by Morris West
Mary gave a small gasp of fear when she saw that Jimmy, the head-boy, had Dillon’s hat hung on his pommel. He handed it to Adams and then made his report in tumbling, liquid pidgin.
‘Catchim tracks in timber. Horse belong boss Dillon, tired, walkim slow. Hat he come off, boss-Dillon maybe sick. Catchim more tracks by river grass. Man lie there long time, bleed much. More tracks go down to river. We leave. Come back longa Adamidji.’
Adams listened until he had finished, then explained it quickly to Mary.
‘They picked up your husband’s hat in the timber, where they found his tracks. They followed them into the grasses and came to the spot where he must have been thrown, then they came back to meet us.’
‘Didn’t he say something about blood?’
Adams dismissed it curtly.
‘He must have lain there some time. We know he was wounded. That would explain the blood.’
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘Get Jimmy to take us there. We’ll set the other boys working to clear a landing-strip on the open ground. Gilligan’s flying back this way tomorrow morning. Wait here a while.’
He began a swift explanation to the stockboys, and after a few moments he rode off with them towards the open plain at the foot of the ridges, leaving her alone with Billy-Jo. The old man watched her a moment with shrewd, sidelong eyes, then said tentatively:
‘Sergeant good man, missus. See much, say little, trustim sure.’
‘I know, Billy-Jo. But I’m worried about my husband.’
The old man shrugged and scuffed his feet in the dust.
‘Missus young. Catchim new husband, makim piccaninny longtime yet.’
She flushed and threw him a quick look, but his head was bowed and his dusky face hidden under his hat-brim. It was no new thought to her, but uttered by a stranger in bastard tongue, it had a new and shocking impact. She turned and stared away across the red plain where Adams was pacing off the rough strip and showing the stockboys how to clear it with their bare hands and with branches broken from the scrub timber.
She was drawn to him. So much was easy to admit; but what drew her harder to name. An ease, perhaps? A confidence in the way he wore the world – as if it were a sprigged waistcoat instead of a hair shirt. He was a man in equilibrium, stable and content; whereas Lance, for all his strength and driving power, seemed always in conflict. Neil Adams made no demands on life, and yet life seemed to pattern itself in order about him. Lance was always restless, prescient, as if building, all too slowly, a rampart against chaos.
Was this, perhaps, the nub of the matter? That she was dissatisfied with the man she had, and wanted another; that the land had taken on the colour of her own wintry discontent? Would it look more like Eden, if she were travelling it with Neil Adams?
When she saw him galloping back with Jimmy, the stockman, she dismissed the thought abruptly, lest he read it in her eyes. If Lance were dead, she would have the right to nourish it, but if not…She had a vision of him, spread-eagled in the sun, the life bleeding out of him; and once again she was bitterly ashamed of herself.
The shadows were lengthening as they rode into the timber, with the stockman leading, and Billy-Jo following, intent on the signs. When they broke out on the paper-barks and came to the grass patch where Dillon had been thrown, they dismounted. The stockman held the horses, while Billy-Jo and Adams made their examination, with Mary a pace behind them, watching intently.
This time, Adams was more careful of her. As the tracker read the signs, he translated them crisply.
‘This is where he was thrown. You see how the grass was broken and the ground hollowed a little by the impact. He lay some time, bleeding…then apparently got up and walked away, using a stick… There are no trees hereabouts, so it looks as though it might be a spear he’s using. From here he headed down to the river… That’s natural, because he’d be thirsty from loss of blood and body fluids. It’s a good sign because it shows he’s thinking straight and seeing straight…’
He broke off as Billy-Jo called his attention to new signs; a wisp of fur, a faint smear on a grass-stalk, a depression in the swampy earth. She saw him frown and then mutter something to the tracker. Then she questioned him sharply:
‘Something new, Neil? What is it?’
He straightened and faced her. His eyes were hard, but his voice was carefully controlled.
‘The myalls came this way too, Mary. It must have been afterwards, because there’s no sign of a struggle. But they were very close on his tracks.’
‘How long ago?’
‘At a guess, this time yesterday.’
‘That makes it twenty-four hours.’
‘Near enough.’
‘You can say all that, just from looking at the ground?’
‘I can’t. But Billy-Jo can, The little I know confirms it.’
‘That means Lance is dead, doesn’t it?’
For the life of him, he could not tell whether a wish or a fear prompted the question. He shook his head.
‘Not yet. It just means that the odds on his survival have shortened again.’
He turned to the stockman. ‘Jimmy, you head back and join the others. Keep ’em working until dark; then make camp and start on the strip again at sunrise. We’ll push on and I’ll get word to you before Gilligan arrives. Is that clear?’
‘All clear, boss.’ He touched his hat to Mary and rode off, as casually as if he were going to a muster. Adams watched him go, then handed Mary the bridles of the ponies.
‘You lead ‘em, Mary. I want to stay close to Billy-Jo. We’ll go on tracking as long as the light lasts.’
‘And after that?’
But Adams was already three paces ahead, following Billy-Jo through the long grasses towards the river.
Five miles away, the kadaitja men, limping in their feather boots, had reached the river, and were fanning out over the flats to begin the hunt for Mundaru. They were in pain, but the pain was an ever-present reminder of the sacred character of their mission. It was more than this, for the burnt and dislocated toes had now become magical eyes to guide their steps towards their quarry. They walked in two worlds, infused with supernatural power, but still applying the simple pragmatic rules of the hunter: stealth, concealment, calculation.
Their calculation was simple but sound. If the white man were still alive it was because he was using the abundant cover of the swamp-land. If he were dead, Mundaru would first hide the body and then use the same swamp-lands to provide himself with food. He would not risk a break into open country during the daylight hours.
There was no doubt in their minds that Mundaru knew of the sentence promulgated against him. This was the whole virtue of projective magic, that the victim sensed it, felt it in his body long before the moment of execution. The knowledge would weaken and confuse him, so that he would become an easier prey. More than this, they knew that the white men were out. They had seen the plane and the dust-clouds kicked up by the horses. They gauged, accurately, that the white men would follow the tracks from the valley to the river, so that they would end by driving Mundaru down-stream towards the sacred spears.
The spearmen were hidden from each other and spread over a mile of country, but they moved in perfect co-ordination. Their communication was a cryptic mimicry of animal noises: the raucous cry of a cockatoo, the honk of a swamp-goose, the thudding resonant beat which a kangaroo makes with his tail on the ground, the high-rising whistle of a whip-bird. The sounds were never repeated in the same sequence nor from the same location, so that even the wariest listener would hardly suspect their origin.
Towards the end, Mundaru would hear and understand, but then it would be too late. The kadaitja men would be circling and closing in on him. There would be a silence, long and terrible; and out of the silence would come the throbbing note of the bull-roarer – the tjuringa, the sacred wood or stone, which is pierced with holes so that when it is twirled in the air, it roars deeply in the voice of the
dream-time people. To Mundaru it would be a death chant, and before its last echoes died he would fall to the sacred spear-thrust.
But all this was still far ahead of them. It was ordained, but it was not inevitable. It still depended on their own skill, and on the use each man made of the magic with which he had been endowed. So they moved silently, every sense prickling, up-stream towards their victim.
CHAPTER SIX
THE RIVER slept shade-dappled under the late sun. The sound of it was a whispered counterpoint to the creek of palm leaves and the crepitant buzz of insects.
They came to it on foot, leaving the horses tethered on the high bank, and while Billy-Jo began scouting the sandy verge, Neil Adams and Mary Dillon waited together, watching the play of shadows and the jewelled flight of a kingfisher across the water.
The weariness of the long ride was in their bones, and Mary felt her courage thinning out with the decline of the day. Her face was drawn and dust-marked. Her eyes burned with the glare. Every muscle was aching from unaccustomed hours in the saddle. Adams, too, was tired; she saw it in the deep lines about his mouth, the droop of his shoulders and the slackness of his strong, hard hands. Yet his attitude was one of relaxation and not of tension. He was alert and watchful as ever, and she envied him his leathery strength while she resented his seeming indifference to her own condition. The resentment put an edge on her voice as she questioned him:
‘What have you found, Neil? What are you thinking? You’ve hardly spoken a word for the last half-hour.’
To her surprise, he was instantly apologetic.
‘I’m sorry, Mary. I’m not used to company on the job – certainly not women’s company. Billy-Jo and I don’t need many words, we think in harmony.’
‘And I’m an intruder, is that it?’
He grinned at her, disarmingly.
‘No. Just a figure in the landscape that I haven’t had time to notice. Besides, there’s not much to tell that you don’t know already. Your husband reached the river at this point. The myalls were on his tracks. We still don’t know how far they were behind him. All this happened twenty-four hours ago, you see, and the ground dries quickly in the sunlight. The two sets of tracks look as though they were made at the same time – although we know they weren’t.’
‘You’re trying to tell me they caught Lance?’
‘It’s possible – yes.’
A cold finger of fear probed at her heart-strings, but her voice was steady as she questioned him again.
‘He could be dead by now – is that it?’
‘He could…but he may not be. If I were you I’d prepare myself for the worst – and still hope for the best.’
Once again the calm containment of her shocked him. She said simply:
‘I’m prepared. You needn’t be afraid of me.’
He gave her a shrewd, sidelong look and said dryly:
‘You have a lot of courage, Mary.’
‘More than you expected?’
The question was barbed, but he shrugged it off.
‘Maybe. But I’m glad, anyway. Whatever happens, you’re going to need it.’
Swift anger took hold of her and she blazed at him:
‘You’re very practised in brutality, aren’t you? I suppose that’s what makes you a good policeman.’
Before he had time to frame a reply, Billy-Jo came hurrying towards them along the sandy bank, his dark weathered face set in a frown of puzzlement. Adams questioned him sharply:
‘Find anything?’
The tracker pointed along the bank, up-stream and down from the point where they stood:
‘Blackfella tracks all about. Walkim up and down. Makeim fire, eat and sleep. No tracks for white boss. No clothes, no blood, nothing.’
A gleam of admiration brightened in Adams’s eyes. More to himself than to Mary, he muttered:
‘Clever boy. He used the river to break his tracks. Must have been far enough ahead to throw them completely off the scent. I wonder which way he was heading?’
His eyes searched the farther bank, where the steep, muddy incline was tufted with thorn-bush and creeper and the tangled, water-hungry roots of the pandanus palms. Mary Dillon watched him intently, not daring to intrude again on the patient privacy of his thoughts. It was Billy-Jo who spoke the first word; quietly but with the authority of complete understanding.
‘Loseim light fast, boss. Maybe we cross river and look around, eh?’
Adams pondered a moment, then nodded gravely and turned to Mary.
‘We’ll have to leave you for a while, Mary. There’s swamp-land on the other side and we’d like to make a quick survey before dark. Bring the horses down here, water them and then tether them. Then you could start collecting wood for a fire. There’s a rifle in my saddle-bucket. There’s no danger, but if you want us in a hurry fire two shots. We’ll be back by dark.’
The words were already on her tongue to tell him that she knew nothing about handling horses, that she had never fired a rifle in her life, that whenever they had camped, it was Lance or the stockboys who had gathered the firewood, that her flesh crept at the sight of an insect and that the terror of emptiness haunted her like the beginning of madness. The words were there, but she choked them back and said only:
‘You go ahead. Don’t worry about me. I’ll have a meal ready when you come back.’
For the first time in their day-long company, Adams’s lean face relaxed into a smile of genuine approval. He patted her shoulder and said gently:
‘Good girl! We won’t be gone long. We may have better news for you when we come back.’
He turned away, and with Billy-Jo at his heels walked down-stream to where the river narrowed and the water ran swiftly over a stony outcrop where they could cross without fear of crocodiles. Mary Dillon watched them until they scrambled into the bushes of the farther bank; then, alone, scared yet oddly elated, she walked back to untether the horses and bring them down to drink at the river.
As the tired animals drooped their muzzles into the water, she unsaddled them, awkwardly, yet with a curious satisfaction in the simple labour. Always before she had avoided it, as if it were some kind of concession to the hated country. Now she was happy to do it, at the casual behest of a man who challenged her with mockery instead of love. It was a bleak commentary on her relation with Lance, a terse query on her attitude to Neil Adams. She resented him, but she was eager to please him. She wanted to hurt him, but when she found him beyond the reach of her ill-temper she did violence to herself to earn his off-hand praise.
Not once in three years of marriage had she conceded half so much to her husband, who might even now be lying dead and staring with blind eyes at the peach-bloom sky. In this last hour of the day, with perception heightened to feverish clarity by fatigue and resentment, she understood how far she had failed him and how much he, in his own fashion, had failed her. He had loved her, but love was not enough. He had set her too high, conceded her too much, handled her too gently. He lacked the perceptive brutality of Neil Adams; the egotism, the cool certainty of ultimate conquest. Even now, fear for him as she might, she could weigh his death for profit and loss as if he were alien from her life.
Strange that here in the narrow solitude of the river valley, she could face the thought without shame – if not without regret.
When the horses had drunk their fill, she hitched them to a palm-bole near the embankment and began to walk slowly along the bank, gathering driftwood and branches for the fire. Each armful she gathered took her a little farther from the horses and the rifle. Each return took a little longer in the paling light. At first she was nervous; her eyes searched this way and that among the shadows of the undergrowth, her head full of nameless terrors. Then the tension in her relaxed slowly, so that a moment came when she thought suddenly: I am not afraid; I am alone, but not afraid. There is water and sand and rock and trees ruffling in the wind, but I walk as if in a familiar place. The terrors are elsewhere – with Lance, with Billy-
Jo, with Adams; but not with me.
By the time she had finished, the driftwood was piled high on the sand, and she was hot, filthy and uncomfortable. She looked about for a spot to wash herself and found, twenty yards up-stream, a small rock-pool. It was deep, ringed by scored sandstone, clear as crystal over a sandy bottom where small speckled fish swam in a low slant of sunlight. She felt it with her hand. It still held the warmth of the day. Without a second thought, she stripped off her clothes, spread them carefully on the rock shelf and stepped into the water, sliding down into it until it covered her breasts and lapped the hollow of her throat.
The touch of it was like silk on her parched skin. The weariness and the saddle-ache drifted off her like the dust of the red plains so that she seemed to float, a new creature, slack, content, invulnerable, in a strange new element. The tree-shadows lengthened and lay weightless across her body, the peach-bloom sky darkened slowly to crimson, the chorus of cicadas ragged and scattered, the first spasmodic cool of the evening came ruffling along the river-reaches, but she still lay there, lapped in the waters of this illusory baptism, until from far across the river she heard Billy-Jo hailing:
‘…Dillon… Boss Dillon…!’
And then, more distant, the long despairing ululation of Adams’s voice:
‘Dillon!…Answer me! Where are you? Dillon!’
Mundaru, the buffalo man, heard it too – so close that he could see through the stalks of the grass, the trunk of the shouting man. A single leap and a single spear thrust would silence the shout for ever: but Mandaru squatted, motionless as a rabbit in the depths of the grass until the man and the voice had passed far beyond him. This was not his victim. To kill him would profit nothing. Besides, he was tired now from the day’s stalking, from hunger, and from the long, violent ravishing of Menyan.
It was a thing he had not counted on: her terror, her cowering rejection of him, as if he were unclean or a threatening spirit man. Withdrawal, yes – a token flight, an ultimate surrender – this was the ritual of a tribal abduction when a young wife was ‘pulled’ from an ageing husband. The woman must prove fidelity before she could be unfaithful. The man must prove strength before he could possess another man’s woman.