The Call of the Pines

by Lucy Walker

  ‘I did. And Cherry noticed Alan’s absence.’

  ‘Then what’s wrong with a perfect morning? Come on, we’ve got fish for breakfast.’

  When Cherry presently rose, with Peter in her arms, and came somewhat haltingly towards the fire, she saw Stephen turn abruptly away.

  The friendly guide through the jungle had gone, and the distant stranger was back.

  ‘The sooner we’ve had some refreshment the sooner we can move on,’ he said to Tracy.

  Cherry felt he intended her to know he was not going to allow her injured ankle to hold them up: and for the moment he had nothing more to say to her.

  Cherry’s heart dropped a little.

  It was seeing Tracy and Alan so comfortably camped down here that had changed Stephen’s mood so quickly, she surmised. Her own ankle wasn’t as bad as all that.

  Chapter Eleven

  Alan Donnelly had come out of the jungle and gone straight to the fire. He was now turning fish over on hot flat stones.

  Cherry came closer to the cooking scene and sat down on a rock, holding the child. Her foot hurt a little. She must hide the fact by pretending she had to sit down to hold the small child. Peter was wholly concerned with what was going on round the fire. Temporarily he had forgotten the new world he had discovered by being able to stand upright. Here was another, and quite different, to engage his interest.

  ‘How did you catch fish?’ asked Cherry with wonder.

  Alan straightened himself up. He pointed his long pronged stick first at Stephen and then Tracy.

  ‘They might know all about bush-whacking,’ he said. ‘But it takes an air pilot to know about fishing when you haven’t got a line.’

  He looked slightly smug but Cherry felt happy for his sake that he had achieved something to impress the others.

  ‘How did you do it? Trap them?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘More or less,’ said Alan, back to the business of turning fish. ‘I go crayfishing off the west coast in my holidays. I used the cray-pot idea. Make a pot of stones with a hole for entry at the top. Put the innards of the water-hen we cooked for dinner last night in the sea-pot and anchored them down with small stones.’ He looked over his shoulder and grinned boyishly at Cherry.

  ‘Sheep are silly,’ he said, ‘but nothing like as silly as fish. In through the top hole they go to get a cheap feed and forget to find their way out again. This not-so-silly human got up at daybreak, dropped in a hefty stone and temporarily stunned them; lifted them out, five of the beauties ‒ voilà, grilled breakfast for the family.’

  ‘Very clever!’ Cherry said appreciatively. She wanted to be pleasant to make up for the momentary touch of ill-will she had sensed in Tracy when Stephen had carried her through the bush. ‘You two seem to have got yourself a good time last night. Roast water-hen for dinner and fish-potting for breakfast.’

  ‘Don’t be jealous, darling,’ said Tracy. ‘He slept one side of that pile of rocks and I slept the other. We didn’t even need Peter for a chaperon.’

  Cherry flushed. She wasn’t used to such frank talk and she certainly was too unsophisticated to have the kind of thoughts that flitted through Tracy’s mind.

  Both Tracy and Stephen seemed to be amused that she was the kind of person who needed chaperons, just for the look of the thing. Hadn’t he teased her about it last night?

  As Stephen had said, lost persons couldn’t be choosers but all the same there wasn’t anything unwholesome in those old-world fashions.

  Obliquely Cherry felt she was in defence of her parents and their way of life again. She had seen Tracy cast a derisive smile at Stephen as if she was sharing some kind of joke with him. Cherry wondered if at some time, since her arrival at Yulinga, Stephen had told the others about her formal and ‘quaint’ little mother.

  She bit her lip.

  ‘Safe to give Peter fish do you think, Alan?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing safer and nothing better,’ he replied as if Tracy’s little by-play had gone over his head, or wasn’t worth his notice.

  Stephen had crouched down on his heels to watch Alan’s cooking prowess. Tracy handed him a cigarette out of her packet and so engrossed was he in the business of grilling fish on hot stones that he accepted the cigarette, took a stick from the fire and applied the coal end to his smoke, without realising what he did. He had not noticed that, once again, Tracy had produced something that was supposed to be communal property and in Stephen’s keeping not her own.

  He got up now and reached for his gun.

  ‘Keep mine hot while I do a spot of shooting,’ he said. ‘I don’t want all the duck to leave before I’ve bagged enough for a couple of days.’

  Cherry looked over the lake. There were plenty of brown duck about but the coveys of pelicans and other birds had gone. It was mid-morning now and she supposed they had taken off soon after daybreak.

  ‘Bathe first or eat first?’ Alan said, standing up and looking at Cherry.

  ‘Will the fish spoil if we bathe? I mean me and Peter?’

  ‘Not if you’re quick.’

  ‘We’ll be quick,’ said Cherry.

  She stood up and once again her foot hurt. She winced unthinkingly.

  Alan came across to her.

  ‘I’ll carry Peter,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’ She gave up the load willingly.

  ‘And would you like a loan of my arm?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Cherry, ‘but not while Stephen and Tracy are looking.’

  They stood and waited until the other pair had begun their descent down the uneven slope of the bank to the lake’s edge.

  ‘Now,’ said Alan conspiratorially, ‘we’ll go this way. I’ll help you bath Peter and then bring him back while you swim. Leave the washing until after we’ve eaten.’

  ‘Good,’ said Cherry. ‘And, Alan, when you come back there’s an empty tin for a billy, the plastic cups and the packet of tea from the pilot’s ration box in the bigger of the two bags we brought. Do you think we could …’ She smiled up at him. ‘Do you think we might just have some tea as a special treat?’

  ‘Since that pair are smoking illicit cigarettes, I think we might do a spot of wrongdoing ourselves,’ Alan said with a grin. ‘Hurry back, Cherry. There’ll be tea for two before they’ve had time to bring down a brace of ducklings.’

  ‘And I’ve got secrets in my own pocket,’ said Cherry, patting the place where she had some of Tracy’s cigarettes hidden. ‘I just might take to smoking myself to prove my independence.’

  They were picking their way carefully round the stony outcrops and downwards towards the place where Cherry had had her swim yesterday. Alan had Peter on one arm and Cherry holding firmly to the other.

  ‘Dear girl, don’t take to smoking,’ pleaded Alan. ‘I can do enough of that for the two of us.’

  Cherry stopped, dropped his arm and fished for the cigarettes. She took out one, gave it to him and then handed him the matches.

  Alan struck a match, drew in the cigarette smoke happily and then expelled it slowly.

  ‘What on earth do hermits do without women?’ he asked. ‘No one to think up crime for them.’

  Twenty minutes later, beautifully refreshed, Cherry climbed up the bank and joined the others already sitting down for their fish meal.

  Stephen, with Tracy as retriever, had been quicker at bringing down duck than Cherry had anticipated. Tracy, prettily wet ‒ she was never anything but pretty, wet or dry ‒ was already steaming out in the hot sun. Cherry’s hair was almost dry by the time she climbed up the short bank of the lake. Peter, tired now with his early morning activities, was asleep on Alan’s shirt under a tree near the bush edge.

  ‘I gave him a drink of tea,’ Alan explained triumphantly when Cherry arrived. ‘After all, he can walk. He’s a grown man now.’

  Stephen frowned.

  ‘Good for you,’ said Cherry. ‘Tea is quite harmless when given in small doses. I trust it was weak, Alan?’

  ‘Strong a
s a blackfellow likes it,’ said Alan. ‘Look at the tan he’s got on him. How do you expect to make a giant of him if you feed him on wish-wash?’

  All this was badinage which both Alan and Cherry were enjoying. Cherry knew that Alan had set himself to be helpful and that he would give Peter nothing that would harm him. Stephen was frowning because he didn’t know whence had come the tea in the first place and in the second place this dickering with Peter’s diet was playing with the fortunes of his nephew. He regarded himself as responsible for what happened to young Peter.

  Tracy, meantime, delicately ate fish flesh with her fingers, all the time making pretty gestures with her hands that never let anyone forget she was a dancer.

  ‘Whose child are you two talking about?’ she said, licking the tips of her two fingers as tenderly and elegantly as if this was something only the best ballerinas do on the stage of Covent Garden.

  ‘Ours,’ said Cherry and Alan in unison.

  They caught one another’s eyes, and laughed.

  ‘Hurry up and have your joint breakfast,’ said Stephen shortly. ‘We’re moving out of here in just half an hour. We want to make camp on the plains by sundown. That is if your injuries permit, Cherry.’

  ‘They permit,’ said Cherry. She had sat down to take her fish which Alan was now serving to her on a flat small stone. She drew her injured foot under her so that no one would notice that it was now black and blue around the ankle bone.

  They reached the plains at least an hour before sundown and this was due more to good fortune than Cherry’s stoicism. Each quarter of a mile Stephen had gone on ahead to make sure of the way. Quite by accident he had come on a section of the bush that had thinned out to scrub and low stunted trees. Through this area he had been able to see distant low hills that were not tree-covered at all. He estimated that they had broken through to the plain about three miles north of the path he had discovered the morning before.

  Cherry, determined not to hold up the party, had for once willingly surrendered Peter to Alan Donnelly’s care. Stephen was fully taken up with the problems of path finding; carrying the gun and the birds he had killed that morning. Tracy and Cherry shared the bag load of a change of clothes and the utensils which, fortunately being plastic, were very light. In addition there were two of the waterbags and the bag of emergency food and dried milk for Peter. Alan carried the largest of the waterbags as well as Peter.

  On Stephen’s command they had eaten well at the lakeside camp and they drank as much water as they could comfortably take. This meant if there was no anxiety about food and water they could take longer reconnoitring the conditions for a long camp on the plains. Clearly if there was no available water they would have to return to the lake.

  Already it was taken for granted they had permanently left the camp in the clearing near the wrecked plane.

  ‘We’re within a few miles of the lake and water and food,’ Stephen had said when they reached the plain. ‘We can make camp here and return there if necessary. In no time now we should be spotted from the air.’

  With his usual thoroughness and vigilance he set about making a camp at sufficient distance from the scrub to ensure safety from setting it on fire. Here, away from the deep heavy cool growth of the jungle, the bush was dry as tinder.

  It was strange, Cherry thought, that within so short a distance of one another there should be both neardesert and dense growth. It was as if the monsoonal rains that watered the north stopped dead on the same latitude every year. The poor sparse plain before them, the rounded treeless hills in the distance looked as if they had never seen rain. The heat was drier but very fierce.

  Oh, now, for that lovely lake bath they had left five hours earlier!

  ‘I don’t trust scrub. You girls will have to sleep out in the open the same as we do,’ Stephen ordered. ‘I’ll make two camp-fires. Tracy, you and Cherry sleep Peter between you, as usual.’

  ‘I’ll give him to Cherry for the night,’ said Tracy. ‘He hasn’t got a cot anymore, and I don’t like being kicked.’

  ‘Perhaps Cherry might feel the same way,’ Stephen said quietly. His voice sounded judicial and not angry. He was doing the right thing by all members of the party.

  ‘I don’t mind a bit,’ Cherry said hastily.

  ‘And she’s paid for it,’ said Tracy.

  ‘Quite right,’ said Cherry unexpectedly. ‘I am paid by Mr. and Mrs. Denton to take charge of Peter. He’s mine until I stop getting paid. Now please … no one interfere.’

  This she meant for Stephen who showed every now and again a propensity for interfering on the grounds that he was the child’s uncle.

  Left alone, Cherry thought, she would do far more good for Peter than all the combined interferences of relatives and friends.

  Heavens, how was she ever going to give him up when this trip was over?

  Cherry was sitting down on a fallen tree-trunk just beyond the verge of the bush, giving Peter a further drink of powdered milk and one of the few remaining biscuits.

  ‘They’ll find us any minute now, sweetie-pie,’ she said to the small boy. ‘So I won’t be counting the biscuits so often.’

  She was suddenly aware that the noise of activity on the part of the other three had stopped. There was an odd silence all around. She looked up.

  All three were standing, their hands shading their eyes and looking to the west. They had seen something of interest and yet not one of them had spoken.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Cherry. She had Peter on one arm and the plastic cup that held his milk in the other hand so she could not shade her eyes against the westering sun. To the west, where they were looking with such concentration, there was nothing but a plain of dried grasses and a glaring sky beyond the rounded hummock of low hills.

  The three continued to stand in silence, looking.

  At last Stephen dropped his hand and turned to Tracy.

  ‘Did you see what I saw?’ he said.

  Tracy nodded. She smiled. Stephen lifted his shoulders in a quick gesture and Tracy did a small hurray in pantomime. She waved one hand in a circle round her head and then struck a pose that seemed to say … ‘What do you think of that?’

  Cherry knew that the two of them, Stephen and Tracy, were at that moment not only cut off from Alan and herself by virtue of their background and relatives but they were cut off by their bush know-how too.

  Alan was seeing something but he was as ignorant of what he was seeing, as Tracy and Stephen were conversant.

  Cherry felt a little stab of anger.

  Whatever it was they were looking at it meant something important in the lives of five stranded people, and they hadn’t the kindness to explain it.

  No, thought Cherry. She wouldn’t like to be married to a man like Stephen. He was clannish, and he was superior. He didn’t care about ordinary people like herself and Alan. It was absurd for him to think that Tracy was any use to him, even if she did know bushcraft, while she herself and Alan had carried on with the chores unremittingly.

  ‘We are servants. We are of no real importance. Alan is the salaried officer of an airline which is paid to convey the Dentons of the world backwards and forwards between their town houses and their station properties. And I’m the paid governess!’

  She felt angry, for, irrespective of their various positions in life, at this moment in time they were all in the same spot. They had been plane-wrecked and were lost. Somewhere out there Stephen and Tracy were looking at salvation and they didn’t even bother to tell Alan and herself about it.

  Cherry’s foot hurt her, and she was hot and tired. She felt suddenly ashamed.

  ‘I think they see something,’ she said, drawing Peter closer. ‘I think they see something wonderful, and in a minute they’ll tell us.’

  At that moment Alan Donnelly spoke.

  ‘Well, what is it?’ he said to Stephen. ‘It’s not a willy-willy. It’s static.’

  ‘It’s cattle moving in a mob. It couldn’t be anything else. A
dust cloud as big as that means a native corroboree or cattle on the move. It’s the wrong hour of the day for corroboree, so it’s cattle.’

  Tracy struck another pose and waved her slender hand in the air.

  ‘And if you look at those streaks in the bright blue heavens you’ll see another reason why they’re cattle.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ said Alan Donnelly. ‘More birds and not flying inland to that lake.’

  ‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘They’re flying in to a water-hole. And it’s at water-holes that drovers camp down their mobs for the night.’

  He turned round. Suddenly his whole face was changed. It was creased with that illuminating smile Cherry had seen on the day he had come to the home in the Street of the Pines.

  ‘Good people,’ he said, ‘we are somewhere very near a stock route. Sometime to-day that mob may have passed this way. I’ve been worried by a dust haze ever since we broke through into the scrub from the heavy bush.’

  Cherry, looking at his face as he spoke, felt unexpectedly moved. She was remorseful for her unkind thoughts of a moment ago.

  Except for their short interlude alone this morning Stephen had not been very friendly or companionable with any of them. Now for the first time she understood he had had a burden of worry on his shoulders which somewhere in a sternly disciplined mind he had hidden from them all.

  His had truly been the authority and the leadership. This extraordinary change in his face which made him look younger now proved it.

  Somewhere not many miles away was a saviour in the form of a cattle drover.

  ‘Well,’ said Stephen, still smiling, ‘I think that speaks two roast ducks for dinner, two biscuits for Peter and a cigarette all round.’

  He dug his hands in his belt, rocked back on his heels and lifted his face to the sky.

  ‘Even the craziest aeroplane can find a mob of cattle,’ he said.

  Alan gaily threw more wood on the fire which they had already got going.

  ‘Steady on your abuse of aircraft,’ he said with a grin. ‘Next time I wreck you I’ll put the sea between you and any mob of cattle.’