by Alex Miller
Amazed by their presence, Feng examined his audience. He knew every one of them. Each of them, he saw, carried a rifle. Two wore sabres and another had a coiled rope fastened by a thong of redhide to a D on his saddle. In the first seconds of waking, as he lay on the ground with his head raised a little, Feng noticed something else about the group of horsemen, something which sent a quiver of deeper alarm through him. He noticed that each of them was either a landowner or the son of a landowner. All of them had cheerfully passed the time of day with him on occasion. Some had enjoyed the hospitality of his hut. On meeting him, every one of them had been accustomed to greet him in a friendly manner and to offer him their trust. He saw now that this group of men had become strangers to him. He saw, by the manner in which they were regarding him, that they no longer knew him nor trusted him.
The world bad changed. He had understood at the moment of waking that he was no longer in the place where he had gone to sleep. And he had understood, also, that there could be no regaining that former place. He knew there could be no going back to it. He had closed his eyes and a catalyst had been slipped into the mix of their new society and had caused this group of men to separate out and to form a single body united by a common identity and a common purpose. While he’d slept something had awoken in these mounted men the knowledge that they were of the same tribe. Some event had threatened their species and had stirred within them the latent memory of ancestral bonds, and, in becoming the familiars of each other, they had become strangers to him. Feng knew all this at the moment of his awakening. He knew it intuitively.
The master of Ballarat Station touched the trembling flanks of his horse with his spurs and the unnerved beast stepped forward smartly, striking the white ash into Feng’s face. The man leaned from his saddle and looked down at his shepherd – the wind seemed to hold its breath – and he asked in a low and intent voice, articulating each syllable with great care, Where is Dorset?
And as he asked his question the others in the circle leaned forward in unison to hear the reply, as if this were a dance which they had rehearsed, a familiar rite requiring from them particular responses. They eased themselves forward, the leather of their saddles creaking, their eyes fixed upon the crouching shepherd on the ground, the shepherd who had become a stranger, his ashen features those of a clown, a familiar made strange, a creature – though scarcely a fellow-creature now – who had been transformed and rendered anonymous by the white ash and whose body had been concealed within the dun hessian cloak, so that he resembled more a sheep than a shepherd. The demon of the land made visible. No more the cheerful and reliable Feng, the amiable one-eyed boy, but an alien in their midst. As if for them his truer form had been revealed by this disguise.
Feng got unsteadily to his feet, unsure of what he might expect, and rubbed the ash from his good eye. In his make-do patois he told his master as best he could that apart from the dreadful wind it had been a normal day so far and that Dorset was almost certain to be found tending his flock.
No thanks were offered for this information, but they looked at each other with questions in their eyes then wheeled their mounts and crashed away through the sticks.
When they had gone Feng called his dogs and sent them to gather the mob, and he drove the sheep back to the hurdles and shut them up. His master had lingered a moment to instruct him urgently, Until we take the murderer, life and property cannot be considered safe.
Confident in their ignorance that an innate, a primitive, if not indeed a savage, faculty had survived his long exposure to London society, the corps of mounted landholders sought out Dorset and asked him to track the killer for them. Dorset firmed his black box hat upon his head and steadied his nervous thoroughbred with a gentle hand and replied at once, To be sure gentlemen. Anything to oblige ye. And in his hunting pink he led them for three days through the thickest coverts of scrub and up and down the steepest and stoniest gullies. For is it not, he proposed to himself in the absence of any personal knowledge of such matters as these, to such unhallowed places that desperate fugitives will resort when pressed?
But all to no avail. He was dismayed but not downcast by this result. Indeed the unseemliness of his persistently cheerful manner was the cause of some resentment among the serious men he led. With frequent pauses to stare in puzzlement at some mark on the ground, and murmuring about a damned devious fellow, he did his best. But it was not good enough. The truth was, he could not read the land. The signs among the leaf litter meant nothing to him. Indeed he did not even discern them. Like the white devils who followed closely at the heels of his horse, Dorset saw on the ground only fallen twigs and bark and leaves and shaley outcroppings of rock and such like. He had diverted the fashionable salons of Regents Park with the pathos of his readings from Racine’s great tragedy Andromaque, but in the text of his motherland he was illiterate. He had lost his link with her. He was a free man.
He did not fail to find the culprit because he was unwilling to find him. On the contrary, he desired fervently to demonstrate that he was as free a devil as any man present, that he was a colonist of no uncertain loyalty, that he was a founding member, no less (if not quite a founding father), of their new society. For he understood that it was a society which was to depend for its cohesion not upon ancestral bonds, but upon the principle that all persons are born free and equal before God, that he or she enters the world unblemished, that each, indeed, bears his or her own vita nuova inscribed for life upon the quality of their particular demeanour. He understood that the essence of freedom is in dislocation from one’s origins, that freedom is to be judged for oneself and not for one’s tribe. He understood that freedom is identity for the individual. And, as he rode about the place in his futile search for the murderer, he did not expect this to change suddenly.
He would gladly have snatched the shivering culprit from behind a bush and presented him by the scruff of the neck to the glowering potentates who rode behind him. Here he is, gentlemen. Your murderer. A rabbit from my hat. How’s that for black magic? Do with him as you will. Hang him! For Dorset identified his own interests with theirs and believed in British justice as unreservedly as any Port Phillip gentleman. Indeed he considered himself elevated from barbarism by it and protected from arbitrary violence by its vaunted impartiality.
The fourth day of the hunt dawned to a steely sky. The landholders and their sons woke cold and dispirited and aggrieved. Three nights camped in the low scrubby forest, which flourished on the outcroppings of quartzose sandstone south of the main station, without either adequate cover or decent food, and with not a sign yet to indicate that they were a yard closer to their quarry than they had been on the day they set out, had brought them to a vengeful state of mind.
An elder son squatting beside the fire and observing Dorset saddling the chestnut thoroughbred was the first to voice a certain opinion. Turning to Feng’s master, their acknowledged leader, and indicating Dorset by pointing at him, so that no one might mistake his meaning, this young man enquired in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, Cannot you see the plain truth of this matter, sir?
Though he understood it, and even harboured some sympathy for it in the privacy of his own mind, the master of Ballarat was disinclined to be moved as yet in his opinion on the point that was being made. Let us mount up and follow Dorset, he said, tossing a stick on to the fire and turning away from his youthful interlocutor. So that is what they did, for a fourth day. They straggled along unwillingly, an increasingly mutinous group of men, a little behind Dorset’s red coat, which a man was heard to observe was surely a kind of costumed mockery on such a one as the black tracker.
By the time the evening drew on and the hunt was abandoned for the night no further advanced than it had been that morning, the elder son, who had voiced his opinion at the beginning of the day, had drawn around himself a band of followers. With him at their head these young men rode up to Feng’s master in a close body and voiced their grievance, respectful still but insis
tent. We are mocked, sir, and must settle this matter. It cannot be allowed to proceed for another day.
Hearing the complaint, others joined them, a few to listen, more to murmur their agreement. They were deeply tired. They were hungry. They were saddened and angered and, to a degree, as settlers they were demoralised by the brutal murder of their confrere and by their seeming impotence to avenge the crime. They were beleagered and were not in a state of mind that lent itself to cool judgements. And so they made a mistake; a true error of judgement. For they judged Dorset not as a man like themselves, not as a free man, but as the son of his ancestors. They had not understood that Dorset, the individual, was unable to read the text of the landscape of his forebears. They believed in his innate ability to read it. And they concluded, therefore, that he was misleading them. That he was, in fact, leading them through the hills and mocking them in their ignorance of such things – they were content to admit to the possession of no such innateness as his for themselves.
They knew, in a general way, that Dorset’s Australian countrymen held to the belief that the land is pervaded by good and evil spirits who can be influenced and controlled by select persons among the clans. And believing this of his countrymen, they believed it also of Dorset. He was the land’s familiar and they were interlopers. He was playing with them. He was subverting the legitimacy of their grip on the land. It was a point upon which they were particularly sensitive. They ‘read’ allusions to their act of dispossession everywhere, for they more than half-expected retribution to sweep them from their hold on the country yet.
The poor quality of their judgement concerning Dorset’s relation to his ancestors, based as it was on an assumption of innate differences and on guilt and a certain superstitious fear of losing what they had gained by illicit means, misled them. It offered them uncertainty and fed their paranoia, and it made them draw more closely together to find comfort and support in each other.
And in doing this they forfeited their freedom to make judgements as individuals and they became a tribe themselves, bound by a common ancestral imperative. The transformation had begun four days ago. Feng had witnessed it when, as one, they had leaned from their saddles to inspect him.
It was growing dark among the trees, but still none of them dismounted or looked to prepare a camp. They were gathered in a clearing among the low scrubby woodland at a point where two gullies ran together. The prospect faced them of a supperless night, for they had used the last of their provisions that morning.
Dorset alone had dismounted. Handing the reins of his thoroughbred to the son of a landholder, he had walked a little way up the right-hand gully and had gone in among the open timber. As he went on he looked left and right, now bending to pick up a likely stone and weigh it in the palm of his hand, now moving on a pace or two before squatting to brush thoughtfully at the ground litter with his fingers, the pale doeskin glove held in his other hand.
The close-knit rank of mounted men observed his progress. Their weary horses spoke for them, blowing and shifting bruised hooves on the stony ground. Then a man’s voice broke the uneasy hush. In the gathering darkness it was not possible to identify the speaker. With the tone of one who believes himself robbed, the voice said, He does not lead us to the murderer because he is in league with him. There followed a little rustling. Then the voice went on, Or he is the murderer himself.
After this the silence between them went much deeper. Something in the men subsided at these words. An unstable level within them, which had resisted until this moment, collapsed and sent a tremor through them. They drew into themselves. They shrugged their coats more closely around their shoulders and, becoming heavier and more anonymous, sat lower in their saddles.
Slowly the silence deepened, until each man knew his thoughts were overheard by the others.
In the rapidly failing light Dorset’s red coat moved about ahead of them among the trees like a target. The red coat of the fox, it might have been. The dismounted huntsman himself become the hunt’s quarry. The red coat focused the attention of the mounted men. It was all they could distinguish in the gloom. They saw nothing else.
As they watched, the silence settled within them onerously, became horizontal and colder, reducing them to a simpler stratum, embedding them into a single mass, as if they had been a bank of fog forming in the cooling air at the junction of the unnamed gullies, fog in the stillness hanging between the darker earth and the lighter sky. They were simplified. Their elementary notion of Dorset as the quarry reducing them to its own elementary level and beginning to direct them towards a mode of action which, as free men, each one of them would have condemned as arbitrary and barbarous.
Not more than thirty metres from the rank of horsemen the true quarry observed the scene. The Koorie warrior in his silver-grey possum cloak was invisible to them, however. He wasn’t a spirit. He was real enough. A solid, physical man standing among the trees. He was not invisible to them because he was insubstantial but because the horsemen were not looking for him. They did not know how to look for him. If he had moved, a horse might have detected the movement out of the corner of its vision and reacted. But even so, there were other movements in the bush which the men discounted. Parrots walked about above their heads on the branches of the trees and were not interpreted by them.
Without making a particular effort to conceal his presence from them once he had concluded that they could not possibly be looking for him, and curious to know the actual nature of their purpose, the Koorie had visited the meandering party of horsemen a number of times during the past four days. He observed them now with a quickened interest. He was their audience. Though they would never acknowledge it, he was the only theatre of their history. They might have sensed him, but that is all, as an eerie kind of absence.
Dorset was returning through the trees, coming down the gully whistling and slapping his quirt against his boot in time with the tune. He was wondering what to suggest next. When he reached the place where the two dry courses met he stopped abruptly and strained to see what it was that had alarmed him. Something had made him pause. He had sensed a movement towards him through the darkness. He stood still, undecided, his quirt poised, his lips pursed, the rhythm of his song interrupted.
Well gentlemen, the villain has left no sign here for us to follow, he called into the night, his educated English accents too thin, however, too high and too refined, the cadence of his speech too uncertain, to impose itself upon the dark bush with conviction. His words remained with him. They went nowhere. They died in the weighty silence. He sensed the mass that moved upon him and his skin prickled with fear.
Feng was cooking a shoulder of mutton in the pot above his hearth. It was Saturday again. The mutton was for their supper after the cards. He had seen no one and had therefore heard no news since the previous Monday, the day on which he had woken to find the world changed and himself confronted by the group of horsemen, the day on which he had risen from the ashes of his fire to answer the inquisition of the landholders.
As a wife whose husband has gone into battle waits for confirmation of the dread within her, Feng went on behaving as if nothing had changed. But an expectant space had opened around him. It waited to be named.
The dogs were barking. He finished peeling an onion and dropped it into the pot with the simmering mutton, and he crumbled in a good measure of salt before going to the door to see who was coming.
It was Patrick. He was on foot. When he saw Feng at the door, Patrick waved his arms and broke into a run. Feng went down the track to meet his friend. He did not hurry. Patrick was out of breath. His long orange hair and straggles of his beard were wetted to his neck and brow. A grey slick glinted in the corners of his cracked lips. He clutched Feng’s coat. His eyes were dark with dismay. They’ve done for him laddie, he gasped.
They reached the junction of the two dry gullies in less than an hour. The place was still and quiet and pervaded by an eerie kind of presence. The heavy green parrots walked
back and forth along the horizontal branches of the gums, cracking seed cases. Ants had pioneered roads across Dorset’s red coat.
Feng saw his friend lying on his face in the stony bed of the dry watercourse and in his mind a stricken voice, which he did not recognise as his own, cried out, Dorset, this cannot be! He went to his friend and would have embraced him and raised him back to storytelling and to whistling and would have told him of the shoulder simmering on the fire for later. But it was two days on and the black corpse was bursting from the seams of its garments and was no longer Dorset.
Feng sat on a fallen log in the bed of the gully and wept. He knew now that when the world had changed, heaven had become hell. Patrick cradled him in his arms, as if he were his child, holding Feng’s small body tightly against his own broad chest. He promised, by the Holy Mother of God, that he would not rest until he had brought upon the potentates a terrible vengeance for this crime.
But this was not Patrick’s first loss. And even as he uttered it he knew his promise was a kind of rhetoric and that the meaning of his words did not lie in violent reaction against the landholders who had murdered Dorset. To kill one of them, he knew, would only increase their numbers. He understood the social nature of the fracture line which separated himself and Feng from the potentates. He had seen the like of it before and knew that individuals cannot be brought to account for such phenomena as these.
They went to Patrick’s hut, the closer of the two, and fetched a mattock and a spade. They took turns to break the ground, while the other stood by to shovel out the meagre spoil. It was hard going. There was no topsoil. The ground was dry and tight and would not yield, but bounced the mattock back at them, jarring the muscles of their arms and shoulders. This ground had never been broken into. The ring of the iron mattock striking the stones and the dry scrape of the spade filled the clearing all day.