by David Malouf
I swallowed hard, nodded glumly. I'd known this was coming, and Mr. McGowan, not to embarrass me by witnessing my youthful disappointment, turned away. I knew what he was doing. He was keeping me out of harm's way. But there was something else as well. If anything went wrong out there my inexperience might be dangerous, and not only to myself.
“Come on, boys,” I told the dogs, and I put my arms around Tilly, who turned and licked my face.
Glen and the others were on their feet now. Braden cast me a quick look and I nodded. I too got to my feet. The little party formed in three lines, Matt Riley and Jem in front to do the tracking, Braden, Glen and Stuart behind. They set off through the waist-high grass. Once again I would be on the sidelines watching, as I had been so often before when it was a matter only of the telling. I urged the dogs up into the tray of the Bedford and, scrambling up behind them, stood straining my eyes for a better view.
The shoulders and hats, which were all I could see above the sunlit grasstops, moved slowly forward. Twenty, thirty yards further and Matt Riley sheered off to the left. The rest of the party came to a stop. Waited. I could hear the silence like a hotter space at the centre of the late-morning heat. Big grasshoppers were blundering about. Flies simmered and swarmed. The dogs, on tensed hind legs, leaned into the still air, tautening the leash. “Easy, Jigger,” I whispered to the younger dog, though he paid no attention. His mind was away up ahead, low down in the grass roots, close to the earth. “Tilly,” I told the other, "quiet, eh? Be quiet now.” My own mind too was out there somewhere. Beside Braden. Who would be sweating hard now, every muscle tense, preparing for the moment when he would move on out of himself. I saw Matt Riley, without looking behind, raise his arm.
“Quiet now, Tilly.”
I laid my hand on the old dog's quivering flank. The sky hung above like a giant breath suspended over the shifting light and shadow of the grass and I watched the hats, and below them the upper bodies, part the still grassheads as they waded towards the treeline. They were moving in dreamlike slow motion, Matt Riley still in front. “What can you see now, Tilly?” I whispered.
They had stopped again. I saw Matt, still without turning, beckon to Braden.
He moved forward and Matt passed to his right. Braden was half a head taller than anyone else among them except Henry Denkler, who towered above the rest.
Matt raised an open hand, and I saw Braden lift the .303 very slowly to his shoulder.
The cicadas stopped dead in the heat. There was a sound, more like a happening in the sky I thought than a shot, and dozens of birds that had been invisible in the grass were suddenly in the air, wildly flapping.
There was a swift movement among the hats, then another shot, and the dogs were barking and straining so hard at the leash that I was almost pulled out of the truck, too busy shouting at them to shut up, and cursing and jerking at the leash, to see what was happening off in the distance, till there was another shot and I risked it, and saw the knot around what I knew must be the kill.
At that moment, a quarter of a mile to my left and well out of the vision of the others, I saw the two ancient carriages of the Chillagoe train come puffing across the horizon, pouring out smuts. It would have made its mid-morning stop at Miss Appin's, taken on water, and was now heading west into anthill country.
I could see Wattie McCorkindale, the driver, in the cabin, a tough nut of a man with tight grey curls like a woolly cap. I passed him each morning on my way to school, always in the same faded, washed-out overalls and carrying his black lunch tin. Beside him in the cabin was his mate, Bill Yates.
For a moment, as it swung close, I heard the hammering of the wheels on the track, then it swung back again, and it was the little gated platform at the rear that was facing me, and a woman was there, shading her eyes as she peered into the sunlight. She must have heard the shots. I was tempted to wave. I wondered what she must be making of all this. The shots, then a lone boy standing in the tray of a ute, in a grassfield in the middle of nowhere, holding hard to a mob of crazy hounds. Meanwhile, the party of pig-shooters, in a tight bunch now, was coming back.
Braden was flushed and looked innocently pleased with himself. Stuart and Glen were on either side of him. They had never seemed such a close and affectionate group.
I let the dogs loose. They leapt down from the ute and went running in excited circles around him. He dropped to one knee; happy, I thought, to be in a group where he could be the focus of another sort and exhibit an easier and more exuberant affection. He hugged Tilly, then Jigger, who was jostling to be gathered in, and they licked at his face and hands. Perhaps they could smell the pig on him, or some other smell he carried that was whatever had passed between him and the three hundred pounds of malevolent fury, in beast form, that had come hurtling towards him in the blood-knowledge and small-eyed, large-brained premonition of its imminent death.
He looked up, with his arms round Tilly, who for the past eight years had shared so many of our games and excursions, and in her own way, with doggy intuition, so many of our secrets. I saw then what a relief it was to him that all this was done with at last, and done well.
He had wanted it to go well for his father's sake as much as his own; out of a wish, just this once and for this time only, to be all that his father wanted him to be. All that Glen wanted him to be as well, and Stuart, because this was the last time they would be together in this way. When he left at the beginning of the new year it would be for a life he would never come back from; even if he did, physically, come back.
Except for Braden himself, I was the only one among us, I thought, who knew this. And because I knew it, I felt, as he must have, the sadness that was in Wes McGowan's pride in him, and in what he had shown of himself in front of Henry Denkler and Matt Riley whose good opinion the old man set such store on. Had it crossed his mind, I wondered, that Braden, even in this moment of being most immediately one with them, was already lost to him?
I glanced at Stuart. He knew Braden just well enough to see what was at stake for the boy in that other world he was about to give himself to, though not perhaps how commanding it might be, or how clearly Braden understood that there was no other way he could go.
Glen saw nothing at all. It was inconceivable to him that a fellow of Braden's sort, his brother, who had grown up in the same household with him, could imagine anything finer or more real than what had just been revealed to him: the deep connection between himself and these men he was with; his even deeper connection with that force out there, animal, ancient, darkly close and mysterious, which, when he had stood against it and taken upon himself the solemn distinction of cancelling it out, he had also taken in, as a new and profounder being.
What surprised me, and must have surprised Braden too, was the glow all this gave him. It was real, in a way I think that even he had not expected: the abundant energy surging through him that lit his smile when he glanced up at me, then gave himself, all overflowing warmth and affection, to the dogs.
An hour later,with Matt Riley's battered ute in front and Matt himself hanging out the cabin window to guide us, we bumped and lurched into the Valley. Which wasn't a valley in fact but a waterland of drowned savannah forest, reedy lagoons stained brownish in the shallows, sunlit beyond, or swampy places, half-earth, half-ooze, above which ti-trees stood stripping their bark or rotting slowly from the roots up. We parked beside an expanse of water wide enough to suggest a lake and with a good deal of leg-stretching, and expressions of satisfaction at the number of game birds in evidence, made camp, Matt directing.
Matt's precedence out here, I saw, had nothing to do with Braden's business with the pig or “professionalism.” It was something else. Very lightly ceded, the authority that Wes McGowan might have claimed as the getter-up of our party, or old Henry Denkler as its senior member and as mayor, had passed naturally, and with no need for explanation, to the younger man. And though no one had spelled it out I knew immediately what it was. I looked at Matt—at Jem t
oo—with new eyes.
The land out here was Matt's grandmother's country, and the moment he entered it he had a different status: that was the accepted but unspoken ground of his authority. That and the knowledge of the place and all its workings that came with the land itself.
I had heard of this business “grandmothers.” The grandfathers were something else. Overdressed men with beards and side-whiskers— farmers, saddlers, blacksmiths, proprietors of drapery shops and general stores—they had given their names to streets, towns, shires all over the North. You saw their photographs, looking sternly soulful and patriarchal, round the walls of shire halls and in mouldy council chambers; men who, in defiance of conditions so hard that to survive at all a man had to be equally hard in return (in defiance too of the niceties of law as it might be established fifteen hundred miles away, in Brisbane), had carved out of the rainforest a world we took for granted now, since it had all the familiar amenities and might have been here for ever.
In fact, they had made it with their bare hands, and with axes and bullock-wagons. Doing whatever had to be done to make it theirs in spirit as well as in fact. Brooking no question, and suffering, one guesses, no regrets, since such work was an arm of progress and of God's good muscular plan for the world. All that so short a time ago that Wes McGowan might well have been one of the children in long clothes you saw seated on the knee of one of those bearded ancients, or in the arms of one of the pallid women in ruched and ribboned silk who sat stolidly beside him flanked by her brood.
No one would ever have spoken of Matt Riley' “grandfather.” That would have given something away that in those days was still buried where family history meant it to stay, in the realm of the unspoken.
“His grandmother's country" was a phrase that referred, without raising too precisely the question of blood, to the relationship a man might stand in to a particular tract of land, that went deeper and further back than legal possession. When used in town it “implications,” easy to pick up but not to be articulated. A nod to the knowing.
Out here, in the country itself, though what it referred to was still discreetly unspecified, it was actual. From the moment we climbed down out of the trucks and let the light of its broken waters enter us, and breathed in its sweetish water-smelling air, and took its dampness on our skins—from that moment something was added to Matt Riley, or given back; and he took it, with no sign of change in the quietness with which he went about things, or in his understated way of offering his own opinion or disagreeing with another's. He had re-entered a part of himself that was continuous with the place, and with a history the rest of us had forgotten or never known.
It was a place he both knew and was a stranger to; so deep in him that only rarely perhaps, save in sleep or half-sleep, did he catch a whisper of it out of some old story he had heard from one side of his family— the other would have a different story altogether—and which, the moment he stepped into it, became a language he understood in his bones and through the soles of his feet, though he had no other tongue in his head, or his memory, than the one we all spoke.
At home I had been shy of Matt—mostly, I think, because he was so shy of me. Out here things were different. All those afternoons in our kitchen when, with Eileen at the ironing board, I had sat at the table and drunk the milkshake she had stopped to make for me, and ate my biscuit or slice of cake, though we had barely addressed a word to one another, constituted a kind of intimacy, out here, that could be drawn on and made to bloom. “Com’ on, son,” he'd tell me, "I got somethin’ you oughta take a look at.”
Alone, or with Braden, and always with Jem in tow, he would uncover for me some small fact about the world we were in—a sight or ordinary but hidden wonder that I might otherwise have missed. Brushing the earth away with a grimy hand, or delicately lifting aside a bit of crumbling damp, he would open a view into some other life there, at the grub or chrysalis stage, that in moving through several forms in the one existence was in progress towards miraculous transformation, and whose unfolding history and habits, as he evoked them in his grunting monosyllabic style, moved almost imperceptibly from visible fact into half-humourous, half-sinister fable.
He showed us how to track, to read marks in the softly disturbed earth that told of the passage of some creature whose size and weight you could calculate—sometimes from observation, sometimes from a kind of visionary guesswork—by getting down close to the earth and attending, listening. The place was for him all coded messages; hints, clues, shining particulars that once scanned, and inwardly brooded on, opened the way to another order of understanding and usefulness.
We ate early,before it was dark, Matt choosing what should go into the pot and Jem doing the chopping and seasoning.
Afterwards, bellies full of the cook-up and of the damper Jem had made to soak up the last of the gravy, we sat on as the ghostly late light on the tree trunks faded, and the trees themselves stepped back into impenetrable dark. Slowly the world around us re-created itself as sound. The occasional flapping, off in the distance, of a night bird on the prowl, an owl or nightjar. Low calls. Bush mice crept in, and tumbled with a chittering sound in the undergrowth beyond the fire, lured perhaps by our voices, or by our smell, or the smell of the stew and Jem's damper, the promise of scraps. There was the splash, from close by in the lagoon, of waterfowl, the clicketing of tree frogs or night crickets, a flustering of scrub-turkey or some other shy bush creature that had been drawn to the light, here in the great expanse of surrounding darkness, of our fire.
We sat. Not much was said. Talk out here, at this hour, was not so much an exchange of the usual observations and asides as a momentary reassurance, subdued, unassertive, of presence, of company and speech. The few words, an occasional low laugh, mingled as they were with the hush and tinkle of bush sounds, lulled something in me as I lay stretched on one side on top of my sleeping bag, face to the flames, and led me lazily, happily towards sleep.
The one jarring note was Stuart.
He too said little. But often, when I glanced up, I would find his eyes on me, dark, hostile I thought, in the glow of the fire. His beard had grown. He looked a little mad. Sometimes, when I dropped some word into the conversation, I would hear him grunt, and when I looked up there would be a line of half-humourous disdain to his mouth that in the old days would have been a prelude to one of his outbursts of baffled fury. Braden saw it too. But out here, Stuart kept whatever he was thinking to himself.
I stayed clear of him. Not consciously. But with Braden here it was easy to fall into the old pattern in which Braden and I were a pair and Stuart was on the outer. Perhaps he thought I had told Braden something—I hadn't. That I'd betrayed him in some way, and that we were ganging up on him. Then there was Matt Riley and the things he had to show. It simply happened that for the first two or three days we barely spoke.
It was my job,first thing each morning, to take a couple of billies down to the edge of the lagoon and draw water for our breakfast tea. Usually Braden went with me, but that morning, when I rolled out of the blanket and pulled on my jeans, he was still sleeping. I sat to tie my bootlaces, waiting for him to stir. When he didn't I took the billies from beside the fire and set out. The grass was white with frost. Pale sunlight touched the mist that drifted in thin low banks above the lagoons. Cobwebs rainbowed with light were stretched between the trees, their taut threads beaded with diamond points that flashed and burned gold, then fiery red.
Later, in the heat of the day, the bush smell would be prickly, peppery with sunlight. Now it had the freshness in it of a sky still moist with dew.
I climbed down the weedy bank and trawled the first of the billies through the brownish water, careful not to go too deep. I heard someone behind me, and thought it was Braden, but when I looked up it was Stuart who was swinging his long legs over a fallen branch and glowering down at me.
“Hi, Angus,” he said, "how's it goin'?” His tone had an edge to it. “You havin’ a good time out here?” H
e reached down and I passed the first of the two billies up to him, then set myself to filling the second.
“Great,” I said. “Great!”
“That's nice,” he said. He rested the billy on the log beside him. It sat there, balanced and brimming. “I been hopin’ to catch you an’ have a bit of a talk,” he said at last. “You been avoidin’ me?”
I found it easier to ignore this than deny it.
“Aren't you goin’ to ask me what about?”
“I suppose it's about Katie,” I said. I was wondering why, after so many weeks, he had broached the subject at last, and so directly. Did being out here make things different, relax the rules? Or was it that he had somehow come to the end of his tether? I emptied the second billy and for a second time drew it slowly across the surface of the lagoon. I had caught the little smile he had given me. Good shot, Angus. You got it in one. Satirical, I thought.
He waited for me to stop fooling with the second billy, then reached down and I handed it up to him.
“So,” he said, holding on to the handle but not yet taking its weight so that I was caught looking up at him, "what do you know about all this, eh, Angus? What's happening? One minute everything was fine— you saw that. An’ the next she's gone cold on me.”
“Honestly, Stuart, I don't know what's happened. She wouldn't say anything to me.”
He looked doubtful.
“I'm beat,” he said suddenly, taking the billy at last and hoisting it over to sit beside the other one on the log. I thought there were tears in his eyes. I was shocked.
“I just don't know what she wants out of me.”
“Stuart—”
“Yair, I know,” he said. “I'm sorry, Angus.” He sniffled and brushed his nose with his knuckled fist. “If you knew what it was like …”
I thought I did, though not from experience.
