‘A good two days ride,’ I said.
While Dan gathered sticks and scrubby branches from the sparse, wind-stunted bushes, I spread out my swag and unpacked our supplies – a couple of instant cup-a-soups and a fistful of dried apples.
Dan lit the fire close to the edge of the cliff then cast his eyes over the meagre meal I’d laid out on the enamel plates. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said.
Twenty minutes later, just as I was getting nervous, he reappeared with his hands behind his back. He stretched his right towards me. In his palm was a beautiful scarlet flower. ‘For your hat.’
I took it, touched. It was tradition out here to tuck a knick-knack into your hatband. Dan had his flag. Now I had a Kimberley rose.
He thrust out his other hand.
I backed away. ‘What the . . . ?’
‘Olive python,’ he announced. ‘Great tucker.’
I shook my head, but smiled. ‘If you say so.’
When he declared the snake cooked, I tentatively took a bite. It actually tasted okay, sort of like croc: a mix of chicken and fish. The texture was tough too, because the snake lived in tough country.
We were on top of an escarpment in the middle of nowhere and Dan was right at home. If I didn’t have instant soup would I starve? Dan had followed Aria’s barely visible trail. For him there must be no such word as, lost. He could probably survive wherever he was. He knew where to find food, how to build a fire, where to find shelter.
‘Who taught you to track?’ I asked.
Dan finished swallowing a mouthful of snake. ‘My old man. He was a beauty for hunting.’
‘But you said your dad was a white guy,’ I blurted.
Dan frowned. ‘What’s that meant to mean?’
‘I thought you got all these skills from . . . from being Aboriginal.’
He shrugged. ‘Everyone’s got something to teach us.’
I gestured beyond the cosy halo of the firelight into the vast blackness stretching in every direction. ‘You belong. You really know how to survive here. Not just survive – live.’
‘My dad taught me to pay attention. My grandmother taught me how to connect. If you pay attention and connect, you belong.’
This time, as he fixed me with those beautiful gold-flecked eyes, I stared back. I felt as if I was falling, deeper and deeper, into a world that had no words. And all the time there were stars whirling around me, sweeping me up in one inevitable spiral.
Heat fanned through my body, but it wasn’t from the fire. I wasn’t going to retreat. This time, I’d take the lead. I stood in slow motion, my legs shaking, and bridged the three paces around the campfire to sit beside him. It felt as if I had walked a mile.
My fingers crept to his sharp jaw. It was smooth. His lips were strong, full, soft as a velvet muzzle. I remembered what he’d said about horses one time to Aria. ‘You have to get the horse to trust you. You can’t be frightened. You need to get it to the stage where you can touch all of its body, walk under its belly, lift its feet, breathe its breath . . . You have to let it come over to you.’
I pressed my lips to his.
The kiss was warm and salty.
We laid back on the swag and pressed our long lean bodies together. Tingles raced up and down my spine. I wanted to open myself up for him. I wanted to breathe him in.
The Milky Way shone overhead. There were no lights below. No electricity wires, or cars, or buildings. We were the only two people in the world. I closed my eyes. Dan kissed my eyelids. ‘Your tears have stars in them,’ he said.
THIRTEEN
It was cold. I snuggled down into the swag and against the sleeping warmth of – Dan! Oh. My. God. The evening before rushed back. My lips felt bruised and my eyes were crusted with salt. My bra was undone. Nice work, Skye – sleeping with one of the team. But we hadn’t actually . . . done it. Even that expression seemed so crude compared to the amazing feeling of being with him. Would he feel the same way? What if it was just a casual thing for him, a guy and a girl alone under the stars, like all the girls Damien had hooked up with at the camp drafts? Worse – what if he was as embarrassed as I was?
I attempted to slip from the swag into the blue-black shadows of early morning.
Dan sighed and rolled over, flinging a dead-weight arm across me in the process.
I tried to move it.
His fingers curled around my arm and tightened.
I lay still, my mind racing at a zillion miles an hour as everything else came rushing back. Blue Dreamer . . . Aria! Dan nuzzled my neck. A tug of desire swept over me as his lips rose to meet mine. He kissed me: firmly, passionately.
He was definitely paying attention to me. Did that mean we belonged?
‘Good morning, beautiful Skye,’ he murmured. He swirled his finger through a lock of my hair.
No one had ever called me beautiful before. Except Mum, and she didn’t count. I wasn’t hideously ugly. I was a breakfast cereal packet kind of girl – sky-blue eyes, light eyebrows and hair – ordinary, girl-next-doorish. And I was tall and rangy and fit. Easy on the eye, but without Aria’s grace and exotic combination of Russian ballerina eyes and heart-shaped face . . . Me . . . beautiful?
‘Dan,’ I said, reluctantly surfacing into reality. ‘We have to find Aria.’
He tensed and leaped out of the swag.
His chest was bare and the dawn light emphasised the muscles beneath his honey-coloured skin. Behind him, down the escarpment, the land fell away in a primeval landscape of tumbled rocks and twisting waterways, some dried-up: an intricate pattern of scales formed from stones and shadows like the sloughed-off skins of giant snakes.
Dan threw on his shirt and hastily buttoned it, eager to get on with the job of finding her.
Dark thoughts about Aria tumbled through my mind as we broke camp, rolled our swags, and saddled up.
‘Look!’ Dan called out. ‘Down below!’
I peered over the cliff-edge into Lizard Gorge and the dark-shadowed river. A bright red scrap of colour fluttered from a branch at the bottom: Aria’s stupid designer cowgirl scarf. Please, I willed silently. Please don’t let her have gone into that water.
The ride down was arduous. When Magic stumbled on a scree of red stones, I thought: This is it – we’re going to plunge down the cliff. But he kept his feet, I kept my seat, and we continued on, even more cautious than before.
Dan and I hardly spoke. I willingly followed his lead. Sure enough, he picked the safest path, through tumbled rocks and stunted bushes clinging to crevices. I trailed after him, trying to keep focus on the potentially treacherous path and licking my dry lips, still tender from the night before.
Last night had been heaven. Today was hell. I had lost control. Over the past couple of weeks I’d turned from a practical, capable person into a confused, bitter, judgemental wreck. The muster was my responsibility and it was a disaster. Why hadn’t I given Aria more support? Why hadn’t I helped her when she had been so clearly out of her depth? Why had I allowed my jealousy of her to jeopardise the muster? Why, even now, did I long to nudge Magic up alongside Sandman and inhale the musky smell of Dan’s sweat? And why was I even thinking about Dan’s sweat when my best friend might be trapped somewhere between treacherous cliffs and a river teeming with salties?
When we finally made it to the bottom, I winced. There were parts of the riverbank that were only a metre or two wide. Magic’s ears laid flat and his tail twitched. Horses could smell fear and perhaps he smelled mine. Or perhaps he could smell croc – a stinking rotten fish smell. I sidestepped him over the gravelly river sand. The rifle was slung across the back of my swag, but it needed loading. I checked my radio with a shiver of premonition. No reception.
Ahead, Sandman whinnied and jerked back. There was a long flat dent in the sand. Something had slid down it – a croc slip. My skin prickled as it did on certain parts of the station – badlands. It was hard to explain: there might be no visible change in the landscape, but you’d be galloping alon
g and the next moment the horse would shy and your skin would come out in goose bumps and you just knew not to go any further. It was like that down here. Shivering, I kept my gaze trained on the water, scanning for the telltale glimpse of slimy croc snouts . . .
‘Dan. I think we should turn back.’ Magic was getting more and more toey. ‘Surely Aria wouldn’t be silly enough to . . .’
Dan shook his head. He pointed to the crescent of river gravel just ahead. There were the unmistakable dents of hoof prints. Even I could recognise Bella’s sharp, light tread.
We came to a section where the cliff jutted into the river – a dead end.
‘So she did turn back,’ I said, relieved and desperate to get back to higher land.
Dan examined Bella’s hoof prints and frowned, as if puzzled. ‘Skye, come and check these out.’
I urged Magic over.
‘The hoof prints leading out are shallower. It means Bella was lighter going out. And look!’ Dan pointed to a section further up where a small shrub had been crushed as if something or someone had fallen on it.
‘But I don’t understand. Bella might have been skittish, but Aria can handle a horse.’
Dan shrugged. ‘Maybe Bella got spooked and threw her.’ I could only think of one thing that would spook a horse in a crocodile-inhabited gorge. I didn’t want to say it. Saying it might make it real. Surely there’d be more signs of struggle. What signs? Churned up river sand? Bloodstained mud?
Dan scanned the surrounds. Apart from the narrow ribbon of riverbank, we were hedged in by a soaring cliff and deep, dark water. There was nowhere else to go.
I spotted it at the same time as Dan – the way the cliff edge undulated and protruded to form a series of hand and footholds, far enough above the river to evade a jumping croc. Just. At a crocodile farm I’d seen one monster jump three metres in the air for a dangling fish.
‘You don’t think she went around the cliff?’
Dan dismounted from Sandman.
A thousand panicky thoughts rushed into my head. ‘No!’ I said. ‘You can’t take that risk, Dan. We’ve got to get help.’ ‘What help?’
‘A chopper. A proper search party. Men with guns.’
‘And how long would that take?’
He was right. We couldn’t just dial 000. Nature didn’t wait for a neat assemblage of emergency workers and equipment. If Aria wasn’t in that river then she was very possibly caught somewhere halfway up a cliff. This was it. We either searched for her now, or we scrambled back up the cliff, tried the radio and waited for hours for the chopper, by which time . . .
‘What are you doing?’
Dan was pulling off his boots. His feet weren’t soft and white like mine, but brown and calloused. ‘I’ll find her.’
A bush prince going off to rescue a city damsel in distress. What about me? I thought. Don’t leave me here alone. But that wasn’t how it worked. I was big Skye, capable Skye, coping Skye – tough as boots, like my gran.
I don’t know what Dan saw in my eyes, but he dashed towards me across the strip of river sand and crooked his finger to make me lean down from the saddle.
He cupped my cheeks and drew my face closer to his. The warmth of his breath was like a hot bath after a week in the saddle, a padded swag on a chilly night, a cup of sweet tea at the end of a long day’s muster. He whispered something I could hardly catch. It sounded like: ‘It’s you.’
Dan pulled himself up onto the cliff. I clung to Sandman’s reins with one hand and reached into the saddlebag for the box of cartridges. Three left. I carefully loaded them. If a croc attacked, attracted by the sweet smell of horse, I would have less than a second.
I finally understood what Mum had meant whenever we’d watched Damien ride wild steers at the rodeos. ‘My heart was in my mouth,’ she used to say. Now, as I watched Dan climb the cliff, clinging to small cracks and niches, my heart really did feel as if it was in my mouth, blocking my airways, pressing against my tongue. A protrusion of rock jutted out. Dan edged around it and vanished.
‘Dan.’ I tried to keep my voice low. I couldn’t see him, but he couldn’t be too far away and the last thing I wanted was to make him lose concentration.
There was no response – the only sounds were the quiet swish of the slow-moving river and a ripple as a brave honeyeater darted in and emerged with crystal drops of water spilling from its beak. In some gorges a sneeze could ricochet off the cliffs and practically cause a landslide. In others, there was an eerie, deadening effect as if the cliffs were sucking up all sound, greedy for secrets. This was one of those places.
Keep calm. As a kid, when I was helping with the fencing, kilometres of fencing posts would stretch out, marching over the paddocks to the horizon. I’d tell myself that it was already the end of the day and I’d arrived at my destination. Same with exams. I’d trick myself out of the jitters by imagining that it was the day after, the month after, and everything had already happened. I did that now. I told myself that it was a week from now and Aria and I were back in our partition shoe-box laughing about how crap she was at mustering and how next holidays we were definitely going to her place . . .
It didn’t work. Blue Dreamer was dead, Aria was missing, and now Dan had gone after her. I wanted to grab the remote and press rewind – right back to when Aria and I had had the first fight.
A sound from above roused me from misery.
Dan’s head appeared around the cliff.
‘Dan!’
He treated me with that sweet crooked smile. ‘Aria’s okay. She was curled up in a cave. A croc came up from the river. Bella threw her and she only just escaped up the rock. Problem is – it was hard enough getting round from this way. Getting back is murder.’
‘What can I do?’ I demanded. ‘How can I help?’
‘I’m going back to get her,’ Dan said. ‘I just wanted to check that you were okay.’
My heart hummed. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Back soon,’ he promised. He stretched himself, spider-like, around the cliff and I was alone again.
It was some time before his head reappeared. Aria was with him! She moved shakily and clung to the cliff as Dan coaxed her across. I didn’t blame her. They were high up and anything could be lurking in the river below. They painstakingly made their way around and further down the cliff, closer to the sandbank.
It happened before I could move.
A crocodile leapt out of the water in a sudden streaming rush.
Aria screamed – high-pitched, piercing screams. She tried to scramble higher up the cliff, her feet treading on Dan’s hands. He cried out.
It happened so fast, but in slow motion. Dan’s fingers scrabbled to find rock, but the rest of his body was off-balance. For a split-second he hovered over the water, only his feet keeping contact with the cliff.
Then he fell.
‘No!’
The Stetson floated on dark water. There was a thrashing then a cloud of red as the croc lunged for Dan and tumbled him over and over. Dan’s head appeared and he gulped in air before being rolled back under.
I dived off Magic and raced to the river’s edge.
Pointing the rifle at the water, I commanded my hands to stop shaking. I had to wait until the croc was on top. It was agonising waiting, trying to line up the shot. I couldn’t afford to get it wrong. The croc resurfaced, its jaws locked onto Dan’s shoulder.
I fired.
The croc convulsed. Its grip on Dan tightened.
No. Oh no. I hadn’t hit it properly. Oh my god. Oh my god – the same mindless words turning over and over in my head.
The croc writhed and released its jaw lock.
I rushed into the river without thinking about any other crocs that might be lurking in there. I waded in and snatched Dan away. His body was light enough while it floated in the water, but the blood – so much blood – billowed around me, staining my jeans and shirt pink. When I got to the river’s edge, I had to drag his dead weight along the rocks.
I yelled up to where Aria remained, clinging to the cliff face. ‘Get down here and help! You’ve got to help me!’
Keeping the rifle beside me I ripped off my shirt, sending a spray of buttons to the river gravel. I was grateful for the worn flannel – it was easy to tear. I ripped it into strips and bound the awful place that was just a mash of flesh and blood and bone – Dan’s shoulder. I pulled it tight to stop the blood from spurting.
Aria appeared beside me. Her face was deathly white and there were huge purple shadows beneath her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve screwed everything up. I should never have come.’
This wasn’t the time for self-pity. Dan might bleed to death. We had to get him to safety. The radio didn’t have reception down here. Even if it had it would be almost impossible for a chopper to land.
‘Help me lift him,’ I said curtly. ‘Onto Sandman. You’ll have to take Magic.’
Aria looked at Magic, her eyes widening with surprise. ‘Where’s Blue Dreamer?’
I bit my lip. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Aria helped me heave Dan up across Sandman’s back. Sandman barely moved. I mentally blessed the horse for being so solid. Hoisting myself up behind, I propped Dan against my chest, hunching my shoulders forward so his head could loll against my chest. For the first time since the muster, I was thankful that I was tall and strong. It would take all my strength to keep him alive.
The way up was torturous. Sandman was slowed by the weight of Dan and me. Aria rode Magic behind us. For once she was quiet. When we made it to the top, I tried the radio. There was a crackle of static. ‘Yah?’
‘Elise, it’s Skye. Dan’s been attacked by a crocodile. We need help!’
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