by Bear Grylls
Funnel web – two words that made Beck’s blood run cold. The funnel web spider was one of Australia’s most poisonous. Its bite was agonizing.
Ganan shrieked. ‘Get it off! Get it off!’ He tugged at his T-shirt in panic, and Barega went to help him.
‘Come on!’ Brihony ran as fast as she could in the other direction. Beck hesitated – he still wanted that gun. ‘Come on!’
Beck realized they were out of time, so he turned and ran after her. He glanced back after they had gone a short distance. They were well out of the circle of firelight. Ganan had finally managed to pull his shirt off and was stamping on it.
‘It could have bitten you,’ Beck gasped.
Brihony poked him in the arm. ‘It was just dirt. I only said it was a spider.’
And Beck had to grin. To Ganan, the earth running down his back would have felt very similar to a spider’s legs.
But they couldn’t stop to enjoy the sight. In just a few seconds the men would come looking for them. Running wouldn’t solve anything. The men had longer legs, and sooner or later they would catch up. And Ganan still had that gun. So Beck knew that he and Brihony had to think smarter – and fast.
He reached out for her arm and slowed her down. She stared at him through the gloom as if he was mad. They could barely see each other. The sky was as brilliant with stars as ever, but the land was just vague grey shapes. The men would only see them if they were silhouetted against the Milky Way. Beck pulled her down into a crouch and they looked back at the camp.
Ganan and Barega were both circling the fire at the edge of the light, straining their eyes into the darkness. They had been too preoccupied with getting the spider out of Ganan’s clothes to notice which way the two friends had run.
Then Ganan pulled a pair of torches out of his backpack. He tossed one to Barega, and two spears of light flicked out into the darkness.
Beck closed his fist around a small rock. When both men were looking the other way, he rose swiftly and drew his arm back. Taking care not to grunt with the effort, he flung the rock as hard as he could across the camp. It landed with a thud on the far side of the fire. Immediately Barega and Ganan swung their torches round in the direction of the sound. Beck heard them speaking, but not their words, as they ran off into the darkness.
‘Come on,’ he murmured. He and Brihony headed off in the other direction.
‘We can’t keep doing that,’ Brihony murmured back – they both knew that a voice could carry a long way in the still night air.
‘We’re not going to.’
He and Brihony found themselves at the edge of a gully, and they made their way carefully down the side. Beck didn’t want to dislodge any stones that would rattle down the slope and alert their enemies. Nor did he want to trip over something in the dark and end up injured. They couldn’t afford to use a light, even if they had one – so their only option was to find somewhere to hide down in the gully.
They made their way cautiously through the dark until Beck found what he wanted: a dense clump of bushes growing at the base of a large rock. He knelt down beside the rock and felt his way carefully with the machete. A small voice at the back of his mind screamed that he must be mad – hiding under a bush in the pitch black when anything could be lurking there! Maybe another king brown . . . But he didn’t have a choice. If there was anything nasty, he hoped the machete would scare it off before it decided to investigate the annoying mammal on the other end.
He led the way into the bush and Brihony followed him. They lay there staring at each other from a distance of a few centimetres. Brihony’s face was pale in the dark. Too pale, Beck decided. His would look the same – visible to anyone close by who was looking in their direction.
‘Hang on . . .’ he whispered. He spat on his fingertip and ground it into the dirt, then smeared damp mud in streaks on Brihony’s face. He repeated the process on his own. ‘Camouflage. Breaks up the lines. Our brains are programmed to pick out faces.’
They heard the men’s voices coming and going. It must have been half an hour or more before they heard them clearly. Then they both froze as torchlight flashed down the gully and through the leaves. Shadows danced over them as the light moved. Neither of them shifted a muscle.
‘Anything?’ It was Ganan, a short distance away. His voice sounded harsh and abrupt.
‘Nothing. Still nothing.’ Barega was almost on top of them. His voice seemed to boom in Beck’s ear. ‘Face it, Ganan. They’re miles away.’
Ganan swore. ‘OK, that’s it. We’ll leave them to the dingoes. They won’t get out of here alive.’
‘Pindari seemed to think Beck could make it.’
‘Pindari was a stupid old man who believed his ancestors haunted a cave.’ The contempt from Pindari’s murderer made Beck’s blood boil. ‘I’m not interested in what he thought. C’mon – let’s at least get back to the boat and sleep in a decent tent. We’ll find the cave when it’s light.’
The torch beam swept over their hiding place one last time as Barega turned slowly round. It made Beck think of a lighthouse. But then they heard his footsteps recede, and the clatter of falling rocks as he scrambled up the side of the gully.
The men were gone, but Beck wasn’t moving. He and Brihony lay where they were for the rest of the night, until the world began to emerge from the pitch dark, and sunlight spilled again across the Outback.
They cautiously returned to the camp as the sun rose above the horizon. Their shadows were long in the fresh colours of a new day. Pindari lay where the men had left him. Beck knelt down by the body. He reached out to feel for the pulse in the old man’s neck, but there was nothing. Pindari must have died instantly. Beck felt relieved that he had at least been spared the pain of betrayal by two of his fellow Jungun. And at the same time he felt sick to his core that someone he had loved and respected so much was gone.
‘We’ll get them.’ Brihony spoke with quiet contempt. ‘You can get us back to civilization, can’t you? And we’ll go public. We’ll tell everyone . . .’
‘Our word against theirs,’ Beck said. ‘I know Al will believe us and he’ll do what he can, but Lumos will just deny they had anything to do with it. They’ll simply make Ganan and Barega disappear.’
Brihony’s face sagged in despair. ‘So it’s over? We just go home empty-handed and forget about it?’
‘Nope.’ Beck rose slowly to his feet and looked out at the horizon. ‘We go home with the stick.’
‘But how? The men—’
‘The men are in the boat, which has to stick to the river – which loops, if you remember.’ Beck closed his eyes and summoned up the details of the map in his mind. ‘They’re taking the long way. We can just cut across.’
‘The land’s poisoned.’
‘I can keep us safe.’ Beck spoke with quiet assurance.
‘And then?’ Brihony asked.
‘We figure out a way back to civilization and make sure the right people see what’s on that stick.’
‘Can you really keep us alive?’
‘I’ll do my best,’ he said with a smile.
Hope began to flicker on Brihony’s face, but she still pointed out the difficulties. ‘Pindari said that the cave is very hard to get to.’
‘But not impossible. Do you think he had a boat? You must be able to reach it by land as well as by water.’
‘We don’t know where it is.’
‘We know it’s just above the edge of the river, over there . . .’ Beck gestured in the direction Pindari had indicated the night before. Beck and Brihony had been sitting opposite him, and the old man had pointed just over Beck’s shoulder.
‘OK, so we’ve got a vague direction—’
‘No.’ Despite all that had happened, Beck couldn’t help smiling. He felt the confidence swelling within him. ‘Can you imagine Pindari being vague about anything? He knew the Outback like the back of his hand. If he pointed in a direction, he meant it exactly. So – I was sitting here; Pindari poin
ted . . .’
He slowly turned to face the direction they were heading for.
‘The cave’s that way.’ He dug his heel into the dry ground to draw a line. ‘Let’s go get that stick.’
Chapter 24
It didn’t take long to gather together what they needed. Pindari had a water bottle, so now they had one each. He had also been carrying a large leather bag that probably contained everything he owned. Beck cut up the wallaby into slices and stowed them inside the bag. There would be enough to last them a couple of days.
Lumos had poisoned the land they would be crossing, so they couldn’t risk eating or drinking anything there. Everything had to be carried with them.
And then there was one last thing. Pindari himself.
Tears pricked behind Beck’s eyes as he stood over the old man’s body. It wasn’t just that he had lost a friend. It wasn’t just outrage and shock at witnessing a callous murder. He would have felt that with anyone’s death. All life is special. But so much had been locked away inside Pindari’s head. So much wisdom, so much knowledge, so much experience. It had just been wiped out. Beck knew that a truly great man had died – and with him was lost a library of knowledge.
Pindari still lay as he had fallen, eyes open, body half curled up. Beck didn’t know enough about the funeral rites of the Aboriginal people. What should he do?
They didn’t have a spade to dig a grave, and digging a hole with the machete or a stick in the hard, dry ground would take for ever. It would waste time, and wasting time would have annoyed Pindari.
Brihony came to stand beside Beck and put a hand on his shoulder. Her voice shook. ‘There’s nowhere else he would have wanted to die.’
Beck nodded silently. She had answered the question for him. Pindari had belonged to this land, and this land would reclaim him. The dingoes would come for his body if nothing else got there first.
But Pindari would never want to meet them curled up like that. So Beck knelt down and gently rolled him over onto his back, then straightened his legs, crossed his arms over his chest, and closed his eyes.
Brihony watched him. ‘I’ve never seen a dead person before.’
‘Pindari’s spirit has long gone. This is just his earthly remains.’
Beck tugged Pindari’s spear out of the ground and put it in the old man’s hands. Now Pindari’s body could face whatever came for him with pride.
Beck passed Brihony the water bottle they had shared ever since the boat accident, and took Pindari’s for himself. Then he swung the leather bag onto his back and raised his watch to the sun for a northerly reading. He glanced down at the line he had drawn in the sand. On the face of his watch, the direction they wanted was five minute marks away from north.
‘Come on,’ he said, and set off without a backward glance.
They were walking into the loop of land that was almost encircled by the river. Whichever way they went, they would eventually reach water. Finding Pindari’s cliff was more difficult. Every few minutes Beck took another reading to check they were still going the right way.
They were now heading into the land that Lumos had poisoned. The mine buildings that Beck had seen on the map were still some miles away; they wouldn’t pass anywhere near. But their influence was all around, and he and Brihony found the first sign of it when they came to a dry watercourse.
Every river and stream bed they had seen so far still managed to bring forth new life. Trees and bushes grew out of the pebbles, kept alive by the water that had soaked into the soil.
Not in this one. The withered remains of dead plants clung to the rocks, but that was all. There had been rainy seasons since the disaster. Enough fresh water had come down this way to wash most of the vegetation away. But the soil was still poisoned. Nothing new grew here, or ever would. This land, which could have produced so much new life, had been killed by Lumos, just as Pindari had been killed by Ganan. Everything that was special and unique . . . just wiped out. The sheer waste of it made anger boil up in Beck’s heart.
He remembered the images on Ganan’s iPad back in the warehouse in Broome. It all seemed so long ago, though it had only been three nights back. Ganan hadn’t been lying about the effects of the contamination – which made his betrayal all the more wicked. He knew exactly what kind of people he was working for, and yet he still took their money.
Beck checked the direction again, and they headed across the dry course.
‘Will the air be radioactive?’ Brihony asked quietly.
He shook his head. ‘Air blows away. It was water-containment pools that cracked, remember? The water in them would have been toxic. So anything that the water touched would be poisoned. And anything that ate anything – and so on. It would have soaked into the soil, been picked up by plants . . . but the air will be OK.’
‘It could get through our boots,’ she pointed out.
‘We’ll keep moving. It won’t get the chance.’
As they continued across the doomed land, the scrub grew withered and brown. It crumbled when their trousered legs brushed against it. The boabs and the eucalyptuses that had provided shelter and fruit were just wooden skeletons. No leaves or fruit hung from their branches. The wood was dried out and brittle. Beck wanted to poke one with his machete, just to see how far in it would go. Then he changed his mind. For all he knew, he might push the whole thing over. It would be one more act of environmental vandalism and Beck wasn’t like that.
Something else was bothering Beck. A cloud of unease hung over him. Was he sensing the land’s hurt? It bothered him as they walked along in silence.
Then Brihony, walking up a short slope, dislodged some pebbles with her foot. They clattered down, and Beck jumped with shock. But now he realized what had been worrying him. The land was so quiet.
There had always been sounds in the Kimberley. The wind blowing through trees and shrubs. The cries of a dozen different types of bird. Insects buzzing as they flapped their wings or rubbed their legs together.
But here there was nothing. This part of the Outback was as quiet as the grave because it was a grave.
Beck set a punishing pace. He wanted to be out of this zone of death as soon as possible, and he was aware that Ganan and Barega were heading for the same place as they were. The men might have taken the longer route, and they had probably set off later – but they had an engine.
They took rest stops, because it would have been suicidal not to. There would be no point reaching the cave first if they arrived dehydrated and weak from hunger. But their breaks only lasted a few minutes. They sat on a high rock that was clear of the poison from the pools. A sip of water, maybe a nibble of wallaby meat, and then they were off again. All they could do was take long, measured strides to eat up the ground in front of them, and hope that they would be in time.
Finally, halfway through the afternoon, the ground fell away in front of them and they gazed down at a river gorge. They stood on the edge of a sheer cliff of red sandstone that fell fifty metres, straight down to the water. Beck looked quickly up and down the gorge. There was no sign of a boat.
‘We’re first?’ Brihony asked.
He allowed himself a small smile, but he wasn’t going to get carried away now. ‘I reckon we are . . .’ He saw that Brihony was peering down the cliff, a frown on her face. ‘Will you be OK?’
‘I guess I’ll have to be. Any chance of a bite to eat and a drink?’
‘Sure. We may as well keep our strength up.’
Brihony walked up and down the edge of the cliff while Beck swung the bag off his back. ‘This is definitely the place?’
‘This is definitely where he was pointing,’ Beck answered with quiet confidence. He had faith in his navigation and Pindari’s accuracy.
‘So where do we climb down?’
‘Let’s scout out a good place.’
Brihony continued to patrol the cliff top while she drank from her bottle. Suddenly, a few metres to Beck’s left, she stopped. She was staring strai
ght down at the ground. Then she crouched. ‘Hey, Beck, look!’
‘What is it? A sign saying Climb down here?’ Beck hurried over.
‘Good as. See?’
He knelt down beside her. It took him a moment to see it. When he did, he whistled.
A figure was carved into the rock, the grooves only about a centimetre deep. It was like the footprints he had tracked – if you looked straight at it, then it was hard to make out. You had to view it from an angle, so that there were areas of light and shade. It showed a man brandishing a spear very like the one Beck had left with Pindari’s body.
Somehow you could tell that this figure belonged. The lines followed the curves of the rock, as if whoever had carved them had been careful to make it blend into the untamed nature of the Outback. It must have been thousands of years old.
The man’s spear pointed straight towards the edge of the cliff.
‘He said, follow the spears, remember?’ Brihony pointed out.
‘Then I guess that’s what we do . . .’
Chapter 25
At first Beck couldn’t see anything unusual in the place where the spear was pointing, and he was about to move on. But then he peered more closely over the edge of the cliff.
There was a ledge. It was the same reddish colour as the sandstone, and from this angle it was almost invisible. It angled gently downwards.
That was the good news. The bad news was that it wasn’t much wider than the length of his feet.
‘We can’t walk down that!’ Brihony was aghast when Beck pointed it out.
‘Nope. We’ll have to ease our way carefully. And we’ll have to go down facing the rock. If we had our backs to the cliff, our bums would push us off. I’ll go first,’ he said.
‘Word of advice, Beck?’ Brihony said as he crouched down by the edge of the cliff and lowered himself onto the ledge, first one foot, then the other.
‘Uh-huh?’ He began to move sideways to make room for her.
‘If you ever meet someone really special – you know, a girl you really fancy – and want to give her a good time . . .’