Gripped By Drought

by Arthur W. Upfield

  The morning he left Forest Hill, the out-station, for the Atlas homestead, the sky indicated a coming weather disturbance. Mrs. MacDougall, very large, very jovial, her face weather-beaten and her accent Scottish, herself saw to it that his tucker-box was filled with her good cooking, and safely stowed on the floor of his car, and that the canvas water-bag, hung from the spare tyre, was also full. With her husband she accompanied him to the waiting machine. They had been at Forest Hill eight years, and he had come to regard the great-hearted couple with affection.

  “Wind!” MacDougal1 said, looking up at the sky.

  “Yes, and perhaps rain, Mac.”

  “Every drop a pound to the squatter, a shilling to the overseer, and a penny to the station-hand,” Mrs. MacDougall said with a deep laugh.

  “You will be right, Mrs. MacDougall, bar the overseer and the station-hand, who will get respectively more than the shilling and the penny. Well, au revoir, and thank you, Mrs. MacDougall!”

  He left Forest Hill at nine o’clock. The sun, now rising in the north-east and setting in the north-west, already glowed with uncomfortable heat through a high, almost invisible haze which covered the sky with a ghostly white veil. Without doubt that haze presaged the coming of wind and rain, rain and wind that would banish the long summer and introduce the splendid invigorating winter.

  Nevertheless, he drove at an easy twenty-five miles an hour. There was plenty of time. Feng did not require his immediate presence on any important matter, and Ethel would be occupied with her new sets of guests. He sighed, remembering the MacDougalls, eighteen years married, and blessed with three children all away at school; remembered, too, the little sly glances of affection he had seen so often pass between them.

  For two miles the car descended the winding track twisting among the low hills, presently to come out on the gently undulating country, plain chiefly, excellent grass-lands, but bare now save for the almost invisible green shoots thrusting upwards from the tussock-grass roots and mutely crying for rain.

  Reaching Mulga Flat about ten o’clock, he was received by the senior of the two riders stationed there, examined the well, decided to send a man to renew some of the white-ant-riddled timber, and obtained the riders’ mail and ration list.

  “lt seems ter me,” the rider drawled in careless speech, “that that crook heat-wave we ’ad in February killed all the rabbits, and now that the foxes ain’t got too much tucker they’re going to play up with the coming lambs.”

  “Yes, Archie. That is what Mr. MacDougall thinks. Any of the lambs appearing yet?”

  “Nope.”

  When Mayne left Mulga Flat the wind was noticeably freshening. It came from the east of north in a peculiarly steady pressure, recalling to Mayne’s mind similar conditions in other Aprils and other Mays which had been followed by abundance of rain.

  Whilst he drove eastward his speed countered the wind force, the machine making hardly any air disturbance. The flies, able to keep pace with him, tried to drown themselves in his eyes and crawl into his ears with irritating persistence. Midway between Mulga Flat and White Well he left the main track and travelled northward for fifteen miles to a hut near a dam named Karl’s Dam, after the contractor who had created it. Here he found Tom Mace who, when his living at rabbit-trapping was destroyed by the first heat-wave, had applied for and was given a job. Here he was managing the petrol-engine that fed drinking water from the fenced-in dam to receiving tanks that fed drinking troughs in two paddocks.

  “Well, Tom, how are things going here?” Mayne asked the highly strung, alert Englishman.

  “Aw–all right, Mr. Mayne. Bit of a change from the rabbiting.

  I’ve made up for a lot of lost sleep.”

  “The money is not so good though, is it?”

  “N-no. But the work is not so hard,” Mace pointed out, from an innate sense of fairness.

  “How are the foxes?” was Mayne’s next question. Mace offered a suggestion. “Let’s go along to the troughs. The sheep haven’t been to water since last night. We’ll see the tracks.”

  Together they left the hut, passing the iron shed that housed the engine, then the dam, and so to one, the nearer, of the two long lines of troughing. They returned by skirting the sheet of water in the dam, and everywhere they cared to look they saw on the ground countless impressions of fox-pads not yet obliterated by the rising wind, tracks so numerous that it was as though during the night the foxes had come to drink in a close flock, like sheep.

  “All the sheep drinking regularly, Tom?”

  “Y-yes, Mr. Mayne. Harry says that the last rain wasn’t heavy enough to fill the gilgie holes in these north paddocks.”

  “Ah! Of course! The country here is too porous to hold surface water. The foxes coming here proves that. What about you dealing with them?” Mace considered. Then:

  “Well, it’s a bit early,” he said. “The fur won’t be fit for the market till next month.”

  Pinching his chin with forefinger and thumb, it was Mayne’s turn to consider. He recognized this fox menace created by a succession of good years. The good years had enabled the rabbits to breed with their astonishing fecundity. Because the rabbits provided quickly and easily won food for foxes and eagles, both eagles and foxes in their turn had bred rapidly. The eagles were a degree less to be feared than the foxes. Over all Atlas he had seen fox-tracks. It was the eternal cycle, Nature’s adjustment of the scales. First the good years with their abundant gift of life, then the bad years when Life is reaped by Death, to be followed by the ousting of Death by Life, and so on and on.

  “Well, Tom, the foxes must be dealt with,” Mayne decided, thinking of his sheep. “What about you starting operations right away if I pay you station wages and tucker and give you a scalp bonus of half a crown, till the fur comes in and you can skin for the market?”

  For yet a further spell Mace considered. The proffered terms were most generous. Yet, for all that, his objection was the legitimate objection of every trapper. It was to him almost criminal to kill a fox out of season, as it were, before its pelt had grown to prime. Quite suddenly he appreciated his employer’s viewpoint.

  “All right, Mr. Mayne.”

  Mayne smiled a little grimly. He, too, appreciated Mace’s viewpoint. “Very well, Tom,” he said. “I’ll send a man out to relieve you to-morrow.” They walked over to the car. “Shall I mention to Eva that you will be in to-morrow night?”

  Mace flushed scarlet.

  When in the car, the engine running, Mayne spoke again.

  “You stick to me, Tom, and you’ll discover that I’ll stick to you,” he said seriously. “When this dry spell is definitely broken, if one of the married couples’ houses is not vacant, I’ll build you a house near the homestead.”

  Again Mace flushed scarlet.

  “Th-thanks, Mr. Mayne!” he managed to say.

  4

  When Frank Mayne again reached the east-west track the wind was rising to a gale. Maintaining its steady, even pressure, it swept up the surface dust, laying over the ground a foot-thick reddish blanket. The sun, now almost at its zenith, shed surprising heat, heat that the wind did not temper, for the wind itself was hot against the driver’s face.

  It was two o’clock when Mayne reached White Well, twenty miles out from the Atlas homestead, and experience had convinced him that White Well was a most unpleasant place during a windstorm. The two corrugated-iron buildings, the near-by well and windmill, and the sheep-yards in the distance formed the centre of a circular plain rimmed by sand-dunes that rose forty feet above it, like a line of huge whales cast up along the shore. Now the plain was as bare of herbage as the summits of the dunes, and lay beneath a dust pall varying from six to sixty feet in thickness.

  Imperceptibly the wind moved to due north, its velocity increasing, its temperature unpleasantly hot. It hissed through and thrashed the branches of the solitary half-century-old pepper tree that grew beside the living hut, and, sweeping between that hut and the kitchen
dining hut, put a face of pure sand on the low wall beyond the buildings. A dozen hens crouched in the shelter of a roughly made dog-kennel, whilst the dog, with sand-rimmed eyes, looked out from its interior, too uncomfortable and wretched to bark.

  Mayne, having telephoned the solitary rider stationed here to remain in to meet him, descended from the car and was almost forced into a run by the wind whilst making for the dining-kitchen door. It was latched, opened outward, fought to keep shut, slammed shut when Mayne slipped through. Within the dim, dust-filled interior he found Fred Lowe, the youthful, lithe, crack stockman of Atlas.

  “Phew! What a day, Fred!” he said, gasping.

  “Ya-as. It’s a hell of a day all right, Mr. Mayne,” the rider agreed, having now laid aside a Nat Gould novel, putting billets of wood under the swinging boiler in the great open hearth. “An’ this is a hell of a place to be in on a hell of a day too.”

  Dark eyes peered at Mayne through the murk. A wispy black moustache emphasized the whiteness of perfect teeth when the man grinned at his employer with unconquered cheerfulness.

  “It is not a nice day, certainly,” Mayne said. “But if the wind brings rain we shall soon forget the dust and heat and flies. While you are making a drink of tea, I’ll telephone the homestead.”

  Two minutes later he was talking to Feng Ching-wei from the instrument in the living hut.

  “It is blowing big guns out here, Feng,” he said with voice raised to overcome the rattle of the roof sheets. “But it looks mighty like rain. Two inches now would assure a good season and end our worries, eh? Yes. Ah, well, I’ll be in in an hour or so. Put me through to Ethel, will you?”

  He heard his wife’s voice a few seconds later.

  “Hallo, Frank!” she said in her calm, cold manner.

  “I’ll be home about four o’clock, sweetheart,” he told her cheerfully. “It’s a beast of a day, but let us hope it will end in a good rain. How are all the people?”

  “All locked up,” Ethel replied. “Mr. Wilkins and Miss Jefferson and the two Rawlings are playing bridge in the drawing-room. The others are in their rooms resting, but we have to have every door and window shut, and consequently the heat is horrible. Even here in the house the air is full of sand and everything is coated with dust. Really, Frank, this Australia of yours is a terrible country. I had no idea we’d have this dust and heat at this time of the year, or I would not have asked these people to come. It is most unfair to subject them to such hardship.”

  “Well, well,” he said soothingly, “the wind will die down by sunset, and it’ll then become cooler. Anyway, you are really lucky. This hut is surrounded by sand-hills, and inside it is almost as sand-fogged as it is outside.”

  “That makes it no better here,” Ethel told him, a trace of tartness in her carefully modulated voice. Her emphasis on the word “no” irritated her husband.

  “I’ll be home about four. Keep smiling till I get in, old thing. Au revoir ! ”

  Mayne waited for a return “au revoir” , but heard only the click of Ethel’s instrument being replaced on its hook. He sighed, and for a moment gazed with unseeing eyes at Fred Lowe’s bunk, its calico covering deeply reddened with sand. For weeks small faint voices had been striving to command his attention, and, whilst he stood there in the red murk, with every sheet of iron in the building rattling beneath the vicious wind, one voice did make itself distinctly heard.

  The voice told him that his wife hated Atlas.

  Regret lasted fully a minute, to be followed by anger. Memory recalled scenes and conversations between them before they were married. He remembered how careful he had been to describe to her the several bad points that were so much outweighed, to him, by the good points of the climate of Central Australia. He had been so careful, so meticulously honest in describing the disadvantages of living so far from civilization. But never had she made any demur, or weakened in her determination to accept him as her husband. And now, having married him, having accepted Atlas as her home, the least she could do was cheerfully to make the best of things.

  A little tight-lipped, he rejoined Fred Lowe. The young man was not so good a cook as he was a horseman. The slab of cake he produced from a calico bag was hard and leaden. There was tinned milk in lieu of cow’s milk, and whilst he stirred his tea Mayne remembered the hamper so carefully packed by Mrs. MacDougall.

  “Slip out to the car, Fred, and bring in that box of tucker you’ll find on the back seat,” he requested. “And, Fred, let the dog loose and bring it in here. Out in the flying sand it can hardly breathe.”

  Mayne shared the contents of the luncheon hamper with his rider, and whilst they ate the thought occurred to Mayne how grossly unfair it was that he should enjoy the comforts of life merely because he was begotten by Old Man Mayne, and his men should exist in the conditions he found here at White Well. Was it any wonder that the bush was rapidly being emptied of bushmen, who were coming to realize the absurdity of living, as Fred Lowe was living, almost as primitively as the aboriginals, starved of ambition, the chance of marriage and winning a home almost as remote as winning a prize in a sweepstake.

  “Ole Westmacott met up with a bit of trouble,” Fred was drawling whilst lounging at the table, minus cloth and smeared with sand particles. “Oh!”

  “Ya-as. Met him yesterday along his boundary. ’Member young Harry, helped by nig, taking twenty hundred wethers down to the Victorian roads last year?”

  “Yes. Westmacott told me.”

  “Appears the old man gave him legal authority to sell at ten shillings a knob. Young Harry gets the sheep down to Swan Hill. Leaves Sampson, the nig, with the sheep whiles he goes into town for a spree. Falls in with a barmaid who sools a bloke on to him to sell at four bob a knob. Tells young Harry she’ll go to Melbourne with him on the cheque. And young Harry bites. The bloke gets ’em at four bob a knob, and gives the tart a diamond ring for doing her work in the deal. Whiles young Harry was hanging about for the barmaid to go off to Melbourne with him, he loses all the four hundred quid gambling.”

  “Silly young ass!” Mayne said.

  “Ya-as. As the old man said to me, if young Harry ’ad come home, a tongue-lashin’ was all he’d have got. There was no need to drown himself in the Murray.”

  “Drown himself!” Mayne echoed, startled into bolt uprightness.

  “Ya-as. It’s knocked the old bloke rotten. He says the old lady does nothink but screech.”

  “Good God! That’s dreadful. I didn’t know. When did Westmacott hear?”

  “Police told ’im about it yesterday.”

  Shocked into silence, Frank Mayne thought of the Westmaeotts and of their long, hard struggle on a selection which, like almost every pastoral selection, was too small in area to support a family through bad years that came with the inevitability of Fate. There were Sanders and Wills on his south boundary, both now facing ruin. Sanders had asked for employment on Atlas, intending to leave his two daughters to look after his flock, but Mayne had sufficient men for his needs. He felt he could not put off a man to give Sanders a job, because the man would work for Atlas in the good years when Sanders would not.

  Yes, the small men were already becoming desperate. If the coming winter did not prove to be marked with good falls of rain, their case would be hopeless.

  Telling Lowe not to come out to the car, Mayne battled with the wind to reach it, started the engine, and drove slowly across the small plain, instinct assisting him to keep to the track, now wiped from vision by the moving sand. He could not see the surrounding sand-dunes until he arrived, by good luck, at the point where the track passed through them, and then he dared not look toward those on his windward side. He knew that their summits smoked as the stacks of battleships, and that every ten minutes their shapes were completely changing. The sand-grains flayed his left cheek, compelling him to keep closed his left eye. He could have fastened the car’s side-curtains, but considered that they would be torn away. The car was buffeted so that it rocked.
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  The sun appeared now as a huge ball of blood. The scrub-trees he passed screamed in torture, their branches thrashing wildly. Gradually the sand fog became deeper red in colour as it became more dense. The wind veered to the north-west and blew harder. Surely rain was behind that wind!

  He had gone but four miles from White Well when he decided that until the wind dropped he could go no farther. Arriving at an open clay-pan covered space, he swung the car round, so that its back faced the wind, and pulled up. When he got out and stood on the ground, he could hear the water in the radiator boiling, the effect of the labour of the engine. Putting out his hand gently to unscrew the cap, two-inch blue electrical sparks flashed from each of his fingers to the metal cap. Sand grains and wind had stored in the metal parts of the machine electric static. When he was climbing on the back seat preparatory to covering himself with a rug, a spark from the metal hood rod gave him a second shock.

  With his head enveloped in a rug he sat inside the car for hours-till the sun went down and the wind fell to a light breeze coming from the south. And the sky, when the sand wrack thinned, he saw to be quite clear of clouds.

  CHAPTER XII

  THE DOOMED

  I

  THE western sky was pink. The air was cold and still, and vibrated with the harsh cries of many galahs returning from a dam, which they had visited for a drink, to the gum trees beside a dry creek wherein they roosted.

  On the bank of the dam sat Tom Mace, reflectively smoking a cigarette, and wondering how many foxes he would secure that night and skin on the morrow. Beside him was set a large, roughly made wooden tray, covered with small pieces of raw meat sprinkled with powdered strychnine crystals. Near the tray lay a split-open sheep’s head to which was attached a length of rope.