The Naked Country

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by Morris West


  The slaughter of the bull was no wanton act, but an act of religious significance. In some tribes, a man must refrain from killing or eating his totem animal. In Mundaru’s tribe, the people of the dream-time had set a different pattern. The totem must be killed and eaten, for from this mystical merging flowed strength, virility and a promise of fertility. Mundaru had prepared himself for the moment by taking red and yellow ochre and charcoal and the blood of a kangaroo, and drawing his own buffalo figure on the wall of one of the caves. The intrusion of the white man was, therefore, a violent and dangerous interruption of a life-giving ritual, which must be avenged if Mundaru and his brothers of the buffalo totem were not to suffer in their own bodies.

  Dillon had been right when he guessed at other motives; resentment of white intruders, fear of the elders and of the inexorable vengeance of the policeman. But these considerations were secondary and sophisticated, the pragmatic reasoning of men who lived in two times, with one foot in the twentieth century and the other in a tribal continuum of magic, sorcery and spirit symbols.

  So, Mundaru, the buffalo man, sat on his high rock in the sun and planned his pursuit and his killing.

  First, he would go down into the valley and eat the flesh of the big bull which the others were now roasting over the fire. When he had eaten, he would sit down and have them paint his body with totemic patterns, in ochre and charcoal and the blood of the bull. The others would go with him to flush the quarry and cut off his lines of retreat. But, because Mundaru had drawn the picture in the cave, and Mundaru had thrown the first spear into the side of the great bull, Mundaru must be the one to kill him. When he was dead, they would hide the body in a spirit place, where the policeman would never find it.

  To this point, everything was simple and consequential for Mundaru; but beyond it there was doubt and a small darkness of fear.

  By attacking the white man, he had taken the first step outside the tribe and into a pattern of existence he did not understand. He had killed before, in a tribal blood-feud. But in this he had been directed and supported by the elders. They had taken him to a secret place and shown him the stone with the symbol of the victim on it. They had given him the feathered boots and the spear made potent by a special magic and sent him off on his mission. When he returned they had welcomed him with honour.

  But this was a matter of totem and not of tribe. The elders would be divided. There would be no magic to help him, because Willinja, the sorcerer, was a kangaroo man, and, moreover, he hated Mundaru, because he knew Mundaru coveted his latest wife. In the council, he would speak against him, and if he swayed them, a magic might be made which was terrible to contemplate. But he was committed now and he could not turn back. The spear does not return to the hand of the thrower, nor the blown seed to the pod. He could only drink the blood of the bull and trust to it for strength and security.

  Far away to the south he saw a white egret rise, flapping and screaming, and knew that the white man had left the trees and entered the high grass of the swamp lands. He stood up, and carrying his spears and club, walked back to the camp-fire to eat the flesh of the bull.

  Lance Dillon groped his way through darkness and a fiery, enveloping pain. His head was full of thunder and a high, cacophonous screaming. There was dust in his mouth and bonds around his chest and his body was stuffed with sawdust like a doll’s. He tried to move and brush aside the darkness, but the pain rose in a high wave and his limbs refused to obey him. He felt himself slipping down the long trough of the wave into blackness.

  After a while, he opened his eyes, a man waking from eternity into space and time. Above him was the dazzling blue of the sky, about him a forest of grass stalks filled with the scream of cicadas and the crepitant bustle of insects. The thunder in his head had subsided to a low, persistent throbbing, but the dust was still in his mouth and the pain was only an inch away, so that when he moved it stabbed through him like a knife-blade. He lay still again, closing his eyes and trying to remember.

  He had cleared the timber and the pony was thrusting carefully through the six-foot grasses towards the river flats. Suddenly, scared by a snake or a flying-stick-insect, it had reared and thrown him. He recalled the high, parabolic fall, the sickening impact. After that, nothing. He opened his eyes again and saw the flattened grasses where he had fallen and the broken stalks where the animal had trampled through them.

  Cautiously, he stretched one leg, then the other. The cramped muscles obeyed him, slowly. There was no pain; the bones were still unbroken. His left hand was outflung on the dusty grass. He watched it, curiously, from a long way off, trying to make it obey him. He saw the fingers flex, the wrist bent, the elbow flex and then the whole arm move slowly back, lift itself and lie across his belly.

  Encouraged by this small success, he set the hand groping again, upwards to the diaphragm, across the rib cage and towards the right shoulder. The fingers encountered a sticky mass of blood, the minute scurrying mass of ants, and then the serrated edge of the spearhead. He understood that the fall had snapped off the spear-haft and driven the head out over his breast.

  The small pressure of his fingers sent a sharp agony through him, and the disturbed ants pumped their poisons into his skin. He closed his eyes and lay back sweating until the pain subsided. Then he groped blindly among the grass roots until he felt the haft of the spear and drew it towards him.

  Inch by painful inch, he rolled himself over on his stomach, worked himself up to his knees and, using the spear-haft as a stave, tried to hoist himself to his feet. Twice he collapsed, gasping and retching, with his face among the grass roots, but the third time, he made it, and stood, dizzy but triumphant, steadying himself on the haft. After a while he raised his head and, leaning on the staff like an old, decrepit man, began to stumble through the high grasses towards the river.

  By normal measurement, it was no more than half a mile away, but it took him more than two hours to reach it. A dozen paces and he had to rest, head swimming and heart pumping, his body bathed in sweat, a slow blood seeping out round the spear-blade in his shoulder. Each step must be measured, each foot planted firmly, before the other was moved. If he fell again, he might never get up. He was parched from loss of body-fluids – blood and lymph and perspiration – and the first torments of thirst were beginning to nag him. The ants were still clustered on his skin, and from the low ground insects rose in clouds about his face, but he dared not let go the staff to brush them away.

  When he reached the river, he saw that it was twenty feet below him, screened by a tangle of bushes and the long tuberous roots of pandanus palms. He had to grope his way fifty yards up-stream before he found a small, sandy slope that ran down clear to the beach. With infinite pain, he eased himself into a sitting position till his legs hung over the bank, then pushed himself off with the staff and slid down on the seat of his trousers to the water’s edge.

  He drank, greedily, lifting the water in his cupped hand and lapping it from the palm like a dog. When he felt a small strength seeping back to him he worked his way out of his shirt, rinsed it in the stream and then tore it with his teeth and his left hand into strips and tampons which he laid carefully on a rock-shelf beside him. This done, he rested and drank a little more, trying to steel himself to the brutal surgery of extracting the spear-head.

  It must be done swiftly or not at all, but his body was weak and his will reluctant to invite a new pain. Finally, he came to it. Summoning all his strength, he closed his fingers round the barbed wood and wrenched it forward. To his surprise, it came free, with a small rush of blood and a pain that made him cry out. His impulse was to fling it from him, far into the water, but he checked it swiftly, remembering that he was a hunted man, with no weapon but the broken haft. He laid the jagged head on the rock beside him, and, using the strips of torn shirt, began to bathe and cleanse the wound. It was long, slow work, because the spear had entered high up in his back and every movement sent a leaping pain through the torn shoulder muscles.
He thought of bathing himself in the river, but remembered in time that this was crocodile water and that the blood might bring them swimming, in search of him. Suddenly, there was a new fear: blood-poisoning. A native weapon must be crawling with infection. Sick and hunted, he was days away from medical attention – if, indeed, he would ever come to it.

  He sat a long time, chewing on the bitter thought, until he remembered a thing out of a lost time. He had seen the homestead aborigines plastering cuts with spider-web, and someone had remarked that there was a relation between the glutinous web and penicillin. He looked around and saw, strung between the roots of a pandanus, a big web with a huge black spider in the centre of it.

  With the spear-haft in his hand, he inched his way up the bank and struck at the web. The spider swung away, hanging on a single filament, Dillon wound the wrecked strands around the top of his staff and drew them towards him. He rolled the sticky threads into a ball and packed them into the wound with a tampon of shirt. Finally, after many failures, he succeeded in fixing a bandage over his shoulder and under his right armpit and tightening it with a tourniquet. It might hold long enough to staunch the bleeding and let the blood congeal.

  When it was all done, he felt weary and hungry and desperately alone. He was faced with the simplest problem of all – survival – yet he had only the sketchiest idea of how to solve it. First he must eat, to restore his ravaged strength. If he wanted to sleep he must go, like an animal to a safe earth. He must pit his twentieth-century mind against the primitive strategy of the nomad hunters. Elementary propositions all of them, until he came to apply them.

  Where did the fish run? What bait would attract them to a line? And failing a line and bait, how did one catch them? How did one stalk game, while men were stalking him? What plants were edible and what poisonous? Where to hide from men who read signs in the dust and in the chipped bark of a tree-trunk?

  As he sat, sick and light-headed with concussion, ruffling the water with his hand, the nature of his dilemma became vividly clear. All this land belonged to him, but he knew almost nothing about it. He was in it, but not of it. Its secrets were lost to him and he walked it as a stranger. All its influences seemed malign and he knew that he could starve amid its primal plenty.

  So he tried desperately to reassemble the scraps and shards of knowledge he had picked up from the aboriginal stockboys and the old bushmen who had lived blackfellow-fashion for months on end in the outback country. There were edible grubs in the tree-boles, lily-roots in the lagoons, yams and ground-nuts on the river flats. A man could make a meal of the screeching cicadas, provided his civilised stomach did not revolt at the strangeness. The flesh of a snake was white and sweet-tasting, but a lizard was oily and hard to digest. The aborigine did not hunt at night. He was afraid of the spirit men who haunted the rocks and the trees and every dip and hollow of the ancient earth.

  Dillon’s vagrant mind caught and held this last scrap of memory. Here, at last, was hope – a pointer to possible salvation. If he could gather a little food and find himself a hole for the daytime hours, he might build enough strength to move at night, while the myalls were huddled over their camp-fires. The river could be his road, the darkness his friend. But time was running against him. He must act quickly. Any moment now, the hunters might come: black, naked men, with flat faces and knotted hair and tireless feet and killing spears wrapped in bundles of paper-bark.

  When Mundaru and his myalls came out of the valley, the first thing they saw was Dillon’s horse, riderless and cropping contentedly in the wild rice that bordered the swamp.

  Two of the bucks began moving towards it with spears at the ready, but Mundaru called them back. It was a good thing, he told them. The white man was wounded and now had been thrown. There was no need to split up. They would find him quickly and despatch him. The horse would make his way back to the homestead, or be picked up by one of the stockboys. Its discovery would lend the colour of an accident to the white man’s death.

  They grinned, acknowledging his cleverness, and followed him as he walked in a wide arc until they found the point where the pony had emerged from the grass-flats. It was a simple matter to back-track his movements until they came to the tiny clearing where Dillon had lain after his fall.

  Mundaru knelt to examine the signs. There was the bruised and flattened grass, the blood, congealed now and covered with crawling ants; but the size and spread of it showed how long the white man had lain there, and how badly hurt he must be. There was a splinter of wood from the broken spear, and a scrap of cotton from his shirt. Under the tangle of grass were deep heel-prints in the earth and rounded hollows made by his knees as he struggled to his feet. As Mundaru pointed out all these things, the others nodded and talked in low voices.

  He had stood here a long time. There he had begun to walk, leaning on a stick. The intervals between his prints were irregular, showing him weak and uncertain on his feet. As they followed them through the parted grasses, they saw where he had rested and where a drop of blood had spilt on the stalks and how deeply his staff had dug into a soft patch of ground. The track was as plain as that of a wounded animal and they followed it swiftly to the sandy slide which led down to the water’s edge.

  Here they halted, momentarily puzzled, until Mundaru’s quick eyes saw the broken spider-web and the patch of sand whose surface was still soft and friable, while the surrounding area was set in a thin, dry crust. He frowned with displeasure. The white man knew he was being hunted. He had begun to cover his tracks.

  He stood up and, while the others watched him, walked a few yards up-stream and then down again, scanning the bushes on either side of the water, then the shallows themselves, where the stream slid quietly over white sand and rocky outcrops and pockets of rounded stones. Twenty feet from the spot where Dillon had entered the water, he found what he was looking for: a flat stone, kicked out of its mooring, so that the underside of it was exposed through the clear water. All the other pebbles in the pocket were rounded and smoothed by the rush of water and sand, but this one was rough and reddish where it had lain protected in the river-bed.

  Mundaru called to the bucks and showed them the sign. Their quarry was heading down-stream. They had only to follow him, beating the banks as they went. He was weak and moving slowly. In the water he must move slower still. It was still a long time to sunset and they could not fail to find him.

  He waited until three of the bucks had waded across to the opposite bank; then they set off, walking fast, heads bowed and eyes alert, like hounds closing in for the kill.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHEN SUNSET CAME, Mary Dillon stood on the veranda of the homestead, watching the shadows lengthen across the brown land, the ridges turn from ochre to deep purple, the sun lapse slowly behind them out of a dust-red sky. It was the hour when she came nearest to peace, nearest to comfort in this alien, primeval country.

  The days were a blistering heat when the thermometer on the door-post read a hundred and fifteen of shade temperature and the willy-willies raced across the home paddocks – whirling pillars of wind and sandstone grit. The nights were a chill loneliness, with the dingoes howling from the timber and the myalls chanting down by the river, and Lance snoring happily, oblivious of her terror. But in this short hour, which was neither dusk nor twilight, but simply a pause between the day and first stride of the dark, the land became gentle, the sky softened, and the bleached, neighbourless buildings took on the illusory aspect of home.

  It would never be truly home to her. After three years of marriage to Lance Dillon and two visits to her family in Sydney, she knew it for a certainty. She was a city girl, born and bred to tiled roofs and trim lawns and the propinquity of people like herself. She needed a husband home at seven, pulling out of the driveway at eight-thirty in the morning, and a comforting domestic presence in between – not this brown man with the leathery strength and the distant eyes, gone for days at a time, then ambling homeward, dusty and saddle-weary, to demand her int
erest and her comfort and her encouragement in this bleak ambition of his.

  Other women, she knew, made a life and a happiness for themselves in the outback country. They lived a hundred miles from the nearest neighbour, their only company the homestead lubras and the piccaninnies, their only visitors the policeman, the pilot of the mail-plane and the flying doctor. Yet when she heard them talking in the daily gossip session over the pedal radio network, she read the contentment in their voices and wondered why she had never been able to attain it. ‘Give it time,’ Lance had told her, in his calm, positive fashion. ‘Give it time and patience and you’ll grow to love it. It’s an old land, sweetheart – not old and used up like Europe, but old because the centuries have passed it by and the seas have cut it off from change. We’ve got birds and animals and plants you’ll find nowhere else in the world. The myalls – even the homestead blacks-are our last link with pre-history. But it’s new too. The soil has never seen a plough, the waters have never been dammed, and nobody’s even guessed at what’s under the surface. All we need is oil and we could explode into growth, like America, overnight. Isn’t it worth a little waiting and a little courage?’

 

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