by Dave Freer
Tim lay down in the hole, dozing, as the heat built into the cerulean sky. He'd got as far as breaking some branches to make himself a shelter. He'd even cautiously tasted one of the leaves. The bitterness took a while—and quite a lot of spitting—to get rid of. Tim had no idea what he'd eat out here, but it wasn't going to be that. The heat brought out flies that made sleep hard. So did the hunger, but at least his body was mending itself. Toward evening Tim decided he couldn't just stay in the hole and hope something happened. That thought was reinforced by something looking over the top edge of the hole at him. Tim froze—and two more long, reddish-yellow, hairy faces appeared. Were they…wolves? His grasp of what wild animals there were in Australia was slightly smaller than his knowledge of Japanese. They had quite big teeth, whatever they were…and Tim didn't even have a penknife. Then it occurred to him that yes, actually he did have a penknife. He'd just not thought of it up to now. He reached cautiously for his pocket. The animals didn't wait to see what came out of his pocket. The second he moved, they were off.
That was a relief. He wondered if this was their water hole. They might come back when he was asleep. However, it had made him think of his little penknife and what good that could do him. Well, he could cut things with it. Maybe make some kind of spear to fend those creatures off with. Maybe…although this seemed unlikely…kill one for dinner. He'd done that with a tunnel rat, with the other boys in the tunnels under London, but they'd had a fire to cook it. Even as hungry as he was, he didn't fancy it much raw.
What he really needed was some way of carrying water. He thought vaguely about hollowing out a piece of wood…but he'd probably starve to death before he finished. Resolutely, he got down on his knees and drank as much as he could, then scrambled out of the hole into the dying daylight. He'd just have to make sure he could find his way back here.
A few minutes later he realized just how difficult that might be. Away from the channel and its scrubby trees he was on a plain, and the gully he'd come out of was hidden from sight. He could see all around him to the far horizons. It didn't look any different to the west, south, or north. He could see some rougher country to the east.
Tim knew he had to find the railway, or people, or he would die out here. There was no space for pride or thoughts of self-sufficiency. He'd be nothing more than bones lying on this dusty plain with its scattered tufts of dry grass, if he didn't find help.
Only…where to look? He scanned the distances. A hot wind blew, making the horizon dance, then disappear into a blur when he stared at it. That could be smoke to the northwest…
Then his eye was caught by a wink of brightness, off to the east. There were some low hills or something there. And there was another flash. It reminded him of Clara and her Morse signaling when she was trapped on American Samoa, stuck in the old bunker. Just thinking about her gave him strength. He started walking in the direction of the flash. It meant crossing the dry channel again, and walking on. He was sure he'd come from the western side…but in the state he'd been in, he could have come from anywhere. He could have crossed it twice without knowing, if there was an area where the brush was less thick.
He walked on toward the flashes, into the dusk, and then, hoping he was still going the right way, in the dark. Heat still radiated off the sand as he walked, but it was definitely cooling. Fortunately, it wasn't hard walking here. Stony and sandy between the tufts of grass, but at least the ground was open…until he came to another dry channel. And later another. They were smaller than his first one, but there was still dead wood to fall over, live trees to push through, and noises in the dark. In the distance, howling. Something that ran away from him through the bushes in great thumping bounds. It left Tim with a racing heart, clutching his little penknife.
He was never so glad as when he saw a light on the far side of a channel. He ran toward it, relief flooding into him.
Only it seemed to move ahead of him. It was also running away! Bobbing and fluctuating, it moved ahead of him. Desperate, he yelled at the light between panting breaths, “Help! Help! Come back! Come back!” He tried to catch his breath, watching the light, listening for an answer. But all he got was silence. It didn't seem to be moving, but it was changing color, eerily pulsing brighter…and then, as he prepared to yell again, it vanished, and the hairs on Tim's neck stood up. It wasn't natural, whatever it was.
It was very dark and he was very alone and very, very afraid. After a while he got a grip on himself and kept walking on. But every noise, and there were a surprising number of them, on the edge of his hearing, or in his imagination, made him tense. He crossed more channels, and more of the flat, grassy plain. The night grew colder, to the point where he knew he had to keep walking just to keep warm. Dawn, or at least the first signs of it, a paling of the horizon with just a hint of bloody redness, came to the sky as Tim reached the edge of yet another channel. This was a much wider one. He decided he'd stop there and see if he could catch the flashing again, or any sign of people in the daylight. The horizon wasn't quite a flat line here. Maybe…maybe he was somewhere near the edge of the desert? Logic said that simply couldn't be true. But how he hoped for it.
For a while he just sat there and rested his tired, sore feet, and watched the sun tint the sky with rosy shades and edge the black of the low hills with fire then pour hot gold onto them. It was beautiful. He was tired, hungry, thirsty, lost, and totally unappreciative of the beauty. Tim would have swapped it all for a dirty cubby underground in the tunnels of London, happily, right then. For his bunk on the Cuttlefish you could have had the sunrise and all the gold in Westralia.
And that over there…that tall spike, outlined by the sun. That had to be a power station! Even if he couldn't see the smoke…it had to be. It was a long way off, though. Maybe…maybe this was the northward line! It was supposed to be only thirty or forty miles from the southward line. The jokers on the mole had reckoned the two would miss each other and keep going…
But that, up in the hills, that was smoke! Just a thin thread of it, working its way up into the sky. Only…it was nowhere near the spike.
Tim sat there, torn. Tired, thirsty, and not really knowing which way to walk. Already the sun was heating the landscape.
Eventually he decided on the smoke. It was much closer, not more than a mile or two away, or so he hoped. He really wasn't any use at judging distances on land, he decided. It was so different from looking out at the sea.
He pulled himself to his feet and began trudging across the channel toward the smoke, head bowed, but still unbeaten.
It was a fairly long trudge, weaving between the scrubby trees and out onto the plain. He walked on, as the sun stole the coolness. It was hard for Tim to imagine being cold last night, now.
When he looked up again, the smoke trail was gone. All there was in front of him was just blue sky and red, rocky hills.
Now he felt beaten, indeed. He could no longer see the spike of the power station, either, miles and miles away. All he could see were hills quivering with heat. He was desperately thirsty. He knew he'd never get back to his water hole.
He sat down on a rock. There were rocks here, and it was getting harder walking, slightly uphill. What did he do now? He looked at the hills, trying to pinpoint where he'd seen the thread of smoke. If only he had some way of making fire…his questing gaze spotted several birds slowly circling up into the sky above the hills. One dived down…and led his eyes to a narrow, darker indent. Tim had no idea if that meant anything. But he also had no idea what else to do. So he walked toward it, planning to stop in the first patch of shade he found, his tired feet dragging.
Clara had had to start from having only the vaguest idea how the steam mole actually worked, to working out just why it had stopped. The heat of the day was still coming and she saw no signs of the tunnel's low mound or any other man-made structure. There was just a plain with scattered grass tussocks divided by occasional scrubby channels for as far as she could see, fading into a yellow-red dis
tance.
She set out systematically examining the whole thing. Gauges, levers for raising and lowering the drill head, and, on getting out, the conveyor to the fire box, the supply of fuel in the tender, the pistons, and the endless tracks. It wasn't exactly something any of the girls of her acquaintance up to now would have even tried. It wasn't what girls did.
Well, she'd never been any good at accepting that. And neither had her mother or her grandmother…Which, she thought darkly, made mother's insistence that she should also want to do chemistry so annoying. Then she wanted to cry again, thinking about her mother in hospital, her father shaking with fever in some prison in Queensland, Tim hurt and lost out here…
Clara wasn't much better off, or any help to any of them, stuck and lost. She seriously had no idea what to do next. Leaving the machine would be stupid, looking at the country. She had food and water here at least. And food and water, if Tim was out here, were what he was without. If she couldn't get to him, perhaps he could get to her? She had a mirror in her reticule. Mrs. Darlington had insisted on that, as an essential adjunct to any smart young lady.
So she set about eating and drinking. The scout mole had been stocked for two—by the looks of it, for weeks. Then she stood and flashed her mirror as systematically across the plain as possible. She occasionally paused to try to work out just what made the machine go. If she could do that, she could work out why it wasn't going now. That involved getting up and climbing around on the machine in the heat. The day was so hot it literally made it hard to think coherently, let alone reason things through. She was terribly grateful for the shade of the machine and its water supply.
That day produced little progress. She found tools, opened accesses, looked…and then, when it got too dark, she slept. There were two of the bedding rolls in the cab section, and the night did become cold. That was hard to believe after the day's searing heat, but it was so. She awoke long before first light and set to work again.
When Tim finally got to the darker indent in the hill it proved to be a narrow, water-etched ravine, from some long ago time when this place was wetter. There was some shade, and relative coolness in that. What Tim hadn't found there was water. What he did find were birds. They were feeding on the fruit clustered among the leaves of the tree that grew on the rock wall and sent its grey roots down like stalactites.
By now Tim felt not at all like eating. But the fruit might have juice in them. They were not above thumbnail size, and ranged from green to yellowish. Somewhere Tim had read, or been told, that not everything that birds could eat was edible to people, but he thought by this stage he might as well die of poisoning as of thirst and hunger. The small fruit didn't have a lot of taste, or that much moisture. It was some kind of fig, Tim decided, by the seedy inside. It was slightly sweet. It didn't do much for his thirst, but the sweetness must have helped him a little. Tim started to think again and look around. The tree was green and fruiting…it had to be finding some water. He made his way farther up the narrow ravine. There was an overhang with a crack under it, and some green moss. Tim felt it, it was wet, so he pulled it free and sucked it. Judging by the crack and the moss's wetness, if he kept that up all day he might get half a cup of muddy, mossy-tasting water. He might as well, he decided, trying the next bit. It was in the shade, and he didn't have anything else to do.
The demossing of the entire crack took him about an hour, he reckoned—and had given him less water than he'd hoped—but looking down where he'd started, there was a droplet clinging to the rock. A few precious drops had fallen already onto the dusty floor of the overhang.
It was slow, but it was wet. It took hours before he felt he'd had half enough. He left his shirt under the drip and went back down to the fig that had twisted and climbed its way into the cracks—probably getting more of the water that seeped there than Tim had managed to get to. He ate some more of the yellow little figs. Not too many, because not dying had become more important again.
The birds were not much worried by him, so his next effort was throwing a stone at them. He missed. “You throw like a girl,” he muttered to himself, knowing it wasn't true. Clara hit what she threw at. He'd played darts with her on the Cuttlefish.
He had to wait a while for a second chance, and then a third. On the fourth attempt he knocked a bird down and managed to grab it as it flapped on the ground. It wasn't dead, but pecking, scratching, and flapping at him. Tim didn't know what to do with it, but he had it now, and had injured it, so he hit its head with a rock.
The brightly colored little thing was still and dead.
Now he had to decide what to do with it. And he really had no idea. They plucked birds, didn't they? So Tim tried. It was a lot easier to think of than to do. There were a lot of feathers, and they were well and truly attached to the bird. When they eventually did come off… so did the skin. After some more attempts that seemed to be more about getting the fine downy under-feathers to stick to his hands than actually getting them off the bird, Tim decided to just pull the skin off. That worked a bit better. Tim found a lot of the bird was feathers, and the end result from his effort was very small. The drumsticks were the size of the first joint of his pinky finger. He knew from cleaning tunnel rats that the guts had to come out. But doing it with a not very sharp penknife, no water, and no experience was difficult. Even under his overhang there were flies coming in to “help” him. In the end he had a gutted and mostly featherless bird, though bits of the fluffy down stuck to everything. At this point he knew he ought to cook it, but he had no way of doing so.
He wondered what raw bird tasted like. He supposed he'd have to find out, sooner or later. And it had better be sooner, before any more flies tried to settle on it. He cut a little sliver. Tried to tell himself it was good for him. A part of his mind, as he chewed with determination, told him that they always said nasty medicine was good for you, and when he really tried to pretend it wasn't raw bird, it went down. On both the positive and the negative sides, there wasn't a lot of it.
Lampy sniffed. There was of course the wonderful smell of wet after rain, but he could smell the dust and heat on the back of the breeze coming out of the interior. It smelled of dry. It smelled like freedom, and a long way from cities and filth and being chained up. He’d never thought about it before, but now that he’d been there, he knew they’d have to kill him rather than chain him up or lock him in again.
He had to wonder if he was right in his head. He was behaving like some fool who’d been on the grog, and he wouldn’t touch the stuff, not after what he’d seen it do to his pa. His father had been all right when he wasn’t drinking. Except he got the shakes if he didn’t. Lampy shook his head. Here he was heading straight toward where he said he’d never go near.
The Irishman played games with his mind, talking about his family. There was something about the way Jack had said it that sounded just like his uncle talking. The uncle who came to fetch him away when his mother died, who took him back to his land and his people.
The uncle who said everything in life was a circle and would come back around one day.
That was the uncle a horrified boy had watched shot down. When Lampy had run forward to help, another shot had ricocheted off the stones. And there’d been a bunch of whitefellers standing there, laughing, at the mouth of one of those tunnels, guns in hand.
And his uncle said, with his last breath, that he should go. Run.
Jack and Lampy eventually bunkered down in a gully with some small trees for shelter, as the rain had vanished as if it had never been. It was dusk, and Jack was literally so tired he could hardly walk another step.
“I reckon we better take a smoko and get some tucker into ourselves,” said Lampy, squatting down. “You look all in, Irishman.”
Jack knew by now what a smoko was and what tucker meant. He didn’t smoke, even if he’d had anything to smoke, or to light it with, but the break was good. “I didn’t get any more of the food, I’m afraid, but for the half sandwich I gave
you back there. I think Rainy got the driver’s sandwiches.”
“Got tucker here,” said Lampy, showing straight white teeth against the black of his face. “Only you whitefellers don’t eat it.”
“Watch me.”
Which was how Jack ended up digging for grubs and making a show of appreciating them. Actually they tasted a bit like almond paste, if you could forget the texture and the fact that they were insect larvae. It was, he realized, some kind of test. He was right, too. “Mostly women and kids eat them,” said Lampy, who plainly considered himself a man. “I like ’em more cooked, but we not gunna make a fire until we get a little more far away. I got a perente back there. We’ll eat ’im when we stop in the morning.”
“We’ve got to go on tonight?” Jack knew the answer before he even asked the question, but his feet were sore, and he was tired.
“Too right. Them dogs are good, and they got horses, man. They prob’ly pay a couple of blackfellers with a few bottles of grog to track us, too. They follow us easy, now the rain is gone. We got to move at night and hide and sleep in the daytime.”
“I’m just worried about my feet. They’re not as tough as yours. I’m starting on blisters by the feel of it. I want to be able to walk or even run when I have to.”
He saw the gleam of those white teeth in the darkness again. “You whitefellers have got soft feet. Wait up. I go find some paperbark.”
By the time Lampy had finished with Jack’s feet, Jack felt as if he should be in a horror biograph about Egyptian mummies. The flat, flexible sheets of bark, like cheap newsprint, had been made into something like socks and tied in place with cord or held by the sandals. It did make a huge difference.
Lampy plainly had a goal in mind, and he kept them walking. He wasn’t too impressed with Jack’s fire bucket of water. By the time he’d fallen over several things and spilled most of it, Jack wasn’t too impressed with it either.