dad would kill me if he thought I was even thinking of it. We’ve got to stay here. We’ve just got to. We’ve gotta sit tight. Look, even if we sit here and wait for six months we’ve gotta wait.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Colin, ‘we seem to be thinking of things all the time but not doing anything much.’

  ‘That’s because there isn’t anything much we can do. We can put out the S.O.S.; we can scrounge around for something to eat and drink; and that’s it.’

  ‘All right,’ said Colin, ‘let’s do that much. Let’s get on with it or we’ll all go screamin’ up the wall. I know just how Jan feels. I don’t blame her one bit. It’s this hanging around and doing nothing that’s the trouble. We all get steamed up to start, then something happens, and we do nothing.’

  Then Bruce and Carol walked into the picture. They’d been coming into it for a while, trudging nearer, and Bruce called, ‘I reckon I know where we are. We’ve worked it out and you’re not going to like it.’

  ‘Oh, golly,’ groaned Colin.

  ‘Molineaux Island. That’s what we reckon.’

  Bruce flopped down, panting, rubbing his leg, and caught sight of Jan, ‘What’s she blubbing for?’

  ‘Where the dickens is Molineaux Island?’ said Gerald, ‘and how’d you work that out?’

  But Colin stood quite still for a moment or two, looking out over the breakwater, then ran his eyes back along the sweep of the stream, past the old stone walls and the tangled bush, towards the shimmering unknown of the inland. ‘1874,’ he said, then looked at Jan, because history had always been her strong point. Every one in her form at school knew Jan had a flair for history. And Jan had heard Bruce and was wiping her swollen eyes on the back of her hand. ‘What do you think, Jan?’ Colin said.

  ‘Where is Molineaux Island?’ Gerald asked impatiently.

  Colin sounded irritable. ‘In the Gulf of Carpentaria! Crikey, Gerald!’

  Jan had got over her tears; she’d rubbed them away; sniffed them back; but still looked harassed. ‘I hope not,’ she said, ‘crumbs, I hope not. That’s the place where those pearlers put in for water and couldn’t find a drop. All they found was a sea wall. A sea wall. Yeh; that was all they found, a sea wall – and bits . . .’

  ‘How far to the mainland? Do you know that, Jan?’

  She had become suddenly aware of a grave responsibility. They were going to accept as gospel what she said. To Gerald’s question she replied, ‘About fifty to sixty miles, I think.’ Then she wondered and added: ‘But hundreds of miles from anywhere settled. Too far to swim. Too far and too many sharks.’

  ‘The Gulf of Carpentaria!’ Gerald seemed to be stunned. Even after he had remembered flying north his thoughts had been tempered by doubts. No matter what he had said, no matter what he had thought, there had always been the feeling that it didn’t have to be true and probably wasn’t. ‘Are you sure, Jan? Absolutely sure, I mean?’

  This was a challenge and she had to face it with a level head. And the fact that the challenge was there helped her to compose herself. ‘Well, let’s look at it,’ she said. ‘1874 was the date they founded the settlement all right. By 1878 they were dead. What of, no one knows. Sickness of some sort. They were members of some religious sect or other. The Saints of – of – oh, something or other they called themselves.’

  ‘But that doesn’t really prove it, does it? That doesn’t make this place into Molineaux Island?’

  ‘Well, there’s the sea wall and the marshes and the cottages – what’s left of them – and the date and the creek and the – the sunflowers!’

  ‘Yeh,’ said Gerald, almost blankly, ‘sunflowers. Yeh, I remember the sunflowers.’

  ‘It fits,’ Jan said. ‘Everything fits.’

  ‘So it’s Molineaux Island?’

  ‘It fits, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That’s what I said in the first place,’ grumbled Bruce.

  ‘But how do we get off it?’ Mark cried.

  Colin felt all choked up. ‘I don’t suppose we ever do unless someone comes and takes us off.’ (Mark flinched visibly.) ‘Gee, this is sort of bad . . . It’s one thing being on the mainland and sitting tight, but being on an island; on Molineaux . . .’ Colin didn’t know how to finish.

  Not realizing it, they had started edging away, even Bruce, back to the narrow strip of open beach.

  ‘What did those people die of?’ said Gerald. ‘Could the germs still be here, do you think?’

  ‘Golly, we’ve been climbing round all the old stones and everything —’

  ‘It’s an awful long time ago, though, isn’t it?’

  But they continued to edge away, quite openly now, not hiding it from each other.

  ‘Look, Gerald,’ Colin said, ‘you reckon we mustn’t leave the crash, but are they going to look up here? I don’t see how they’ll ever think of it. They don’t know anything about Mr Jim being dead. It’d be like losing something in one town and looking for it in another. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘But it’s the Golden Rule!’

  ‘It might be, but not up here. If we were anywhere on the mainland, yes, but not here. They think a pilot was flying the plane; not just any pilot either, but Mr Jim. Put out the S.O.S. and everything, sure; but leave a note to say which way we’ve gone. We’ve got to find somewhere better than this. I reckon we ought to get right away from here. What I’d really like to do is build a raft.’

  ‘Well, you can forget that. That’s plain silly.’

  ‘What’s silly about it?’

  ‘That’d be the end of us, good and proper. To start with, we don’t even know how to build one.’

  ‘I know how to build one,’ said Bruce, ‘so does Jan.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Gerald said deliberately, ‘we might as well jump in the sea and drown ourselves and be done with it.’

  ‘Look,’ Bruce went on, ‘all we need is a few oil drums and some rope, and something for a sail. We’ve got a tomahawk to chop down trees, and a little bit of rope, and there must be vines and creepers about that’ll do. And we can make a sail out of our clothes.’

  ‘That’s a real bright idea, that is!’

  ‘Well, let’s think about it, Gerald,’ said Colin.

  ‘What is there to think about? Oil drums, he says. Where do we get oil drums from?’

  ‘There are the petrol tanks. We might find them, mightn’t we? They might get washed up even yet. Things are washed up for weeks after a wreck. If Bruce reckons he can build a raft I reckon we ought to let him try.’

  ‘Well, I won’t be on it, I’m tellin’ you.’

  ‘Be blowed to you,’ Bruce yelled, ‘give us a chance. Don’t knock it before we start it.’

  ‘But it’s so stupid,’ Gerald cried. ‘If what Jan says is right, what good is i
t going to do us? Even if you build one, even if it doesn’t sink first time you push it into the water! There are six of us. It’d have to be as big as a house. And how do you steer a course? What if the wind blows the wrong way? What if we drift out to sea? What are we going to eat? Or drink? What if a storm blows up? And what about sharks? Strike me pink, Bruce, it’s the craziest idea I ever heard of. I’m not knocking it for the sake of knocking it; honest I’m not. It’s just plumb crazy. At least we’ve got dry land under our feet. At least we’ve got a chance; but out there we’d have no chance at all . . .’

  He had beaten them into silence. Their expressions were as harassed as Jan’s had been.

  ‘What we really ought to do,’ Gerald added, calmly enough, ‘is to start food gathering, lay out the S.O.S., set up a camp and get a fire going. And I mean not just talk about it, I mean do it.’

  He felt no need of Carol’s strength any more. He had enough of his own.

  15.

  S.O.S.

  Mark was becoming very sleepy, but he pushed off into the scrub along the foreshore to hunt for birds’ nests. He would much rather have curled up in the shade and gone to sleep. It was funny being so tired at half-past two in the afternoon; as tired as he used to feel late at night. He thought of his room at home, of his bed, of his mum: ‘You’re to keep your hands clean and hair tidy and not to belch after meals.’

  ‘Gee,’ he murmured, but went looking for nests just the same, though he was a bit on the wary side, careful where he stepped, alert for snakes and creepy crawly things, often returning to the beach to make sure that someone, at least the sea wall, was still in view. He found nests here and there, but no eggs in them, no birds at home. Perhaps it was the wrong time of the year. And he didn’t see too many birds, either, flying round. Maybe it was so hot they were all asleep.

  He was so thirsty. It hurt him to swallow. He didn’t want to swallow, but kept on doing it. He would try to think of other things, then suddenly find himself doing it again, swallowing. He chewed leaves for a while but they were bitter and didn’t seem to help, though in fact they did.

  It was a hard, stringy, dry bushland behind the foreshore where he was. Farther on it was more low-lying; the salt-water marshes were down there and he was frightened of them and didn’t go that way. If there were birds’ eggs down there they would have to bally well stay there. He wished he had gone fishing with Colin.

  Colin had made spears, borrowing the tomahawk from Jan to sharpen them. They looked all right until he tried to throw them. He couldn’t flight them well, but took a handful off to the sea wall, nevertheless, and carefully picked his way out over the rocks looking for fish. Tropical waters teemed with fish; that’s what everyone said; shark and dugong and stingray and groper. Though they’d all be a bit big for wooden spears. He was sure it would be a hopeless sort of feeling to be hanging on to the end of a spear stuck in a 600 pound groper! Or into a great big turtle; except that the spear would bounce off, of course. It was silly to be nervous of fish, but he half hoped he wouldn’t see any. They were bigger than he was. Big enough to swallow him whole.

  The tide was still well up and vigorous and Colin felt too weak to be sure-footed. Perhaps later; perhaps when he felt stronger he would dare to be brave. Then he would stand, as he had seen pictures of aborigines standing, poised on tip-toe at the water’s edge, quivering spear held high.

  There were shellfish of different kinds anchored to the rocks as if riveted to them, and he started belting at them almost with shame, chipping them off, but he felt it was all so futile somehow. What would they do with the beastly things? Eat them raw?

  Bruce, too sore and dispirited to join the scramble of a food hunt, started gathering up rocks and arranging them into the S.O.S. After a while he felt he had picked the tougher job, not the easiest, but plodded grimly up and down, back and forth, slowly forming huge letters about thirty feet wide. Plodding back and forth almost in a trance.

  Jan shifted everything of value back along the beach about 300 yards closer to the headland and tried the wireless again, longing for music or the voice of an announcer, but there was nothing. She was tempted to look for a sheltered camping spot under the trees, and in fact started clearing such a place with the spade until she grudgingly admitted that their survival probably did depend upon their ability to see or be seen, as Gerald said. Gerald had gone to great lengths to stress that point, even though Jan still felt faintly rebellious. Anyway, there were ants in the bush, and flies, millions of them, and the open beach was less plagued by the persistent little pests. So she picked a spot and felt moved to mark it out like a house, running grooves in the sand with the spade: a front door and a back door, a living-dining-room, a room for the girls and a room for the boys, and a kitchen. She thought that perhaps later on she could add a pantry (when they had something to put in it) and more bedrooms, an entrance hall, sunroom, and so on. She could turn it into a real mansion with private bathrooms and marble staircases and all sorts of things; a grand place like film people lived in. Then she got mad with herself for her childishness and became tearful, and turned her face away in case Bruce saw her, because he was trudging past, scowling, dragging his feet, hugging a stone to his chest like some primeval youth bent on murder.

  In the kitchen she made a fireplace out of rocks, then went off to gather twigs for the fire and came back with such an armful that she used some of them to define her rooms more clearly. Then she thought of standing larger pieces up on end, pushing them deeply into the sand, to make walls for privacy. The rooms should be properly separate, after all. Her mum would expect her to do everything right; not to be lax or anything. Then she got mad with herself again, and tearful once more because there seemed to be so many complications, so many that they churned her up inside.

  She squatted in front of the fireplace and stared at it, at the dead grass and twigs so carefully set in best Girl Guide fashion. There was one fly in the ointment; a Girl Guide’s skill was measured by her ability to light a fire with a single match, not without matches at all. Some native peoples rubbed sticks together, others twirled a stick, others knocked stones together.

  Jan continued to stare until everything became a blur. By then, too, her lips were beginning to swell. Presently Mark drifted in, empty-handed. Jan didn’t know he was there, and he didn’t tell her. He felt guilty because he had been sure he would bring back lots and lots of eggs. All he had found was an old bottle, a very, very old bottle that once might have had spirits in it or medicine. The glass was green and thick and crazed. Perhaps they’d be cross with him because there weren’t any eggs. Col might understand, Jan might understand, too, but it was Gerald he was worried about. He couldn’t work out what had happened to Gerald. Gerald had become bossy all of a sudden.

  Then Jan saw him. ‘Hi,’ she said, as though her voice came from a long way off.

  ‘Hi,’ said Mark.

  ‘No eggs?’

  ‘Couldn’t find any.’ He felt awkward. ‘I found a bottle, though. Do you think I should have another look?’

  Jan turned back to her heap of grass and twigs and wondered whether fire might come down from Heaven if she prayed hard enough. ‘No fire, either,’ she sighed. And she started rubbing sticks together, because with Mark there she felt she should try. ‘A bottle,’ she said. ‘What sort of bottle?’

  ‘A real old one, see. Old as the hills.’

  It was not what Jan had suddenly hoped for. She had hoped for a nice bright bottle that might have worked like a magnifying glass with the sun shining through it. A good hot spot of light might start the fire.

  ‘Are you making a house?’ Mark said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I like the rooms. It’s a beaut idea. Will I get some more brush for the walls?’

  ‘Would you?’ said Jan.

  ‘I’ll say. I reckon it’s a beaut idea.’

  So she put the stick aside and said to herself, ‘I’ve got to get the fire going. There must be another way.’
>
  Gerald came across the headland dragging something behind him, then manhandled it over the rocks with a clatter on to the beach. Bruce, lying flat on his back, immediately sat up and saw him. ‘What’s he got?’ he called. And Colin, way out on the sea wall, looking that way, wondered much the same thing.

  Bruce limped off to meet him. It was part of the wing section of the Egret. ‘Crumbs,’ said Bruce, ‘we can’t eat that.’

  Gerald looked worn out. ‘I’ve been everywhere,’ he said. ‘It’s a rare sort of island. We ought to be caterpillars, you know, like Jan says. There’s nothing to eat but the leaves off the trees.’

  ‘There are still the sunflowers.’

  Gerald grimaced. ‘It’s just a dirty great desert. No animals or anything. I can’t work it out.’

  ‘What’ve you got the wing for?’

  ‘To make dishes out of. Something to carry water in. Get the metal off and it’ll be dead easy to bend into any shape we want. But I can’t work out why there’s no water lying around.’

  ‘Jan said that, didn’t she?’

  ‘The soil must be too sandy or something. It must go straight down. It should be lying around at this time of the year, up here. I mean, rain up here comes down in buckets.’

  Bruce shrugged. ‘Like we said, it’s the real end of the earth.’

  ‘Well, what did the aborigines do? How’d they live on it?’

  ‘Who said they ever did? Maybe it’s just one of those places. Real bad land. It happens, you know.’

  ‘But the trees and grass and all?’

  ‘Trees’ll grow anywhere, give ’em time. Grass too. Crikey, trees grow out in Central Australia, don’t they, and it rains out there once in a blue moon. Do you reckon we ought to start building that raft?’

  Gerald’s eyes were troubled.

  ‘Or do you think we should start walkin’ round the island? It looks a pretty big place, Gerald. It might be all right farther on.’

  ‘I reckon the settlement down there scotches that idea. I reckon they built it in the best place they could find. Anyway, I said we can’t.’