by John Marsden
Our eyes met. He said, ‘If you can get about five metres over to your right there’s another chimney you can go down.’
I swallowed. That was easy for him to say. I felt a funny kind of fluttering under my ribcage, just above my stomach. I licked my dry lips. The strength suddenly left my limbs; both arms and both legs. They felt like useless, stupid, floppy things stuffed with rags and sewn on by a few weak stitches. I didn’t look to where Homer was suggesting, until he said, ‘Hey Ellie, relax. It’s not that hard.’
‘From there maybe.’
‘Are you still thinking of your last cliff climb?’
‘I guess I am a bit.’
‘Well, believe me, this is radically different. Your feet can do all the work, along that ledge. Just concentrate on keeping them solidly planted.’
Then I took a look and thought, ‘Oh yes, OK, maybe I can do that.’
The ledge was between me and the start of the next funnel, but I could only see it by peering around the pillar of rock beside me. All I had to do was step around the pillar and shuffle along.
‘Don’t look down,’ Homer said.
I wriggled around the column of rock, looking steadily upwards and feeling with my feet for each step. I took it slowly, tiny step by tiny step, until I thought I must surely be nearly there. I looked across to my right and realised to my intense disappointment I was only halfway. But glancing up again my eye was caught by a remarkable sight. It’s funny how a foreign object shows out so strongly when you’re in the bush. A bit of plastic, a cigarette butt, a piece of paper: you can see them hundreds of metres away. But only when they’re fresh. Once they’ve been there a week or two they fade into their surroundings.
Just above my eye-level was a tiny fresh fragment of Casey’s bandage. I recognised it straightaway. It looked so bright. In a few days it would become weather-worn and dull. For now it stuck out like a dark green little flag.
I didn’t tell Homer till I was safe at the start of the next cleft, but then I called out excitedly, ‘They’ve been this way. I just found a bit of Casey’s bandage.’
The discovery gave me the energy and willpower to keep wriggling my way down the new chimney. Towards the bottom it became quite easy, and less than ten minutes later I found myself dropping, with a sense of relief, onto the safe firm ground at the base of the cliffs.
I stood clear and waited for Homer. When he jumped the last two metres to the ground we looked at each other and grinned.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘You sure love those high places,’ was all he said.
‘We’d better get on with it.’
We cast around like bloodhounds. Not that I’ve ever seen bloodhounds, but I imagine they keep their noses to the ground and sniff enthusiastically. That’s what we did. Homer went to the right and I went to the left. This was all flat, dry, lightly timbered country, so it was vital we found a clue, or we’d have no idea where to go. They could have walked off in any direction. I criss-crossed the ground over a large area, eyes down, scanning constantly, looking for the slightest sign.
I found nothing. I felt increasingly sicker, knowing we were wasting ten, twenty, thirty minutes. The kids would be losing strength and condition, losing heart too no doubt. Already they’d been gone nearly twenty-four hours. Well, they’d survive that. They’d probably even survive forty-eight, although I wouldn’t like to think of the condition they’d be in. Beyond forty-eight hours, I didn’t like their chances of surviving. All I had to go on was my experience with weak lambs and motherless calves. An orphaned lamb would be dead in a day or so. These kids were stronger than newborn lambs, but every time I tried to make myself feel more optimistic by thinking of Gavin’s tough determined little face, I’d also think of Natalie’s scared eyes and Casey’s grey complexion and Jack’s tiny thin legs.
Chapter Six
When forty-eight hours had come and gone, and we’d spent our third night in the bush, sleeping in nervous fits and starts, waiting for first light so we could get going again, I knew we were facing our last chance. We had to find them today. We simply had to. The whole of the previous day, Homer and I, and the other three when they caught up with us, had scoured the bush. We called the kids’ names now. We had no trouble making that decision. We felt sure they would answer if they could hear us. If they were conscious to hear us. If they were alive.
Each time I called, I just hoped an enemy soldier didn’t answer.
The trouble was that this kind of bush was so featureless. I love the bush as much as anyone but there was nothing to love about this bland scrubby stuff. It seemed to go on forever, the light green leaves of the gum trees, the light brown soil, the light blue summer sky. The colours were dull, the brightness leached out by the relentless sun. There wasn’t even much wildlife to speak of. The most obvious were the ravens, like big black rags floating down onto trees. And often the only sound to be heard was the cawing of the ravens, hoarse and ugly, the voices of death.
Searching was a lonely business. Landmarks were so hard to find that we had trouble fixing meeting points where we could come together every hour to report our lack of results. Later in the day, as we got more desperate, it was every two hours. We got so confused about landmarks that I’m sure we went over the same ground a number of times without knowing. By the time Lee and Fi and Kevin caught up with us there wasn’t much left of the first full day of the search, but we spent all that next day scouring miles of bush, for a total result of zilch.
We didn’t talk much about it. There wasn’t much to say. We knew this was a job we had to see through to its finish. For once there were no choices.
During those hours I thought many times of the stories I’d heard from my father and grandmother, about kids lost in the bush and the huge distances they travelled, the endurance they showed. But most of those kids were from the country in the first place. Dad sang a song sometimes, about a kid who’d gone missing for ages in the New England Ranges in New South Wales. ‘“Where’s my daddy, where’s my daddy,” cried the little boy lost.’ I tried to remember how long Stephen, the boy in the song, had been lost, but I couldn’t, even though I must have heard it a hundred times. ‘Another night, another morning, another day, another dawning.’ I remembered that bit but I wasn’t sure if it meant one night or two had passed. And then there were those three kids from Daylesford in Victoria, who’d disappeared completely in the 1880s or ’90s. No-one had seen a trace of them again.
On the whole I preferred the song. At least the Armidale boy had been found. ‘She prayed to God in Heaven for the little boy lost.’
Her prayers had been answered. Would mine be?
The day had passed in slow motion. Round about lunchtime I’d given myself a sharp talking-to, because I realised I’d reached a stage where I didn’t really expect to find the kids, so I wasn’t looking keenly enough. I was gazing at the ground without seeing anything. So I had to tell myself to keep my mind on the job.
Things were made worse by the fact that I suspected the kids had no access to water. The trickle over the clifftop ran away for a couple of kilometres before disappearing into a soak which had no run-off. We checked the soak carefully, but there were no tracks in the soft ground around it, so we had to assume they’d left that gully. And in all the huge area we’d searched since then, none of us found a single trace of water. In this hot summer weather nothing would kill them faster than thirst and dehydration.
In the morning we skipped breakfast again. There was a sense of such urgency now, such desperation, that we just grabbed a handful of food each and disappeared in our different directions. We’d agreed the night before to concentrate on a big area of stringy-barks that had been cleared by loggers maybe six years ago and was now full of difficult new growth and mounds of rotting trunks.
It was only an hour and a half later, the rising sun still enormous and yellow in the sky, that I thought I heard a cooee in the distance. It seemed to be to my right. I turned that way. A moment
later I heard another one, much closer. I ran at a jog towards the second one and soon saw Fi coming through the trees.
‘Who was it?’ I asked.
‘Kevin I think. He was on my right.’
We hurried in what we hoped was the direction. Our rule was that you could only cooee if you’d found something, or if you were passing on a signal from someone else. Otherwise it’d cause too much confusion. I was on the left flank; there was no-one to my left, so I hadn’t had to pass on Fi’s call. We walked a little but jogged most of the time. In about five minutes I could hear voices, so I swerved to the left, with Fi following. There were Lee and Kevin, and a moment later I saw Homer hurrying up from the opposite direction.
By then I’d reached Kevin and could see what caused him to call out. It was a boy’s shirt. A green check shirt with a torn collar. None of us needed to say anything but Fi said it anyway: ‘That’s Jack’s shirt.’
‘He must be feeling the heat,’ Lee said.
‘Thank goodness we’ve found it,’ Fi said. ‘At least we’re on their trail again.’
I didn’t say anything, just looked at Homer. He looked back at me. His gaze was steady but his mouth turned down as I watched, and his jaw jutted out more strongly than ever. We both knew what it meant when people start shedding their clothes. It means they’re near the end, they’re losing it, their body temperature’s way too high. ‘Go back to our campsite and get all the water you can,’ Homer said to Lee. ‘Fill the containers, and put them in a pack. Then come after us. If we leave this track I’ll put a marker out for you.’
Without another word, and without waiting to see if Lee was doing what he asked, Homer strode off. The good thing was that the kids could only have gone in one direction. The track Homer mentioned was an old logging road, overgrown with waist-high saplings, but still clear enough. It led away from us in a straight line, and that’s the line Homer took.
We trotted along behind, like kids out for a nature walk. When Homer was like this it was a struggle to keep up. He was no runner but he had a long stride and he was determined now, determined to the point of desperation. Like the others I shut my mouth and followed.
Ten minutes later we found another bit of clothing, a yellow shirt that Natalie had worn. Then nothing for nearly half an hour. Suddenly though, Homer stopped. ‘Look at this,’ he said to me. I peered from around his back, because he wouldn’t let me step on whatever he’d seen. I could see straightaway what he meant though. The ground told a story as clear as a Hollywood movie. There was a big patch of crushed grass, squashed and broken, then a kind of trail for ten metres, the grass still bent over all that way.
‘What is it?’ Fi asked, trying to peer over my shoulder.
‘Someone’s sat down here,’ I said. ‘Or fallen down. Then someone else has dragged them along for a bit, and made them keep going.’
No-one said anything and we resumed our frantic chase. ‘Bloody little idiots,’ I thought. ‘If only they would stop.’ They’d save energy. They must know we’d be looking for them.
Occasionally now one of us called out, but there was no response. Most of the time we saved our own energy. I can’t speak for the others but I know I had little enough left. These days of dawn-till-night-time searching, more than sixty hours, on the bare minimum of food, wracked by terrible fear about the fate of the kids ... it drained everything, gave nothing back. And however bad it was for us, at our age, it must have been ten times worse for the kids.
I was getting breathless, tired and sore, and starting to fall behind Homer. I glanced over my shoulder and realised Fi had dropped a long way behind me and Kevin was almost out of sight. It made me all the more determined to keep up with Homer’s broad back.
From then on there was no lack of clues to what was happening. You didn’t have to be an Aboriginal tracker any more. In the next couple of kilometres we passed a string of shoes and socks, and several more places where the kids had either collapsed or stopped for a rest. Twice we came to forks in the old logging track, but a few minutes were all we needed to work out which way they’d gone. We made big arrows for Lee, then kept going.
My own weariness was bad enough, but underlying it was a sense of despair, that we were going to fail. And to make matters worse, to fail by just a couple of hours, or even minutes perhaps. It was hard to tell exactly when they’d passed this way, but it had certainly been this morning. It was now around noon, entering the hottest part of the day, and if they’d had no water since coming down the cliff none of them would still be alive by sunset.
I marvelled at their endurance. I expected at every turn to find them lying under a tree, hiding from the heat of the day, sheltering in the shade. But no. They just kept going. I remember thinking that there was still hope for us in this war, if other people showed the guts of these five. It seemed a long way from the alley in Stratton where they’d mugged us on that desperate morning. Seemed like years ago now.
Then my thoughts were interrupted by a cry from Fi, behind me. I swung round, feeling a sick surge of horror in my throat. Something in the way she’d called out ...
She was hurrying into the scrub on the side of the track. I ran back, forgetting my own exhaustion. I saw at once what had caught her eye, and wondered that neither Homer nor I had seen it as we passed. A little body lying inert under a small gum tree. A little girl, wearing only a grubby pair of knickers, her body deathly pale.
Natalie.
Fi was kneeling beside her, holding her hand and trying to talk her back into life. I ran to them and grabbed the other, tiny arm, feeling for a pulse. I’d done a bit of first aid on an Outward Bound course, ages ago. We all had, except Fi, who’d been on a horse-riding camp. But it was only a very little bit, and it was a long time ago. When I couldn’t find a pulse, I didn’t know if it was my ignorance of first aid or whether there was no pulse to be found. I only knew that the skinny wrist, the size of a half-inch hosepipe, felt cold and clammy.
At that moment Lee, who sometimes has no sense of timing but sometimes gets it exacdy right, arrived with the water. He grabbed Jack’s shirt, which Fi had been holding ever since we’d found it on the track, poured some water on it and started bathing Natalie’s face.
When I saw the tenderness Lee showed then, the way he held her and the desperate gentle way he touched the water to her lips, I felt the old emotions about Lee come back to me, stronger and more intense than ever.
And when Natalie suddenly wriggled in his arms and shook her head and then opened her eyes and mouth simultaneously I felt such a surge of love that I could have fainted. Guess it was just the tiredness and hunger and relief, but for a moment Lee seemed like a miracle worker, someone who could revive the dead.
I had to get a grip on myself then, remind myself that Natalie was only one-fifth of the job at hand, and what’s more, this wasn’t the place to be thinking about my feelings for Lee.
It seemed best to leave Natalie to Fi, so I said to Lee and Kevin ‘Come on, let’s get after the others. Bring some water. Bring heaps of water.’
I grabbed a water bottle and ran after Homer.
The finding of Natalie gave me another burst of energy. Unfortunately it didn’t last long. I was too exhausted for adrenalin to do much for me.
Homer was well out of sight. I chased him for, I’d guess, three kilometres, before I finally saw him pounding along at his steady, effective jog. I had to slow to a walk then. I had nothing left at all and even walking was a huge effort. My legs ached from my hips down to the soles of my feet. Every muscle, every tendon was in pain. I knew from previous experience that I’d take days to recover. Maybe a couple of hours in a hot bath filled with bubbles might have done it, but I had a funny feeling that I wasn’t going to get that.
Anyway, I reminded myself angrily, I had to stop thinking about my problems at a time like this. What did my sore legs matter when these kids were facing death; for all I knew were dead already?
I put in a few little stretches where I tr
ied to walk faster and eventually caught up with Homer.
‘We found Natalie,’ I panted. ‘Off the side of the track.’
‘How is she?’ he grunted, glancing sideways at me but not slowing down.
‘She was coming to life when I left.’
We didn’t talk again, but spent all our time scanning the bush as we hurried along, anxious not to miss another little body huddled under a tree, someone else who’d staggered off the track and collapsed.
In fact we could not have missed the next one. She was right in the middle of the track. A pathetic pile of rags, hiding a body so small that I thought it really was just a pile of rags. More discarded clothes maybe. But this was a child who hadn’t discarded any clothing, except for shoes and socks. I ran to her. I was a little surprised to realise when I turned her over that I was looking at Darina. I’d thought she was stronger than Casey, and I’d half made up my mind that it would be Casey we’d find next. But no, the closed eyes and the slack lips were those of Darina’s dark face; the eyebrows her thin lines of black hair; the little rounded nose unmistakably hers.
She lay completely slack and loose in my arms, so light she could have floated away, and I sensed with a sickening pain in my stomach that that was exactly what she had done. Floated away. She felt different to Natalie somehow. I was sure she wasn’t breathing. Trying desperately to remember my first aid I put my mouth to hers. I felt her dry cold lips. Then I realised I could cover her nose and mouth with my mouth, so I did that. It was the strangest weirdest feeling, blowing into this empty body. Her chest swelled a little with my breath, but it didn’t seem real somehow. I searched for the pulse in her neck, but there was nothing. I knew I had to go to CPR, and there was some special rule about how to give it to kids, something about the way you place your hands, I think just using one hand, so I put the heel of my left hand on her chest.
I pushed down with the bouncy motion we’d been taught. Two or three centimetres was the rule, I thought. I remembered they said not to be afraid of pushing pretty hard. Her pigeon chest felt tiny, and I thought I would break her ribs. The instructor had said something about that too, but I couldn’t remember what. Did she say not to break them, or that it didn’t matter if you did? I gritted my teeth and kept pressing and bouncing. A sudden thought: I was meant to have her head tilted back. To clear the airway. I stopped the massage and did it, but even as I did I felt another wave of despair. Her body was so limp. It wasn’t exactly cold, but it wasn’t warm either: just felt like something had left it. And I knew what that something was.