Tracks

by Robyn Davidson

  Those days were like a crystallization of all that had been good in the trip. It was as close to perfection as I could ever hope to come. I reviewed what I had learnt. I had discovered capabilities and strengths that I would not have imagined possible in those distant dream-like days before the trip. I had rediscovered people in my past and come to terms with my feelings towards them. I had learnt what love was. That love wanted the best possible for those you cared for even if that excluded yourself. That before, I had wanted to possess people without loving them, and now I could love them and wish them the best without needing them. I had understood freedom and security. The need to rattle the foundations of habit. That to be free one needs constant and unrelenting vigilance over one’s weaknesses. A vigilance which requires a moral energy most of us are incapable of manufacturing. We relax back into the moulds of habit. They are secure, they bind us and keep us contained at the expense of freedom. To break the moulds, to be heedless of the seductions of security is an impossible struggle, but one of the few that count. To be free is to learn, to test yourself constantly, to gamble. It is not safe. I had learnt to use my fears as stepping stones rather than stumbling blocks, and best of all I had learnt to laugh. I felt invincible, untouchable, I had extended myself, and I believed I could now sit back, there was nothing else the desert could teach me. And I wanted to remember all this. Wanted to remember this place and what it meant to me, and how I had arrived there. Wanted to fix it so firmly in my head that I would never, ever forget.

  In the past, my bouts of gloom and despair had led, like widdershins,** to the same place. And it seemed that at that place was a signpost saying, ‘Here it is,’ here is the thing you must push through, leap free of, before you can learn any more. It was as if the self brought me constantly to this place — took every opportunity to show it to me. It was as if there was a button there which I could push if I only had the courage. If I could only just remember. Ah, but we always forget. Or are too lazy. Or too frightened. Or too certain we have all the time in the world. And so back up the ravines to the comfortable places (the sane ones?) where we don’t have to think too much. Where life is, after all, just ‘getting by’ and where we survive, half asleep.

  And I thought I had done it. I believed I had generated a magic for myself that had nothing to do with coincidence, believed I was part of a strange and powerful sequence of events called fate and I was beyond the need for anything or anyone. And that night I received the most profound and cruel lesson of all. That death is sudden and final and comes from nowhere. It had waited for my moment of supreme complacency and then it had struck. Late that night, Diggity took a poison bait.

  We were running low on dog food, and I was too lazy, too high to want to go and shoot her game. So I rationed her. She woke me up sneaking sheepishly back into the swag. ‘What’s up, Dig, where’ve you been, little woofing?’ She licked my face profusely, snuffled her way under the covers, and snuggled as usual into my belly. I cuddled her. Suddenly she slunk out again and began to vomit. My body went cold. ‘Oh no, no it can’t be, please, Jesus, not this.’ She came back to me and licked my face again. ‘It’s OK, Dig, you’re just a little bit sick. Don’t worry, little one, you come and snuggle in here and get warm and you’ll be OK in the morning.’ Within minutes she was out again. This couldn’t be happening. She was my little dog and she couldn’t be poisoned. That was impossible, couldn’t happen to her. I got up to check what she had brought up. I remember trembling uncontrollably and droning to her, ‘It’s all right, Dig, everything’s all right, don’t worry,’ over and over. She had eaten some dead animal but it didn’t smell rotten, so I repeated to myself that she couldn’t be poisoned. I forced myself to believe it yet I knew it wasn’t true. My head raced through what you do for strychnine poisoning. You have to swing them around your head to make them get rid of it all, but even if you do it immediately there’s virtually no chance of survival. ‘Well, I won’t do that anyway, because you’re not poisoned, you’re not poisoned. You’re my Dig and it can’t happen to you.’ Diggity started wandering around retching violently and coming back to me for reassurance. She knew. Suddenly she ran away to some black acacia bushes and turned to face me. She barked and howled at me and I knew she must be hallucinating, knew she was dying. Her two mirror eyes burnt an image into my brain that will not fade. She came over to me and put her head between my legs. I picked her up and swung her round my head. Round and round and round. She kicked and struggled. I tried to pretend it was a game. I let her down and she went crashing through the undergrowth barking like a mad dog. I raced for the gun, I loaded it and went back. She was on her side convulsing. I blew her brains out. I knelt frozen like that for a long time then I staggered back to the swag and got in. My body shook with uncontrollable spasms. I vomited. Sweat soaked into the pillow and blankets. I thought I was dying too. I thought that when she licked me, I had swallowed some strychnine. ‘Is this what it feels like to die? Am I dying? No, no, its just shock, stop it, you must go to sleep.’ I’ve never been able before or since to do what I did then. I shut my brain off and willed it into immediate unconsciousness.

  I woke well before dawn. The sick, steely, pre-dawn light was enough to find the things I needed. I caught the camels and gave them some water. I packed my belongings and loaded up and forced myself to drink some water. I felt nothing. Then suddenly it was time to leave that place and I didn’t know what to do. I had a profound desire to bury the dog. I told myself it was ridiculous. It was natural and correct for the body to decay on the surface of the ground. But there was an overwhelming need in me to ritualize, to make real and tangible what had happened. I walked back to Diggity’s body, stared at it, and tried to make all of myself face what was there. I didn’t bury her. But I said goodbye to a creature I had loved unconditionally, without question. I said my goodbyes and my thank-yous and I wept for the first time and covered the body with a handful of fallen leaves. I walked out into the morning and felt nothing. I was numb, empty. All I knew was I mustn’t stop walking.

  * no chance.

  ** water-worn gulleys.

  Part Four

  On the Far Side

  11

  I MUST HAVE WALKED thirty or more miles that day. I was afraid to stop. Afraid that the feeling of loss, guilt and loneliness would swamp me. I eventually pulled into a washaway and built a bonfire. I had hoped that I would be so exhausted that I would fall asleep without having to think. I was in a strange state. I had been expecting a lack of control over my emotions, but instead I was cool, rational, hard-edged, accepting. I decided to finish the trip in Wiluna, not because I was wanting to run away from it, but because I felt that the trip had ended itself; had reached some psychological conclusion, had simply become complete, like the last page of a novel. I dreamt that night, and most following nights for months, that Diggity was all right. In my dreams I would relive the sequence of events, only it always turned out that she survived, and that she forgave me. She was often human in these dreams, and talked to me. They were disturbingly vivid. I woke to the reality of loneliness, and was surprised at the strength which enabled me to accept it.

  It may seem strange that the mere death of a dog could have such a profound effect on someone, but it must be remembered that, because of my isolation, Diggity had become a cherished friend rather than simply a pet. I’m sure, had the incident occurred back in the city, surrounded by my own kind, the effect would not have been anywhere near as great. But out there, and in that changed and stretched state of mind, it was as traumatic as the death of a human, because to a large extent she had become just that, she had taken the place of people.

  Henry Ward had shown me on my map where to turn south. From the mark I had made on that map, it seemed a good few miles past a certain bore. I had obviously made a mistake — I was still travelling due west across monotonous flats, watching what I considered must be the pass in the hills dwindling away behind me. I camped that night on a small sandhill that looked like
an island left behind by the tide. This was peculiar, oppressive country. It was dead flat, covered in white gypsum dust dotted with clumps of a salty succulent at intervals of twelve feet. And out of this vast expanse would rise the occasional still wave of sand, covered in taller trees and scrub. It had an abandoned quality and it gave me the creeps.

  I decided to use my hated radio set that night to call Henry and check up on the direction. I wasn’t so much panicked as uneasy. I wanted to talk to someone. Everything was so still and there was no Diggity to play with or talk to or hold. It took me half an hour to set the wretched thing up — a long bit of wire draped over a tree, and another along the ground. It didn’t work. I had carried this monster for fifteen hundred miles, loaded and unloaded it hundreds of times, and the only occasion I needed it, it wouldn’t work. It had probably been broken all along.

  I was woken that night by the most chilling, hair-lifting sound I had ever heard. A soft, high-pitched keening that got louder and louder. I had never been afraid in the dark, and if I heard a sound I couldn’t place, it didn’t disturb me too much. Besides, Dig had always been there to protect and comfort me. But this? Ripples ran up and down my back. I got up and wandered around camp. Everything was perfectly still, but the noise was now a continuous unmodulated wail. I was beginning to recognize the first tell-tale signs of panic — this noise had to have a rational explanation. Either that, or I was going mad again, or some spirit was out to drive me that way. And then I felt the first stirrings of breeze. Of course, the noise I was hearing was the wind whistling through the top tips of the trees I was under. There had not been a breath of turbulence on the ground, but now the pre-dawn wind, that solid unflagging front of cool air, was chilling me to the bone and making the coals of the fire glow red. I crawled back into my swag shivering, and tried to get back to sleep. I would have given anything just then, to be able to hold that familiar warm dog flesh — the need was like a physical ache. Without her, I was suddenly susceptible to all those swamping, irrational feelings of vulnerability and dread.

  Most of the rest of that week or ten days was a timeless blur. The ground travelled under my feet unnoticed until some piece of country shocked me out of my mental machinations. I kept getting the odd sensation that I was in fact perfectly stationary, and that I was pushing the world around under my feet.

  I came across an almost dried-up, green putrescent water-hole, filled with rotting carcasses of cattle, horses and kangaroos. Around this water-hole were stretches of stone walls, high up on the banks. I suspected they were Aboriginal hunting blinds, perhaps thousands of years old. The hunters would have waited patiently behind these walls, upwind of the animals coming down to drink, then leapt out with their spears. They would have kept the hole clean in former years. Now, with none of them left to maintain and take care of this potentially beautiful watering place, even my camels turned their noses up at it. It was a horrible sewer and it smelt of death and decay. I made sure the camels had enough to drink from my drums that night before letting them go, just in case. Luckily, it was too cold for them to want to wallow in it.

  At about this time I entered and spent a day exploring what was probably the most impressive surreal piece of landscaping I had seen on the whole journey. A vast depression had sunk away from the broken plateau. Rimming it all around the horizon were cliffs of every imaginable hue. Some of these faces were as smooth and glossy as fine porcelain. Some were pure dazzling white, some pink, green, mauve, brown, red and so on. The depression was covered in samphire, which I then thought was ‘sand-fire’. It was a perfect name. When this plant dried out, it changed into myriads of colours — rainbow colours, reflecting the glow and iridescence of the cliffs. And dotted throughout this lost world were weirdly sculptured mounds of rock and pebbles. A martian landscape seen through multi-coloured glasses. I picked up and kept one small rock — pale pink sandstone studded with glitter, one side rippled into tiny sharp ridges.

  But even this exploratory walk felt empty. I had to force myself to do it. Everything I did now was like that — unspontaneous, forced. I had even given up cooking for myself at night. I would scrabble around in the bags for something to eat, forcing myself to nibble even though I wasn’t hungry.

  The other topographic freaks that stopped me in my tracks were the claypans. Mile after mile these perfectly flat brown hard-baked Euclidean surfaces ran, without a blade of grass on them, without a tree or an animal or a clump of spinifex — nothing but towering, thin, crooked, brown pillars of whirling dust being sucked up into a burning, almost white sky. Looking at these claypans was like gazing at a calm ocean, only you could walk on this stuff. Right next to one huge pan was a dwarf replica, about a hundred yards across. A bush ballroom. An outback amphitheatre. I tied up the camels for their midday break and in that searing, clean, bright, dry heat, I took off my clothes and danced. I danced until I could dance no more — I danced out everything, Diggity, the trip, Rick, the article, the whole lot. I shouted and howled and wept and I leapt and contorted my body until it refused to respond any more. I crawled back to the camels, covered in grime and sweat, shaking with fatigue, dust in my ears and nose and mouth, and slept for about an hour. When I woke, I felt healed, and weightless, and prepared for anything.

  I was well and truly back in station country now. The tracks here were well used. I had a bath and a swim at the next bore, washed my hair and clothes and hung them on the saddle to dry. It takes about five minutes out there. And I promised myself as I walked along that I would eat properly that night — I was too light-headed, too close to the edge to continue on the way I was doing, and I needed to bring myself down.

  I spotted a vehicle coming, belting along with a train of red dust behind it stretching to the horizon. I thought it must be station people out to do their check on the bores. I hastily put on my clothes and tried to twist my mind into shape for a short and simple chat with some bush folk. They were usually people of few words, but I was actually frightened of that car.

  It wasn’t bush folk. It was the jackals, hyenas, parasites and pariahs of the popular press. By the time I saw the long-lens camera trained on me, it was too late to hide, or get out the gun and blast it at them, or even realize that I was crazy enough to do such a thing. Out they spilled.

  ‘We’ll give you a thousand dollars for the story.’

  ‘Go away. Leave me alone. I’m not interested.’ My heart was pumping like a cornered rabbit’s.

  ‘Well, for Christ’s sake, might as well come and have a cold beer anyway.’

  They had the human psyche so well tapped that they could bribe me with one beer where they couldn’t buy me for a thousand bucks. I accepted the bribe as much to find out what was happening back in the world, and why they were here, as anything else. They sneaked in a few questions, some I answered perfunctorily, others I refused to comment on.

  ‘Where’s your dog?’

  I didn’t know how to sidestep these people — had once again forgotten the rules of the game. It was either blow their brains out and run or shrink into an acquiescent quivering blob, fighting hard to stay in control.

  ‘She’s dead, but please don’t print that as it would make a few old people back home very distressed.’

  ‘Yeah, OK we won’t.’

  ‘Is that a promise — your word?’

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  But they did print it of course. They flew back to Perth with a scoop, made up a story, and the myth of the romantic, mysterious camel lady was launched.

  That night I camped well off the road in a dense thicket. This was something I had not expected at all. Those light planes I had seen buzzing around all day and vaguely felt curious about were for me. What on earth had got into those people back there? I had noticed a kind of hysteria in the reporters when they talked of the press reports so far. ‘World-wide,’ they had said. I couldn’t believe that. And they’d scuttled off home playing their part in the great ugly farce called ‘the public has a right to know’
. I decided to wait there for a couple of days. If the press were really after me it would be better to hide out until it all blew over.

  It was the overlander who had really set me up. When he arrived back in civilization, longing for any limelight he could stand under, he told a story of this marvellous woman he had ‘spent the night with’ in the desert. The quote ran something like, ‘It was romantic. Her bare shoulders protruded from the sleeping bag, bells were tinkling on the pack, and I talked with her for many hours in the moonlight. I didn’t ask her why she was doing it, she didn’t ask me why I was doing it. We understood.’ Not a bad description of a sun-crazed loony in a sweat-soaked, camel-bespattered, grimy swag, who had been innocently pushing up zeds from the pit at the time. The worm. Maybe he thought he was doing me a favour.

  I ran into the bushes when the first cars arrived, television cameras and all. These reporters had hired a black tracker. But my fighting spirit was coming back to me now. They were so stupid, so heavy, these people — they didn’t belong here and I had the edge on them there at least. I whispered silent Indian war whoops from behind my camouflage. I circled right round through the thicket so that I was only twenty feet from them. The place where I had camped was sandy, so a blind fool could have tracked me. My footprints stood out like neon signposts, like Mack truck tracks on a sandhill.

  ‘All right, fella, where is she?’ One of them, the fat one with sweat staining his red T-shirt and a scowling heat-struck look over his matching face, addressed the black tracker.

  ‘Gee, boss, that camel lady might be real smart one, she might be cover up them tracks. I can’t see where she gone.’ And he shook his head and rubbed his chin in thoughtful puzzlement.

  Yippee and whoop whoop. I could have leapt out and kissed him for that. He knew exactly where I was and he was on my side. The fat one cursed and grudgingly handed over the ten dollars’ wages. The Aborigine smiled and put it in his pocket, and they took off — 150 miles of dirt track back to Wiluna.