Man of Two Tribes b-21

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Bony ate, and she continued to regard him with pleading eyes, until he thought he knew what troubled her. The meat had to be cut and served on a tin plate. She ate daintily, then asked for a crust of the bread loaf, and he was astonished when she carried it at once to Curley.

  Curley’s moaning ceased. The dog returned to beg for another crust, and this she took to Millie. Thereafter, both animals laid themselves down and seldom moved until day broke.

  So there was a facet of a dead man’s character. His dog had to eat from a plate, and his camels had to receive a crust of bread taken to them every night by the dog. Doubtless the old man would converse with his three animals. Assuredly it would be a one-way traffic, opinions and questions and answers all verbally expressed, but not necessarily a one-way traffic of thought.

  These three animals were now at a place they knew, and now they demanded the attention which was customary at this place. The previous night, out in the salt-pan country, the dog hadn’t asked for a plate, and the camels hadn’t demanded bread crusts.

  Having washed the limited utensils, Bony poked the ashes with a stick and raked out the now perfectly baked loaf. He could hear faintly the gurgle of cud when brought up the long neck to the throat. The stars were lamps, indeed. At a distance a fox barked, and on a branch of a sandalwood a mopoke ‘porked’.

  As man has ever done, Bony squatted over the tiny fire, now and then pushing the burning ends of wood into the central glow. It is a time for cogitating, a time for mental relaxation into which often intrude vital thoughts and pictures. Questions were under the surface of his mind, and at odd moments these had stirred throughout the day.

  Why had the attempt been made to ‘slew’ him away from thisnorth country bordering the Nullarbor Plain? To all intents and purposes it was a no-man’s country. Uranium instead of gold might be the answer. But, were it a question of gold or uranium, why the necessity of employing an unregistered helicopter?

  Was there a helicopter? Had imagination dictated Lonergan’s note on the helicopter by sheer coincidence with the night the woman vanished? It resolved to fact or imagination: it must be reduced to the minimum by establishing the state of Lonergan’s mind.

  The reports he had seen on Lonergan, written by the dead man’s relatives, the Norseman policeman and the hotel-keeper, contributed to but one picture. Lonergan was old but still physically tough. After long abstemiousness once he broke himself in, he could out-drink men half his age and, no matter his condition, could speak intelligibly. The Norseman policeman had stated that Lonergan’s mental condition was that of an old man who had lived too long in solitude, that his mind wandered when asked questions, and that this wasn’t intended evasion.

  This to Bony was the crux. The diary proved deliberate evasion of the facts of his travels, although this could well be the habit of many years. Still, there must be taken into account the manifestations of solitude, because solitude does produce extraordinary results, many of which the professional psychologist would decline to consider. These Bony had to contend with when taking his first step toward the authenticity or otherwise of that entry.

  The next day was greeted by the camels and the dog with that absence of irritation ruling when routine is being followed. Millie sank to her knees without objection, to permit Bony to mount behind her hump. Curley gazed amiably about the night camp and decided to behave. Lucy regarded man and animals, and then actually led the way from camp-to the north. The family was harmoniously complete. The sun rose in the usual place, and the sky was cloudless.

  For an hour they proceeded along this verdant strip overlooking the Plain, and then Lucy led down the slope to a blunt inlet, from which they moved on to the Plain and continued northward.

  Bony now had to rely entirely on the dog and the camels to take him from camp to camp, made previously by Patsy Lonergan.

  Lonergan had written: “Nothing in trap at She-Oak Rock.”

  They came to a great rock which appeared as though it had tried to roll on a tree. The tree was a she-oak, and at the foot of the tree was a trap holding a golden dog fox. Lucy sniffed at the carcase, then lifted a lip at the rider. Again, as William Black who might still be followed, Bony slid down from the high saddle and removed the scalp, which was worth at this time, two pounds. The trap he hung in the tree.

  Without bothering to settle Millie in order to mount, Bony hauled himself up to the saddle, and they went on. He did nothing to drive or guide. The animal followed the dog, and sometimes the dog followed Curley, and the way hugged this ‘coast’ of steep slopes with its promontories, bays and inlets and little islands off ‘shore’.

  At one point Millie turned into the cliff and halted at the foot of a landslide years old. This puzzled Bony because there was no mention in the diary of such a place for a trap. He prospected on foot, and found that the rubble contained quartz, and that Lonergan had stopped here to nap some of it for possible gold content. The camels hadn’t forgotten that for them it had been a temporary rest camp.

  The same thing happened towards sundown. Both camels stopped on a shallow shelf of white sand footing what appeared as a dangerous rock overhang. Bony wasn’t impressed by the site for a camp, but Curley went down to his knees and yawned, and Millie looked round at her rider and followed suit when Bony delayed ordering her to ‘hoosta’. He would have gone on, but both camels said plainly with their eyes ‘This is where we camped last time. So what?’

  Having been unloaded and hobbled on good feed, the camels held conference as usual, and, when agreement had been reached, they turned southward and shuffled away.

  “If you don’t settle down,” Bony called after them, “we shall go on until dark.”

  They didn’t even look back. Curley did pause now and then to snatch a mouthful of fodder, but Millie went on steadily until she had a lead of a couple of hundred yards. Then Curley realised he was being left behind, and he bellowed and lunged with hobbled feet to catch up with her.

  Eventually they disappeared into the mouth of a gully, and because they might reach the upland Bony went after them with the noseline and the halter.

  He found them in what was actually a narrow cleft bordered by sheer rock faces. They were facing about, waiting for him with obvious impatience. Then he found the rock-hole covered with rough timber and weighted with rock slabs to prevent wild animals falling in and polluting the water below. It meant a trip back to the camp for the bucket.

  Eventually, the camels went to ground and spent a half-hour chewing water-moistened cud, while Bony sipped hot tea and watched the cliff shadows racing away across the Plain. Soon it was dark, and the bells tinkled contentedly that the camels were feeding not more than a hundred yards away. Then the bells rang a different tune, telling that the animals were coming hurriedly to camp, and into the light of the fire appeared their heads on a level as they waited for Bony to cut a crust for the waiting dog to serve to them.

  And thus was Bony taken to old Patsy Lonergan’s camps, with no roads to follow, no tracks to lead him. To Lost Bell Camp. To another named in the diary as Menzies’s Delight, although what this bare, unprotected place had to delight Mr. Menzies, Bony could not name. He was taken to the Three Saltbushes camp, where a dingo had dragged a trap away for more than a mile; next day on to Big Claypan which was out of sight of the ‘coast’, and where old Lonergan had noted in his diary that he had seen the helicopter.

  Having timed the hours of travel, and multiplied the total by the average walking pace of the camels, Bony estimated that he was now ninety miles north of Mount Singular.

  Chapter Seven

  Beware of Ganba

  ONall thisgrey and purple world, seemingly completely flat and visually round, there was nothing higher than Bony’s head. All day man and animals had moved across this sea of saltbush, never higher than Curley’s knee and, because of the absence of objects, only by gazing directly downward on the bush did Bony retain the sense of movement.

  Shortly after five o’clock, whena
ll the bush to the west was purple, and that to the east was silver, there appeared ahead a thin dark line, which slowly thickened and eventually widened to disclose a circular depression having a diameter of half a mile, the level floor being some twelve feet below the Plain.

  Bony guessed this to be Bumblefoot Hole, and subsequent investigation proved Lonergan’s naming of it when he found the long dead remains of a dingo which had been trapped and had gained freedom. The bones of its left foreleg proved the point, for the extremity was a mere drumstick.

  Following days and nights of utter defencelessness on the Plain, Bumblefoot Hole was the ideal camp, appreciated even more by the camels than their master. Lucy piloted the way down the steep cliff-like edge, and later Bony found that this was the only way down or up for the camels. On the floor of the depression, the feed was good, and the diary had mentioned that here was another water supply.

  To the right of where they reached the floor were the rain-washed ashes of Lonergan’sfires, and in the face of the cliff nearby were several small caves, one of which was filled with dry brushwood obviously stored by the old trapper.

  After the animals had led him to the rock-hole water, and he had set his tea billy against the flames of a fire, Bony explored the caves. There were three on this arc of the circle, and in one he found a ten-gallon oil drum one end of which had been cut away to provide the rocklid, and another that had been used for water storage.

  In the first he found tobacco and matches in air-tight tins, tinned meat and fish, boxes of cartridges for the Savage rifle, bottles of strychnine, pain-killer and liver pills, leather for straps and hide for hobbles and thin rope for noselines.

  Quite a camp! Proving? Proving that Lonergan’s last trap-line had not been temporary, supported by his well protected water-holes.

  Bumblefoot Hole was certainly a hole, a place to hide in, safety from thatSomething from which nothing could be concealed, not even the thoughts running through a man’s mind. To arrive here was not unlike entering a house that is warm and quiet after the door has been slammed against the storm. Once here, a man begins to feel the effect of that bald empty world spinning in space. He remembers how he looked back over a shoulder, subconsciously shrinking from theSomething that was tracking him, stalking him, watching, waiting. He recalls an old fable theabos tell about Ganba, and right now he isn’t in the mood to lift his lip in a sneer at the ignorant, benighted blackfellow.

  Were he a new chum who happened to stumble into this hole, he would stay and, having eaten old Lonergan’s reserve store, starve and die in it because he would be too damn frightened to leave it. Old Patsy was hardened against Ganba. He had grown a shell about himself. His bald world did have companions-two camels and a dog-withwhom he could talk, over whom he could exert authority and so retain something of a sense of values. Doubtless he heard Voices, and spoke to them in return, but he wasn’t that mentally off balance as to relax his defence against the Plain.

  Old Lonergan had neither exaggerated nor had been inaccurate in anything jotted into his diary, from this Hole right back to Mount Singular; therefore, Bony’s opinion firmed still more that the note concerning the helicopter was based on fact. Although the old man had not mentioned the direction of the aircraft, if taken in conjunction with the disappearance of the woman, it was reasonable to assume it was flying north.

  What lay to the north? Only more and more Nullarbor Plain, a wide area of claypan and water-gutter, then the ground rising from the Plain to the Great Inland Desert, so-called, which extends almost to the coast of North Australia.

  Next day Bony remained at Bumblefoot Hole. He washed clothes and troubled to cook something resembling an Irish stew. Once he went up the camel pad to the lip of the cliff with the rifle, hoping to see a kangaroo, their fresh tracks having been seen by him in the Hole. He spent two hours with the old diaries and papers within the battered suitcase he had found under Lonergan’s bunk in the homestead hut, but these gave nothing but proof that the trapper had established other trap-lines.

  For Bony this day had a Sunday atmosphere, for mostbushmen wash clothes on Sunday morning, and read the racing journals during the afternoon. When the sun retired, he went again to hunt for kangaroos, and to his satisfaction saw four does, two sizable joeys, and two young bucks all feeding some two hundred yards distant.

  Already the light was failing. There was no wind. The surface of the Plain appeared to be sinking into a fast-deepening green, and the sky into a fast-brightening dome of matt ivory. Having settled himself, Bony whistled shrilly to bring the ’roosto upright attention.

  The report was followed by no echoes, being just one mighty whip-crack, and, placing the rifle carefully beside a boulder, Bony walked from the Hole to the carcass of the young buck.

  He removed the skin and left the fore-quarters, and then, when beginning the return to Bumblefoot Hole, discovered that it had vanished into the now universally black surface of the Plain.

  He found himself walking in a vast chamber having no walls, and a ceiling of arching blue. The chamber was padded not only to stop sound from getting out, but to prevent it from getting in. Sound was a mirage for the ears, and silence was real and menacing, pressing against the ears so that the heart could be heard working like the engine it is.

  On reaching the lip of the Hole, he paused to welcome the red star of his camp fire and the relief to his ears brought by the sound of the hobble chains affixed to the camels’ feet. The recent impressions were still influencing him when the ghost of a sound stopped his foot from beginning the descent.

  It wasn’t caused by the dog, for she was lying beside the fire. The sound appeared to originate from one of the stars pointing the Southern Cross. It was moving now to the Three Sisters, just a whispered threat…oo-a-i…ar-r-a-i…oo-oo…ish -ah. The sound grew. It came over the edge of the now invisible world. It sped towards Bumblefoot Hole and the man standing at its verge. Abruptly it halted, then veered to the north and ran away under the ground where it ‘hoomped’ and ‘grumphed’. Up it came to race about the Plain with gathering speed, to draw close, to halt. Where? You couldn’t tell. Then it whispered, and the whisper grew to become a rumble which rolled fast towards Bony, finally to sigh with infinite glee right at his back.

  The hobble chains continued to clink musically, and the dog continued to lie sleeping by the fire. Turning about, Bony bowed to the Nullarbor Plain, saying:

  “Greetings, Ganba! Some other time. Goodnight!”

  (Imagination! This is a report, not a fantasy.)

  The night was kind, and Bony slept until the hobble chains told of the camels getting up for breakfast. He ate grilled ’roo chops and he grilled meat for Lucy, and as the sun was firing the horizon he led the camels up from the Hole.

  He urged Millie to her knees, and when mounted merely relaxed in the saddle and waited. Lucy ran a little way to the southward, and he shook his head and called; then she ran to the northward and Millie turned to follow her.

  When the sun said it was a few minutes after eleven, Lucy raised the first rabbit Bony had seen since leaving the station homestead. The dog’s chance was Buckley’s. Millie turned her ears back towards her rider, turned them front again and minded her own business for ten minutes, then stopped and asked a question. Curley strained to walk on to the right, where could be seen a ribbon of bluebush growing in a wide gutter.

  This was Bluebush Dip mentioned in the diary, and proved when Bony found the place where the trap had been set, and the carcass of the dog whose capture also was recorded in the diary.

  As the camels insisted that this was a rest camp, Bony brewed tea and ate lunch of tinned fish and bread.

  Early afternoon, the camels evinced slight nervousness, appearing to place their big feet with caution. The ground was littered with limestone chips, and here and there bare rock created naked patches on the saltbush covering. The way twisted a great deal although the overall direction continued to the north. They took two hours to pass over this wide
area of subterranean caverns and passages and blow-holes. And at five o’clock they came to Nightmare Gutter.

  Nightmare Gutter was azig-zagging crack twenty feet wide and some ten feet deep, an obvious barrier to the traveller northward bound, for old Lonergan had with the shovel cut a road down and up the far side. Here he had camped, and here Bony camped.

  The next night, camp was at Dead Oak Stump, and, as noted in the diary, the camel feed was poor. Dead Oak Stump! The name indicated a tree, and there wasn’t a tree for hundreds of miles. He found the carcass of the half-grown dog Lonergan had recorded, but not for some time did he locate the stump.

  It was less than eighteen inches high and told of a tree, old when it died, a tree that must have lived before William One upset the Saxons. The stump was so dry-rotted that Bony could have knocked it out with the axe, and refrained, thinking that this old stump must have had sentimental value for Patsy Lonergan.

  A man mentally unbalanced is incapable of sentiment. That stump would make a snug fire on a cold night, where all the fuel was brushwood, which burned barely long enough to boil water. Old Lonergan probably loved this Plain, every mile of it, although each mile was exactly like every other mile. He came to this place at long intervals, and would, as Bony now did, stand and gaze at a tree stump because it was rare and therefore precious. It had been his stump, as this was his camp, like the other camps he had made and called his own. Likely enough he greeted it, fare-welled it, remembered it often and wondered how it fared during his absence.

  And thus Bony’s faith in the dead man’s mental integrity was strengthened.

  Time by the stars was eleven-thirty, and he had been asleep for two hours when he dreamed he heard Ganba and woke to hear Lucy muttering in alarm. Sitting up in his blankets beside the now dead fire, he detected the far-off noise of an engine, coming to them from the south-west. The sound was not the rhythmical tune of an aeroplane flying at great height, and in volume it increased but slowly. Eventually it passed to the north-east, and several miles eastward of Bony’s camp and, although Bony knew little of aircraft engines, he was sure that this machine was not an aeroplane.