by Nan Chauncy
‘So it is. Yes, it’s a full moon tonight, as you say,’ replied the old man absently, and would answer no more questions. He seemed absorbed in the rising of the moon.
Cherry thought of her morning washings with a sense of guilt. Had she actually made those frightfully rare creatures drink soapy water for their breakfast each day? She turned to ask Mad Dad if soap would injure anaspides, but he was not there. Nor did he return after they had cleared away the meal, and pulled up log seats round a fine blazing fire.
‘Why doesn’t he come back and yarn with us?’ they demanded of Tas, who only shrugged. ‘We want to hear more of his tales of the old Blackfellows and their ways.’
‘Search me!’ Tas grunted. ‘He’s a queer bloke, like I told you. That’s why he’s called mad, see? Don’t go asking him a lot of questions, neither. He didn’t like Brick asking him what his job was; I could see that.’
‘Oh, yes he did. He told us at once about those prawn things, didn’t he?’ protested Brick.
‘I say,’ Nigel asked lightly, but with an uneasy glance round, ‘I suppose our friend hasn’t gone off to see the Pinners by any chance?’
‘Gosh, no!’ Tas laughed. ‘That’s real funny. If you knew how he hates my Ma! Can’t stand the sight of her. I know that for a fact.’ And he added quietly, ‘He liked my Dad, you see; they were cobbers, reel cobbers in the old days. He’s all right—don’t worry about old Mad Dad, see?’
They didn’t see very far, though they nodded wisely. Tas spoke very seldom of his father, and they knew this was because he thought of him so much.
Still Mad Dad did not return. When the last baked ashy potato had been eaten, and the moon was high and small as a shilling, Cherry got up yawning, and went to bed. She lay watching the fire for some time while the others talked, and whenever she caught the name ‘Mad Dad’ it gave her a hurt, raw sort of feeling.
She almost wondered if she had slept at all, for the fire was still burning cheerfully when she awoke. Though dawn coloured the sky, it was cold and grey where the firelight did not lick the cave. Someone was standing by her bed, and as she rolled over she found Mad Dad proffering a mug of hot tea and smiling down at her.
‘What!’ she gasped. ‘Morning tea in bed in a cave?’
‘I made a billy-full when I came in,’ he explained. ‘If you don’t scorn it?’
‘Try me!’ shouted Brick, whose turn it had been to get up first and light the fire. ‘Just try me!’
Old Mad Dad trotted to and fro passing mugs of hot drink, and made them laugh again with his tales. They all sat up in the creaking beds to enjoy the luxury in slow sips. He did not say why he had only returned with the dawn; nor did anyone dare to ask him.
10
Cherry Learns a Secret
Some weeks later Cherry made by chance a curious discovery. There had been no special event since Mad Dad went his way over the mountains; nothing more than another night raid on the Homestead for supplies. Nor had the Pinners so far done more than shout abuse at Brick one day, when they had observed him streaking past Hollow Tree in broad daylight, carrying a sack of spring onions, peas, and carrots on his shoulder. These vegetables he had bravely collected while they were having dinner, but Pa’s dog had given tongue.
Mad Dad, after staying with them a few days, had left as abruptly as he came. While the moon remained full he had again gone off without explanation, and handed hot tea round when he returned with the dawn. Then, with the waning moon, came a wet night with flurries of rain, and a sky quite overcast. He stayed that night with them in the cave ‘skiting’, as Tas called it, about the wild things of the bush, and the wild men who used to hunt them not so very long ago.
‘If they were all round these parts,’ said Nigel, ‘it’s funny you never find any relics except the stones they chipped.’
‘Remember they were the most primitive of any men left in the world. They may have sheltered in these very caves, but they left no carvings, did they? The Australian abo’s drew on the cave walls with coloured chalks, but not our Blacks. And since they burned the bodies of their dead, and built no homes, what relics could there be? Men of science would give a lot for even the skull of one now, but we let them die out and now it’s too late to learn all we want to know. Hope the same doesn’t happen with the rare animals. The Tasmanian tiger’s nearly gone you know.’
The talk flickered like the fire, sometimes smouldering low, and sometimes flaring up with an argument. It was late when they went to bed and full morning when they awoke.
They found Mad Dad already up and about, fastening up his swag. ‘Well—thanks, all of you. I’m pushing along now,’ he stated briefly. But they begged to be allowed to come with him part of the way, and see some of the back country they had never yet explored. He seemed quite pleased, removed his pack, and made breakfast for them while Cherry milked and they hastily got ready.
Cherry drove the goats with them up the slope when they started out, leaving them to graze in a gully when they reached the Cock’s Spur. This was an odd-shaped knob at which they often stared, and though they had named it none of them had ever been there before. Beyond the Spur there was a big drop into unknown land.
The old man in front, bent like a question mark beneath his load, moved without hesitation over boulders and across fallen tree-trunks as though following a made road.
‘What about a spell?’ Tas called at last, stopping him before the main descent. They sat on the sun-warmed rocks and gazed at the view spread vastly below. The morning air smelled delicious, with a breath every now and then of a late wattle in flower. The great valley beneath them was ribbed with a darker green wherever a gully ran in from the hills. Mad Dad tried to show them the one he would be following when he left them. He called it the Big Fern Gully and said it was his special landmark, but only Tas could pick it out. To Cherry the whole valley looked one undulating sea of foliage, with streaks of scrub here and there, leading up to the grand scenery of the mountain range beyond.
‘Down there’—Mad Dad pointed with the stem of his pipe—‘down in there is quite a big creek. No, you can’t see it. It runs under a load of man ferns and sassafras, buried so deep you never hear it running.’ He described for them walking down there where the sun never reached and the only light came greenly through the fern fronds overhead; how it felt to be treading a prehistoric forest older, probably, than the hills. No footfall could disturb its peace, for there was nothing there not spongy with age or decay, and the mosses into which a boot sank deep.
They longed to reach this place, only Tas having ever seen ferns which grew like trees, with fronds on top like a palm-tree and longer than a man; yet they were compelled to turn back long before they got there. Nippy was clearly both tired and cross, and though no one would have admitted it the return climb was quite far enough, especially with an empty feeling where dinner should have been.
Mad Dad opened his pack and shared generous slabs of chocolate round before he left them. As they sat eating it and resting, a six-foot black snake slipped round a rock into the scrub.
‘Kill it!’ yelled Tas, grabbing up a stick.
‘Why?’ asked Mad Dad, gently taking the stick from him.
‘Gosh! Don’t you always kill a snake when you can?’ Tas looked so utterly astonished that the others had to laugh.
‘I? No, I don’t. Why should I? I have never yet met a snake that wasn’t in a hurry to get away from me—have you?’
‘No, but—they say—’
‘They say—? What do they say? Let them say! Well, I must be moving along. Don’t lose yourselves on the track home. Do you carry matches?’
‘Yes,’ said Tas, patting a pocket.
‘Good,’ approved the old man. ‘Never go far in the bush without them.’
In a few more minutes they were watching his ancient felt hat bobbing away, the wisp of white hair that stuck out of the hole in the crown waving good-bye to them with every step he took.
It was not then—thou
gh oddly enough it might easily have been—that Cherry made her discovery. Had she been less concerned with a feeling of hunger as she plodded along and climbed the Cock’s Spur with aching legs, she might have noticed something that day. She did remember once looking over her shoulder, and noticing the cradle of a tiny creek right in the lap of the hill up on the Spur. It was dry except for one small pool in a rocky basin which flashed like a jewel in the sun. At the time she had no breath left to comment, and Tas, who was leading, rather strangely failed to point out this interesting feature, though he was staring in the same direction.
It all passed out of mind until chance took her a few weeks later up the Spur from the cave’s side, in search of goats. She found them nibbling the reddish shoots of some peppermint gums, and started them for home. Then, having nothing particular to do till milking time, she left them to meander along alone, while she explored the Spur. In a few minutes she was at the top and the great view burst upon her. She could see to the far ranges across a huge expanse of valley, and she could see also, close at hand, something glinting like a silver cup and knew she was looking down at the pool down in its bed of rock. She was so near that she could see the ripples chase each other as a light breeze stroked its face.
Cherry climbed forward on a jutting crag and searched for a foothold, but there was no way down the steep wall over which she leaned. She stared longingly at the pool; it looked so inviting—surely, surely there was a track leading to it? If only she could manage to get down! Yes, there was a track, made by sheep or wombats. It zig-zagged right to the water’s edge. She stared again, feeling oddly excited, but could find no way to descend from her ledge.
Then she recalled the Giant Steps in what had seemed to them at first an unbroken wall. This gave her heart to search afresh, and suddenly she noticed something on a small ledge on her right. It was nothing very much, only a tiny scrap of blue and white paper in fact, yet it instantly reminded her of a similar piece in an old man’s hands as he unwrapped his special chocolate.
‘Man has been this way before,’ she grinned, her mind working swiftly. ‘So this is where Mad Dad has been coming. Perhaps it’s his track down to the pool?’ And she puzzled to herself why he should choose to come here. ‘Must be those shrimps of his he’s after—or—I know! He’s discovered gold in the creek and washes it down at that pool.’
Wildly excited, she was about to rush back and astonish them all with her news, when she discovered something else about the ledge to her right; it led down a deep cleft which could not be seen from above. Scrambling down, she reached an arch of stone, made by a mass of fallen boulders, and passing easily underneath this came out on a well-worn track leading down to the pool. Something stopped her from exploring further without the others, and she turned back to fetch them to share the fun.
The goats were idling on their homeward way. She shoo’d them on, eager to reach the cave with her sensational news, but before she had got as far as the tarn she ran into Tas, busy splitting firewood.
‘What’s up?’ he enquired, with a glance at her flushed face. ‘You look as if you’d shoved your head in a bee tree?’
‘Listen, Tas,’ she began importantly, only wishing the others were there to be impressed too, ‘I’ve found out something. If you want to know where old Mad Dad went off to those nights when he wouldn’t stay in the cave—remember?—well, as it happens I can tell you.’
She paused for effect, and certainly Tas was staring at her with satisfactory interest.
Then he grinned. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to know, thanks. As it happens I know already.’
‘Tas,’ she exclaimed, open-eyed with astonishment. ‘Then—then why didn’t you tell us if you knew all the time?’
‘Not my business—not so nosey as some! Oh, sorry, kid!’ He put out a hand to stop her as she flung off with flaming cheeks. ‘Don’t go. I didn’t mean that for you, I swear I didn’t. You see you’ve hit on a secret, and it’s not my secret. All the same…reckon I’ll have to tell you, now you know so much.’
He paused, frowning, and thoughtfully scratched an ear.
‘You can trust me not to give away a secret,’ said Cherry quickly.
‘Yeah, I know—but…’
‘Anyhow,’ she added, ‘I don’t think you need bother to tell me. I thought it out for myself. Mad Dad’s got the secret, hasn’t he? And I know what it is. He’s found a little dry creek, but—there’s gold in it. That’s where he goes and what he does, isn’t it? Washes out the gold.’
‘No,’ answered Tas, ‘it’s not. Only wish it was. Now sit down and I’ll tell you.’ He swept away the chips on a stump and drove his axe into the side, before joining her. They could see some of the goats slaking their thirst at the tarn; others were already at the milking cave and the sound of their bells was muffled. A robin hopped near the stump where Cherry sat, and eyed with longing a white grub close to her hand.
‘Remember one night when we first came to the cave,’ Tas began, ‘we was yarning away, waiting for the moon to rise? It was full moon and we went down after on our first raid—and got two chooks.’
‘Yes, I do. Nig made up the Raiding Song on the way home, and we got some young green peas and—’
‘Yes, but first we sat round skiting—remember? I told you about a poor bloke lost in the bush, and how they searched and searched, and at last they come on ’im; poor chap, he was dead.’
‘Yes, I remember. It was somewhere out this way, wasn’t it, that you said you found him?’
‘It wasn’t me that found him, Cherry. It was my Dad, see—he found him.’
‘I thought you said it was you.’
‘Look, Cherry, I may have said so that night. I was talking wild. Dunno why I started telling you all about that chap—only the moon was full—like it was the night he was found, see? And there I was in the cave with you all, and wondering if I could somehow give you the slip when we went raiding…’
‘Tas, what are you talking about? And what’s it all got to do with Mad Dad?’
‘That’s wot I’m telling you. See, I knew Mad Dad would be where you’ve come from, over the Spur, and I wanted to get to him without your knowing. See, I had to warn him we’d gone to live in Old Jim’s Cave, for I guessed he used it for sleeping himself now and then. What would you all have done if he’d just walked in one night? Besides—’
‘Besides,’ chuckled Cherry, ‘what would he have thought if he’d stumbled on a lot of sleeping goats?’
‘Matter of fact it was your goats wot found him in the end. I was too sleepy to go out again after the raid and look for him that night. Then next day, remember, we was building the wall. And you come along in a stew saying the goats had gone. “Cunning brutes,” I sez to meself when I hears that, “they must have seen Mad Dad and bin scared of a stranger and cleared out.” So I left you and Nippy, and slipped off to see if I could find the old man and bring him in, remember?’
‘Yes. That’s why Nippy couldn’t find you. But why, Tas? Why all this? I mean—he was your friend. And we showed him we liked him, didn’t we, when you did bring him along?’
‘See, Cherry, it’s like this…’ Tas thoughtfully scratched his ear again as he sought for words. ‘You promise you’ll never tell no one, don’t you?’
‘Of course!’
‘See, that chap I told you about, that was Mad Dad’s only brother that died of hunger on the ranges.’
‘Oh, Tas!’
‘Yeah. He thought he’d be clever and take a short cut, and the poor bloke must hev lost himself in a storm. Easy enough to do, and it was winter, like I told you, and snow about up here. It was my Dad that found him; everyone was out searching, but no one only Dad went over the Spur. He found him with his face in the pool of water down there, and fetched Mad Dad.’
‘You mean—you mean the pool I’ve just seen?’
‘That’s right. And Mad Dad—well, he wasn’t queer before that night but—but afterwards he was. Some say there’d bee
n a row between them about some girl, but I don’t reckon it was that. Only you mustn’t never let on to him that you know anything about it.’
‘Of course I won’t.’
‘No, but—I mean nobody must. That’s what my Dad told me, and I swear I’ve bin careful. I was only a nipper at the time it happened, but sometimes I fancy the old chap knows Dad told me; he often looks at me so queer. Yet I always make out I reckon it’s for his old prawns he comes this way every full moon.’
‘Why every full moon?’
‘Oh, the moon was full in a clear sky the night he was found, see? Now the old chap’s a bit touched it seems he’s jest got to come back and hang around here every clear night of the full moon. Seems like he can’t fergit it all.’
They neither spoke for some time, busy with their own thoughts.
At last Tas looked up. ‘They’ve bin yelling for us down at the cave,’ he remarked without moving.
Cherry sighed. It was so dreadful about dear old Mad Dad, and now everything was spoiled; she couldn’t even burst in with a lump of sensational news. Why was it she never quite managed to pull things off? If it had been Brick or Nippy they would surely have come dashing into the cave, and everyone would have crowded round to listen. But these were shocking thoughts when she ought only to be feeling sorry, and she was so sorry for poor Mad Dad.
Hastily she asked if he would be there again at the next full moon?
‘You bet! Though he may not come to see us. Might think it looked a bit odd, perhaps. I reckon the moon after he’ll be along, if we’re still about.’
He heaved his sack of wood on his back and led the way through the scrub to the cave, with the whole subject finished and shut away between them for ever.
11
Nippy’s Birthday Party
It was just as Tas said; the moon waned, and waxed to the full again without Mad Dad appearing. Spring waned, too, and summer came hurrying along with Christmas in its train. It was very odd to think of Christmas in the height of summer, so odd that only Tas took it seriously as quite natural.