Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  The Kermandie was a slow-flowing river, but rowing against the current with another skiff in tow was not an easy matter, and every half hour Tom beached the little boats and, his chest puffing violently, was forced to rest. About nine of the clock the mist lifted and the huge trees, which had appeared simply as shadowy outlines in the misted landscape, now showed clearly on either shore. Mary found herself locked into a narrow ribbon of water walled as surely and steeply by the giant eucalypts as if the trees had been sheer cliffs of solid rock. A flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos flew over at one point, their tinny screeching the only sound they’d heard since leaving but for the lap of the oars in the water and once the flap of a flock of chestnut teal as they rose in alarm from the water. The sun was now well up and Mary worked herself out of her coat. They passed a black cormorant on a dead branch, its wings spread to the new sun, and soon after a white-faced heron stood on the shore, its long neck and sharp-beaked head moving in slow jerks, made curious by the slap of the oars. Though the trees on either side of the river still looked cold and dark, the glare from the water and the sun overhead made Mary feel uncomfortably hot. Tom’s shirt was dark with sweat and his long, lank hair lay flat against his head. Mary saw beads of perspiration cutting thin streaks down his dirty neck.

  The further they travelled the more dense the trees became. Giant prehistoric tree ferns, some of them forty feet high, grew at the water’s edge, and occasionally they’d hear the splash of an unseen creature plop into the water from the riverbank. At one stage Mary, intimidated by her surroundings, whispered to Tom simply so that she might make some sort of human contact. But he held a finger to his lips. Once, about an hour out from the settlement, they heard the sound of an axe striking. Sharp, regular echoes seemed to bounce off the trees, though from somewhere much deeper into the forest. Mary was not sure whether the sound was frightening or comforting, but Tom shipped oars for a few moments and listened while the boat drifted backwards in the current. Then, Tom taking great care with his strokes, they moved on again.

  After four hours with regular rests they came to a waterfall and Tom pulled the boats into shore.

  ‘This be it, missus, we can’t go further,’ he shouted, his voice almost lost in the crash and tumble of water over rock.

  Mary stepped onto the shore and Tom pulled the boat fully into the little pebbled beach, untied the smaller dinghy and dragged it also onto the safety of the river-bank. Then, straining mightily, he pulled the first dinghy into a clump of reeds and fern, piling the branches of dead trees over it until it was impossible to see. He placed three rocks close to each other, two together and one pointing to where the boat was hidden.

  ‘I’ll be back for the boat in ten days!’ he shouted, pointing to the fern and reeds where it lay concealed.

  Mary nodded and handed the lad a pound. He grinned, his work well rewarded. ‘Thank ‘ee, ma’am, Gawd bless ‘ee now!’ he shouted, touching the forelock of damp hair. Then he pushed the smaller dinghy back into the water. The tiny boat turned in the churning current at the foot of the falls, then the oars dug in and he steadied it, waved briefly and began to row away.

  Mary watched as he disappeared around a bend in the river, rowing lazily in the firm current now driven faster by the falls. Then she rolled up her coat and strapped it with the blankets resting on top of her canvas bag, slipping her arms through its straps so that it sat firmly on her slim back. She stood for a moment and held the Waterloo medal in her hand, half praying that a pair of green rosellas might suddenly fly over as a sign, but nothing disturbed the bright blue cloudless sky overhead.

  She had a map which Sam Goodhead had drawn, or perhaps obtained from elsewhere, and it showed a path leading directly from the waterfall in a direction due west. It took Mary some time to find the path, for it was much overgrown with bracken and fern. She soon stopped to take the axe from her pack, and her going was tediously slow. Though it was not past ten in the morning the forest was dark as though already deep into the afternoon, and as she travelled further into the giant trees she began to feel the weight of the journey on her mind.

  For the first time Mary realised that she had no idea what she was doing or how she would find Hawk. Above her the trees towered two hundred feet into the air and the wind in the high canopy gave off the sound of endless waves beating against a lonely shore. At noon she stopped beside a small stream, ate a little of her biscuit and drank from the mountain water. The straps of her canvas bag had cut into her shoulders, she was already badly scratched about the hands and face, and her bonnet was saturated with perspiration.

  At nightfall Mary was still within the forest and the track had become almost impossible to find, so she halted beside a small stream some twenty yards distance from the path, marking several trees with the blade of the axe so that she might find her way back in the morning. She ate a little more of the hard biscuit and some dried meat, lit a small fire and boiled tea in her billy. The night became bitterly cold but Mary could not take the chance of going to sleep with a fire. She doused the fire, wrapped herself in both blankets and still wearing her coat she fell into a fitful sleep. She was exhausted, and the night sounds did not unduly disturb her for they were no different to those she had heard so often on her own mountain.

  Mary woke up with the sun cutting through the misted trees and lay for a moment, all her senses suddenly alert for she could hear a most familiar sound. It was friendly to her ear until a moment later she realised where she was. She’d heard the sawing of Peter Degraves’ timber cutters a thousand times on the mountain, a cross-cut saw being worked in a sawing pit. But now she realised it was coming from close by. Had she continued on another five minutes along the path the previous night, she would have stumbled right into a timber getters’ camp.

  She folded the blankets and packed her bag and, with her heart beating fiercely, she drank from the stream and then regained the path. She crept along until she saw the camp ahead, four bark huts in a forest clearing. She could see several children playing and a pig tied to a stake and once a woman came out of one of the huts and yelled at the brats to come in and eat. And all through this Mary could hear the saw. Though she could not see the pit, she knew exactly what it would be like. The log would be placed longitudinally over the pit on wooden cross pieces, whereupon sawing lines would be drawn along it with chalk or charcoal. One man descended into the pit while the other stood on the log. The man in the pit pulled down to make the cutting stroke, the one above pulled the saw up clear of the wood and guided the cut along the line. It seemed such a normal and friendly occupation, and while she knew it was most strenuous work which built up bulging muscles if the body received sufficient nourishment, Mary had never before associated the sound with danger.

  The path led directly to the clearing. Mary, hoping that the sound of the saw would cover her escape through the undergrowth, moved in a wide circle around the camp. She kept the sound of the saw in her ears so that she might find herself back on the path but on the other side of the timber getters’ camp. Almost an hour later she regained the path with the sound of the cutting now well behind her.

  But soon after Mary left the camp she had a sense of being watched. At first she told herself that her alarmed senses were a delayed reaction from having so nearly stumbled into the camp. But the feeling persisted and she could not be rid of it. Once she looked up to find a large, pitch-black, crow-like bird with burning ruby eyes looking at her. After the initial shock, she laughed quietly to herself. She was becoming frightened of shadows. At noon she stopped and moved off the path some distance and boiled a billy. She used only the driest, smallest twigs and built the fire against the trunk of a huge red gum so that any smoke she created would be sucked upwards against the trunk and dispersed unseen through the forest canopy.

  It was then that she was attacked. From a hole in the tree she had disturbed a hive of wasps and they descended upon her in an angry storm. Mary had the presence of mind to grab her canvas bag and pl
uck the billy from the fire and run. She rushed headlong through the undergrowth, not caring about any sound she should make, the wasps stinging her furiously as she ran. She fell once and cut her arm and then got up and ran again until the wasps seemed no longer to torment her. Finally she stumbled to a halt and began to weep, her flesh covered in hundreds of stings so that she felt she could not possibly bear the pain.

  She had stopped beside one of the numerous mossy banked streams that cut through the forest and in desperation threw down her canvas bag and ripped off her clothes. The wasps had penetrated through the material of her dress and her body and arms were covered in stings which hurt well beyond the lashes she had received on the Destiny II. Hysterical with the pain, Mary lay down naked in the stream. The icy water flowing over her body brought some relief, for her flesh soon grew numb. Her poor crippled hands were swollen to twice their normal size and her right hand was burned when she’d plucked the billy from the flames. Though her bonnet had protected her head and she had no stings in her hair, her neck and face were badly stung and her lips were so swollen that she could not open her mouth.

  Mary was soon chilled to the bone and was forced to rise from the stream and cover herself with the blankets. As soon as she warmed again the terrible pain returned and she seemed close to losing her senses. Her body had grown quite stiff as though it were paralysed and she could not move, though she was shuddering violently as if in great shock. Then she lost consciousness. Several times she seemed to see the crow with its ruby eyes and long, sharp beak, as though it were seeking to pluck out her eyes. Then a dog-like creature sat and watched her from a short distance, its green eyes sharp as lights in the night, and sometimes she caught flashes of a dark face hovering above her. She tried to scream but no sound came from her lips which seemed, in her delirium, to cover her entire face, enveloping her nose and puffing up her eyes.

  How long she remained in this state Mary had not the least idea, but when she awoke it was morning, though whether of the next day or several days after, she could not tell. Her body and face were covered in a sticky balm, as though the wasp stings had themselves suppurated, but miraculously the pain was gone, and the swelling had abated and did not hurt to the touch. Mary washed in the stream until the sticky substance was removed from her body, hands and face and then she dressed, distressed to find that her garments were torn in several places from her flight through the undergrowth.

  Mary ate, and boiled the billy for tea, for she found herself very hungry. Then she packed her bag and prepared to leave, but suddenly she realised that she did not know where the path lay. She moved around for more than an hour without finding it and then knew that she had become completely lost. Sam Goodhead had cautioned her against leaving the track by more than a few feet. ‘Fer if ya become lost in the forest ya will die as surely as if ya put a gun to yer own ‘ead,’ he had warned.

  It was then Mary heard the screech of the green rosella, a sound she knew as well as the beat of her own heart, the curious ‘kussik-kussik’ call repeated and then a bell-like contact note; when alarmed, a shrill piping sound. Rosellas do not fly in flocks in the spring but in pairs, and now she heard them both as they chattered somewhere to her left. Mary, ever superstitious and with no better plan to follow, moved towards the sound.

  Mary had been three days in the forest, for though she did not know it, she had lain all the next day and the night that followed beside the stream in the delirium caused from the wasp stings. Now, without questioning the curious circumstances that the sound of the two parrots never seemed far from her and that she never seemed to approach nearer or to see them, she responded to their call. Sometimes she would turn to take an easier way through the undergrowth and she would hear the shrill piping of alarm from the two birds. After a while she learned to correct her course to the sound of their calls.

  Mary fervently believed that the great mountain had answered her call for help. Even in her most prosaic moments, Mary thought of the mountain as her friend and lover, which was why she did not question the call of the two birds and the fact that they never left her.

  Late on the afternoon of the fourth day she suddenly came across the track again and soon after broke out from the trees. She had been climbing steadily all day and now she found herself in a small valley above the tree line, a dent in a mountain which rose steeply upwards. It was as though a sharp line had been drawn where the mountain broke out of the apron of trees and into the coarse tussock grass of the high mountain country. The track now led upwards and seemed quite well worn, there being no forest growth to obscure it.

  Mary walked along the track a short distance but then, in the fading light decided to retreat into the forest for the night. It was some minutes after she had returned and moved a safe distance from the track when she realised that the ‘kussik-kussik’ calls of the two rosellas were no longer with her.

  She rose again at dawn, her body stiff and sore, and boiled the billy for tea. She ate sparingly, not knowing how much longer she would be in the wilderness and conscious that if she should find Hawk she would need to share her supplies with him.

  However, by now her hope of finding her son was greatly diminished. The forest had left her in despair and even though she had come safely through it, she now saw that a wild man might hide effectively from a thousand troopers and not be found in a lifetime. Her only hope was the notion that the monster who had captured her son rode on horseback, and horses do not find fodder in the forest but need grassland. He would be forced to live or spend time near some sort of pasture, and this meant open ground.

  Mary climbed steadily all morning. The mountains, she discovered, were punctured with small, sharp valleys like indented cones, many of them turned to small blue lakes with grassy walls too steep to climb down into. She would often stop for breath and far below her she could see the endless stretch of green forest turned blue in the distance, and the glinting, wide stretch of the Huon River twenty or more miles away. The mountain, despite the sun, grew cold as she rose higher, and a sharp, icy wind whipped her skin.

  On her first night she found a small box canyon which was protected from the wind and made her camp. It was perhaps a foolish place to spend the night, for there was no place to retreat, but her hand throbbed painfully where it had been burned by the billy and Mary was too spent of effort to care. Her greatest concern was to escape the cutting wind. Besides, the mountain, but for rock and grass and bracken fern, was bare of any acceptable hiding place.

  Mary woke with the crack of a rock striking near her head, her nostrils filled with the musty smell of horse sweat. She turned to look upwards and saw a horse and rider not fifteen paces from where she lay.

  Mary now sat up with the blankets still clasped about her neck to form a protective tent about her body, groping for the pistol which she had placed fully loaded under a rock near her side the night before. The folds of the blanket concealed her free hand as she found it, though her swollen hand made it difficult to grip firmly the small pistol.

  The man on the horse did not make a sound but simply stared down at her. He was dressed almost entirely in kangaroo and opossum skins but for a trooper’s high-topped white cap much battered and entirely blackened. His filthy beard fell almost to his waist and his unkempt hair hung wild and knotted to his shoulders. What remained of his face was dark with dirt and criss-crossed with scars and his nose was squashed flat, like a pig’s snout, and from it a stream of yellow snot ran into his matted beard. A red tongue flicked from the dark hair of his face as though he was tasting the air or testing the nature of the wind, savouring her body smell.

  It was then that she saw Hawk. Or perhaps it wasn’t, except that the skeleton attached to the rope which led from the back of the horse was black in colour. Mary gasped. ‘Hawk!’ she cried. The skeleton raised both its hands but did not speak and now Mary saw that it was her son. His hands worked slowly and Mary tried to follow. Hawk’s hands simply spelled, ‘Mama’.

  ‘Hawk! M
ama’s come!’ Mary shouted and then looking up at the monster on horseback she screamed, ‘He’s my boy, my precious boy, give me him!’

  The creature looked backwards and jerked violently at the rope so that Hawk was thrown to his knees. Then he slowly dismounted and, undoing the rope from the saddle, pulled it, bringing Hawk back to his feet. He then dragged him over to a large boulder and tied him to it. Turning, he drove his fist into the child’s face. Hawk made no sound as he fell.

  At the sight of Hawk knocked to the ground from the vicious blow, Mary began to weep. ‘You bastard! You fucking bastard!’ she moaned, repeating the words over and over again in her terrible distress.

  The man moved slowly to tie the reins of his horse to the point of a sharp rock. He knew he had Mary trapped. The bluff rose behind and on either side of her, and he himself blocked her only chance of escape.

  Now he advanced slowly towards Mary, who rose to her feet as he approached. He was no more than four feet from her when she raised the pistol behind the blanket, but the wild man, perhaps sensing danger, suddenly lunged forward and threw her to the ground. The pistol fell from Mary’s swollen hand on to her coat, which she had the previous night spread on the ground, so its falling made little noise. Mary landed on her back, the pistol digging painfully into her ribs.

  The monster, now on top of her, panting violently, tore open the blankets which still half covered her, then ripped the top of her dress exposing her breasts. He was not a tall man but wide and powerfully strong, and he now spread one thick hand around Mary’s throat to pin her down. With his free hand he began to tear the skirt from her body.