Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  Harry found the best time for his questions to be when they were out walking, a pastime of which Auntie Ellie was fond. They would walk many miles along Ocean Beach and they would eat the fleshy leaves of the plant they called pigface and she called dead men’s fingers, would rub the bite of jack-jumpers and the inchmen with the pulpy flesh. They would walk in the bush up around Piccaninny Point on the King River and beyond the rain-forested ruins of Teepookana. At such times she reminded Harry of a dark plum. She would pick the ripe kangaroo apples after they cracked open in the early morning sun and push them in his mouth, the taste sometimes like a boiled floury spud and sometimes like a banana. Auntie Ellie herself was particularly fond of mullas - large blueberries to be found on vines in the rainforest. And as they walked and Auntie Ellie fed him from the bush, she would start chattering away and tell him how they had to look after the land for the land was the spirit. When there was a mining disaster at Queenstown and many miners died, she said, as she always said in times of drought or flood or fire, that the land was soaked with blood and that such things happened ‘because the spirit angry, because the spirit sad.’ Sometimes, when she was ill or drunk or in the bush, she talked of her mother and her people, whom she only ever referred to as the old people, and sometimes, when she felt particularly happy or particularly sad, she would talk about the old people’s ways. She was a stern and proud Catholic, though occasionally she called satan Werowa, which she said was the old people’s name for the devil.

  ‘Not that I know much about the old people,’ she would say. ‘A bit. Not much. A bit. You’d have to ask them professors at the museum, Harry, to get your answers. Now they know the lot.’ She would tap her head and heart with her hand. ‘I only know what I got in here and here and that’s two parts of bugger all.’ Then she’d look up in the trees, trying to find another possum run or batch of ripe mullas, and, never looking at him, say in a disinterested sort of way, ‘Them poor buggers had it bad. Oh Lord, yes. Real bad, they had it.’ But about herself she would only say, ‘I am a good respectable white woman.’ Much of being respected for Auntie Ellie was being part of the church, and her religion was, like her, a cranky combination of both the new and the old. She observed the church’s great ceremonies - baptism, communion, confirmation, marriage, mass - wearing her other dress, her best dress, made of a dark serge material. But around her neck, in contrast to the prim drabness of her dress, she wore layers of beautiful meriner necklaces that she made from seashells she collected from Ocean Beach, that had all the colours of the sea upon a single thread of catgut. In anything that really mattered to her it was the old people’s ways she stuck to, not the ways of the Church of Rome.

  The following morning Harry knew for sure she wasn’t well when she called him to scatter the ashes from the fire in the direction of the morning star, so as to warm it and ease its journey through the day. All that day, family from her mum’s side gathered at home, a rough mob they were, but nice and decent and polite as could be. Late in the afternoon Harry’s uncles Basil and George turned up. They all sat around with their dogs and chatted and laughed and hoyed their dogs to cut out this and that.

  Auntie Ellie was dying.

  It had begun after Daisy’s death. Auntie Ellie began to shrivel up. She stopped doing everything. She stopped smoking all the time and took to smoking only of a mid-morning after she had chopped the firewood for the day, and then only rollies and not her pipe. She went to church only of a Sunday, not every day that the priest happened to be saying mass. She talked little and laughed less. She came to find walking very difficult. Each Sunday she would get in a tiny horse cart that she owned and, possessing no horse, get Harry to pull it in a harness they had found on the tip and which she had converted for Harry’s use. Harry would pull the cart to church and back. This practice went on for some months, till the Siddons took to calling in on their way to mass and giving Auntie Ellie and Harry a lift in their A-model Ford.

  When the priest came to administer the last rites Auntie Ellie grew - for the first time anyone could remember - Auntie Ellie grew contemptuous, even abusive. ‘Bugger off, Father Breen,’ she said. ‘I’m off to see the old people, and I ain’t got no need of going to the Catholic heaven.’ Father Breen was perplexed but determined to be forceful, until Harry’s cousin, Big Mick Brennan, smelling strongly of muttonbirds, draped his arm, two threatening hairy joints of mutton, around the priest’s shoulders and, smiling, repeated his aunt’s injunction. ‘Be a good fella and bugger off, Father.’ Father Breen took his hat and bade farewell.

  After the door slammed Auntie Ellie had a cup of tea and started telling stories about the old people. She didn’t tell any of the stories that she had remembered that night when she had been chased by the cow along the road to Lettes Bay, only the good stories and the funny stories about the past. Mostly stories about the family.

  Then Auntie Ellie stopped telling her stories and lay back down on the floor. As Auntie Ellie lay on the floor dying, her brothers sat around in that old sky-blue tin house and told more stories. The stories got the men drinking, and then some of the men drank too much and the women grew angry and ordered them out of Auntie Ellie’s house until they were prepared to give the bottle a rest. There was some screaming and shouting, then it all calmed down again, except for Noah, who just wouldn’t shut up carrying on about how some people were saying he was drunk, just because he kept falling over, and how he knew plenty of sober people who fell over all the time, so how the hell did him falling over prove a thing, how did it prove he was drunk, when all it meant was that his balance wasn’t perhaps as good as it might be? Then the women grew angry again and the men started to laugh and open bottles. In the end, even Auntie Ellie, sick as she was, had had enough and she rose up from her possie in front of the fire, where she had lain for some hours, and went outside to whistle up the wind in her anger. That was when everybody knew that it had all gone a bit too far. Normally Auntie Ellie only called up a wet westerly, but when she was really shitty she whistled up a northerly - she called it Werowa’s breath - to give people headaches and bad chests. She’d make a high-pitched whistle, eerie really, and then the trees would begin to quiver and rustle, and before you knew it, there was a full bloody gale roaring.

  As Auntie Ellie stood on her verandah in that soft mid-morning light, lips pursed and emitting a shrill strange sound, the wind rose like a slow-forming wave, at first just a small rustle, then, as it gathered power, beating at the windows and doors of her little tin home, making them rattle, and finally shaking the very house itself, so much so it frightened everybody inside. It was like a violent song, and every now and then, when it seemed to be beginning to wane a little, Auntie Ellie, with the door behind her slamming open and shut in the wild gusts, would whistle again, and the wind would immediately respond, even more ferocious, even more powerful. Everyone grew quiet, for Auntie Ellie had the powers of the old people. The men tipped their beer out and Auntie Ellie came back inside and resumed her possie and her impassive stare into the fire.

  Harry had never met half of them, but they seemed to know all about him. Harry asked how they knew Auntie Ellie was so sick, because no word had been sent, and they just pointed to the tips of the trees moving in the wind and smiled. The wind seemed to make Auntie Ellie a lot happier, even though her normally immaculately tidy house was being turned upside down and she was, if nothing else, a fiercely proud housekeeper, but she continued to fade through that day and the following evening.

  Near the end she lay down on the floor and asked for the fire in front of her to be built up. She curled up in front of the red heat and her dogs lay around her licking her hands and face and she seemed happy for this to be the way. The light of the fire played upon them and she stared past the dogs’ panting tongues into the ever changing, dancing forms that seized and then fled from the red embers at the heart of the fire - mesmerised, as if seeing things in those flames that she had never seen before. When Harry arrived she became unusually talkat
ive. ‘A strange thing, Harry. Since they took the old people away, Harry, a strange thing. God has not filled this land with animals. The land used to be alive with wallaby and kangaroo, possums would come to your door to eat and you’d eat them. Now you have to hunt all day to find one. The emu gone, the tiger gone. The old people gone.’

  Harry did not know what to say. ‘We’re still here, Auntie Ellie,’ he said.

  Auntie Ellie smiled. She looked up at Harry and said, ‘Seems the whiter and whiter I get, the blacker you get,’ and laughed and laughed. Then coughed, and the coughing became a sort of convulsion, then went quiet again.

  ‘My people call,’ she suddenly said and the dogs howled. ‘No you cry for me, Harry,’ she said. ‘I go back to my people. Me going back. No you cry. My people take me away.’ She took Harry’s hand in hers, as if they were back in the bush and she was guiding him around. ‘They rowing hard to get to me, Harry,’ she said, pointing at the ceiling as if she had suddenly there spied a boat coming through the sky to take her away. ‘Pull, you lousy buggers!’ she shouted in an outburst uncharacteristically loud and vulgar for Auntie Ellie. ‘Pull hard!’ And she gripped Harry’s hand so hard that it hurt and he could not believe that the old woman had so much strength left in her. Tears welled in Harry’s eyes. Auntie Ellie cast her eyes downwards from the ceiling to look at Harry and spoke one last time.

  Saying: ‘No you cry for me, Harry. My people call.’

  After Auntie Ellie died everyone howled, the family and the dogs, and even the rusty corro shook, for half an hour or more.

  Harry, 1946

  I look into the fire, but be buggered if I can see what Auntie Ellie saw there. I stare at the ceiling, but there’s nothing there save the painted Huon pine boards Reg nailed there many years before. And even though I have the power of my visions, the only boat I can summon into my mind’s eye is Harry’s punt as he continues his journey up the Franklin River and then up the Jane River.

  It took Harry the rest of the day to get up to the junction with the Jane River, and from there up the Jane as far as the bottom of the first gorge. He camped the night there, then the next morning pulled his boat high up the riverbank, turned it upside down and tied it up. He waited half a day before Norry and Joff Halsey turned up, having walked around the first gorge. Together they spent the next two days carrying the supplies Harry had brought in the punt around the gorge to Norry’s camp. The camp was a roughie, a sheet of canvas pitched in an A-frame, for there had been but little pine in the vicinity, and Norry and Joff had cut and hauled most of what was worth taking while waiting for Harry. Now they were to move up above the second gorge, where word had it there was plenty of good pine. The next day they began the hard labour of carrying all their gear and supplies, as well as Norry’s punt, up over the part of the mountain range known as Punt Hill. But before they went searching to find the traces of the track that Barnes Abel and his boys had cut back in 1936, they rowed up into the mouth of the second gorge for a look-see. Harry had never seen anything like it. The walls of the gorge cut up hundreds of feet and a cold wild dank breath of wind ran down this corridor of darkness. It seemed as if light hardly ever reached inside the bottom of the gorge, so slimy and mossy were the rocks. The river now ran low, but the walls and rocks sweated moisture. Water seemed to drip from every opening, down every slope, over boulders the size of houses. The gorge glistened green and black in its splendid solitude, a world complete unto itself. Nobody spoke. Norry pointed to driftwood caught fifty feet up a cliff face, and the piners’ blood ran cold with the thought of the gorge in flood, a wild demented cataract, an avalanche of white water sweeping before it everything unfortunate enough to be in this green and black world. They looked in excitement and in fear, in exhilaration and in terror, smelt the gorge’s heaviness, felt its power turn their legs to jelly and make their heads reel with the vertigo of imagination.

  ‘Bugger me dead,’ said Norry. They turned and slowly rowed back to their camp at the base of the gorge.

  They cut and hauled pine for the next six weeks from a stand above the second gorge that Norry had been told about by Barnes Abel. The stand was a few hundred yards back from a cliff that fronted the river. The logs of pine were branded with Norry’s ‘H’ brand and, with the aid of block and tackles and a few long irons, the piners hauled them to the cliff, over which the logs were dropped into the deep water below. The pine trunks that had inched so slowly and with so much difficulty to the cliff would suddenly slither over the edge like seals, falling vertically into the deep pool below, briefly pogoing back out of the water to finally fall sideways and silent. They spent a few days freeing the logs from log jams that snared the river, and floated them down to the mouth of the gorge. There they left them to be carried out in the winter floods, and headed home.

  At Flat Island they came upon Smeggsy and Old Bo, who told them how Old Jack had wanted a drink real bad and had decided to go out with another gang of piners they met heading home as Smeggsy, Old Bo and Jack were heading up the Franklin. Smeggsy was keen for a hand with hauling some logs, given that he was a man down, so Harry said he’d stay on with them, though as Norry and Joff disappeared around the corner he wasn’t sure why.

  It was early morning and the rain had been piss-dripping all night down onto the mossy King Billy pine slats that roofed their hut. Harry sat up in his sugarbag-lined bunk, rubbed a fist in each eye, and took a deep breath of the sweet smoke-heavy air. In the fireplace he found his boots, dusted with the fine light grey ash left by the burnt Huon pine, still a little damp, but warm. He pulled them on and they felt hot and comforting and he revelled in the good feeling they gave his feet, for he knew the rest of the day they would feel like murder. They ate some bread Old Bo had made on the previous Sunday and some bacon that Smeggsy fried, drank some tea, then they rowed the punt upriver to the track that led to the stand Smeggsy and Old Bo were working.

  Old Bo had found the small stand of pine many years before, but then the trees had been a little too small to cut. Now they were of a good size. The stand lay about twenty chains back from the river. To get their logs through the rainforest they had a small kerosene-powered winch they had brought in pieces from Strahan in their punt and assembled in the rainforest.

  Old Bo and Smeggsy took the wire rope up through the bush and hooked it up to a fallen log. When they were done Harry started the winch. It ran a little roughly, so as the log slowly inched toward him, Harry picked up the grease can and went to grease the winch. His damp boots skidded on a slimy sassafras sapling that had been felled along with the other scrub to make a clearing, and Harry fell, the thumb of his right hand going through the cog drive. Harry looked at the mangled stump that emerged and his legs felt weak and his head light. He called Smeggsy and Old Bo to come. They looked at Harry and Harry looked at them. Smeggsy went back up the gully and returned with his axe. Harry laid his injured hand on a fallen myrtle log. Old Bo clawed at the log and a big lump of brown mush came off the log like it was chocolate cake. The entire log was rotten to the core, a mass of decomposed peat held in shape only by the mosses and lichens that encircled it.

  ‘Not there, Harry,’ said Old Bo. ‘It’s too soft, mate.’ It was the first word any of them had spoken since Harry had called them back. Smeggsy scarfed a flat surface from the top side of a pine log they had winched down the day before.

  ‘Operating table, eh Harry?’ said Old Bo and they laughed.

  Then the laughter stopped.

  Harry put the pulp, with its bone-flecked gore, upon the pine log. It looked to Harry like a blob of fatty silver-side flecked with desiccated coconut. Smeggsy put a loose headlock upon Harry, swivelled Harry’s face away from the sight of his hand, and tightened the headlock. Old Bo pinned Harry’s right wrist firmly to the log with his left hand, and with his right, holding the axe halfway down the handle, raised the axe in the air.

  ‘Hold the boy gentle, Smeggsy,’ said Old Bo.

  Then he let the axe fall.


  Do I have to watch the rest?

  Thank God for small mercies.

  the fifth day

  Instead of a toppling thumb I am seeing a watch, and looking down upon it is Aljaz. He realises with a shrug that the watch has stopped working. He looks back up at the valley upon which mist sits so low and heavy that the entire river seems shrouded in white. An extraordinary moment of peace, really - I can see that is what Aljaz is feeling. There is a silence about the river as the punters load the last of the gear on the rafts and do a final check of the campsite. Looking upon it now, it was a serene start for a day that was to prove anything but. And, as if respectful of the quiet, the rafts are untied in silence, kicked off from the riverbank by Aljaz and the Cockroach in silence, and they glide into the tea-black waters of the Franklin River with no sound. The paddling begins without talk. For once, all the punters manage to paddle in unison and the rafts follow each other as if held by some invisible thread. The current is far stronger than the punters have until then experienced. They feel the strength of the moving black sheet of river in their arms and are excited by it, excited by the way the rafts, formerly sluggish when the river was barely running, now seem to move at an almost excessive speed.

  The reverie is broken by a scream. It is Ellen, on Aljaz’s boat. ‘A leech, a leech!’ she cries. Aljaz clambers over the gear frame to the front of the boat where Ellen sits, and pulls a sleek black blister of blood off the back of her hand and throws it in the river, leaving Ellen shivering with a small free-flowing wound.

  They paddle on. Noises strange and harsh crack the enshrouding mist, announcing the overhead flight of a flock of yellow-tailed black cockatoos. The punters briefly observe the birds through a hole in the mist before the flock has flown the length of the valley and left for elsewhere. For a time after the flock has disappeared the wild and rough cries can still be faintly heard, as if prophesying the imminent rain half humorously, half grimly. They paddle on. The mist rises to reveal clouds moving at a pace almost frantic across the narrowing slit of sky above. Nobody talks. The fear is upon the punters, though not yet their guides. They have been on the river for only an hour or so when the air turns suddenly and strangely chill. The Cockroach’s raft is leading. The Cockroach slows his raft up and Aljaz’s raft bumps into it. The Cockroach points up a side ridge further down the valley. It is covered in rain. They look at one another. Nothing is said. The weather has swung back to westerly. They paddle on.