Not a sign from the staring blackmen. They were all naked and to some degree painted. A couple were old, the others middle-aged. Not a move. Till at last one of the men standing stooped and spoke to the squatters. Ochred and banded heads came together in consultation, while slowly backs were turned. Still Prindy stood, knowing that part of his heritage well enough not to expect anything to be done in a hurry, except in dire necessity. Even the answering of a question requiring a simple Yes or No could take an hour, a day, a week, a tribal convention. A visitor without special privilege might easily be kept waiting a full day for the invitation to enter a camp. A group of visitors could be kept for a week.
Savitra became impatient, muttering, ‘Wha’s matter dat silly-bugger?’
Prindy breathed sharply, ‘Kai-atulli!’
The Sun was at the zenith. The men in the camp were under a bough shade. They passed a pipe round between them. Savitra, behind Prindy, stepped further back into shade. Prindy stood rigid, now running sweat. The world was still, with birds and animals camped as usual in midday heat. No doubt the invisible rest of the camp, women, children, dogs, were napping somewhere in shade. By now they would have tired of peeping.
Then two of the blacks rose, and without a glance towards the visitors, made for the waterhole, disappeared. It was the sign of a protracted wait. Prindy relaxed, turned to shade. Savitra would have joined him, only he waved her off with his womera. She sank back, put the tucker-bag under her head for a pillow. He sat straight with back against the small tree. The men at the fire stretched out to sleep.
After a while Savitra started complaining that the ants were at the tucker-bag and getting in her hair. He ignored her till she tore up a little bush and began to lash about her savagely. Then he rose and snatched the bag away, returned to his tree and hung it up, dropped down again. Savitra then complained of feeling thirsty, of being hungry, asked for the bag back. He ignored her. ‘Bloody puggim black bastard!’ she squeaked with subdued passion, then fell silent, perhaps fell asleep.
Prindy sat waiting, waiting, while nothing moved but Sun and shadow. Several times he had to move. Several times Savitra moved, looked up, distorted her prettiness with silent rage, returned to bury it in her chocolate arms.
Waiting, waiting, according to the rules.
Then a sound to the left. He looked quickly. A moment. He leapt to his feet. Dogs were coming tearing through the scrub, a great pack by first sight of them, but proving only to be seven or eight when they stopped in a snarling line twenty feet away, stopped as if by silent command. Dogs of all sorts and sizes, with only one thing in common, which was that they all had a strong dingo strain that glared yellow fire out of their eyes and shot like sparks from golden bristles in their mongrel hackles and grinned menace with gleaming teeth. Not a bark out of one of them, only the long rolling skirl of the snarling.
Prindy looked towards the camp. The dusky sleepers still apparently slept. He turned to get weapons and tucker-bag. The dogs made a feint, causing Savitra to shriek and run to him. He growled at her in his new old-man’s voice, ‘Shut up . . . he only gammon!’
In fact the dogs hadn’t advanced an inch. There is no animal more obedient to a master’s will than a blackfellow’s dog. All they did was to raise the pitch of the chorus — Ngabadaua — Gidardavit! — as the unwanted pair withdrew.
When a goodly distance from the scene, Prindy paused to look back, Savitra at his side all the way now, panted, ‘Dat lot been hunt him we wid dog.’
He shook his head.
She demanded, ‘Wha’s matter like o’ dat?’
‘I don’ know,’ he muttered.
He was setting off again, when she whimpered, ‘Me t’u’sty . . . me hungry!’
He kept his heading for a few paces, then swung diagonally for the line of creek timber well above the camp. He made a good mile of it, causing Savitra to complain about her thirst and in addition about her feet: ‘Wha’s a bloody matter you race . . . my foot knock-up.’ He continued to ignore her.
Where they reached the creek it was dry, a narrow channel with a bed of fragmented sandstone cut deeply in the clayey loam. He followed it up. Another couple of hundred yards brought them to water, a pleasant little hole, all emerald under drooping paperbarks. Savitra, who had been limping, stumbling, whimpering, broke into a run. By the time Prindy reached the hole, she’d finished drinking, and was unpeeling the sari. ‘Come on, bogey,’ she said. But his eyes avoided her dusky nakedness, fixed on the sandy shallow end. As she leapt into the pool, he went round it, dropped down to the strip of sand. Horse tracks, some of them shod.
He followed the tracks up the bank, looked to see the general direction of their coming and going, then surveyed the landscape in that direction. Obviously the ground was rising gradually, because the meagre timber, mostly of about equal height, appeared taller. It was not the rise of the Plateau, because that was southward, and this was eastward. Savitra recalled his attention. She was out of the pool, standing naked, drying herself with the sari, saying she wanted to eat. He still had the tucker-bag. He went round to her.
Savitra flung the sari over a bush to dry, dropped down, folding legs in the manner of a lubra, a heel to guard her vulva. He dropped to haunches beside her, dipped in the sack, brought out Rifkah’s cloth-wrapped package. There were two large fillets of fish and four pfannküchen. He gave a fillet to Savitra, put the other aside, rewrapped the cakes.
She ate her fish before asking, ‘Gi’ me cake.’
He went on eating his fish. When he had finished she asked again. He said shortly, ‘Want him for horse.’
‘What horse you talk-about?’
‘Station horse dere somewhere.’ He jerked his head eastward. Then, gathering up bag and weapons, he rose.
‘Where you go?’ she demanded.
‘Look-about horse.’
‘You come for look-about beinook, you reckon.’
‘Da’s all right . . . I got to look-about horse.’
‘I knock-up now. I wan’ ’o camp.’
‘You can camp. I come back.’ He moved to go.
She got to her knees, voice rising: ‘I can’t stop here wid dem blackfeller.’
‘He can’t hurt you.’
‘You goin’ ’o stop here, you bastard.’ Her voice rose to a lubra’s shriek: ‘You can’t never run away from me . . . I got you Charada!’
His grey eyes were grave as he met the blazing black. After a moment he said, ‘I got ’o look that horse for Mullaka. We got ’o have horse for go Mission, ain’t it?’
‘My foot too sore. Look my foot!’ Certainly they were puffed.
He said, ‘I gitchim horse, you ride him back camp, then. You wait lil bits.’
She leapt up shrieking, ‘You can’t go leave him me. You carry-him-up me gitchim horse.’
‘Eh, look out!’
She snatched for sari from the bush, rushed at him. ‘You carry-him-up me!’
For a moment he stared at her slender nakedness, quivering with the intensity of her feeling. Then he murmured, ‘All right,’ set down his spears, knelt.
Her scowl changed instantly to a smirk as she flung the sari over her head as a hood, and cocked a slim dark leg over his golden-brown shoulder. His left hand shot out to remove the spears, evidently to prevent the defilement they would suffer if bestridden by a female. As she brought the other leg round to clasp his neck with thighs, he handed her the tucker-bag. Then with her feet tucked under his armpits he rose, with obvious ease, and evidently untroubled by her light weight and probably not unused to it, set off. She placed the bag on top of his mop of fair hair.
The tracks fell into a pad heading for the rising country. The creek wound about, split off. No more water. That was probably the last hole of any permanency.
Savitra tried talking coyly. He told her to keep quiet in case horses were at hand. She tried singing softly an Indian song: Okale pusili payra. He threatened to buck her off. She contented herself with rubbing her vulva against th
e prominent bone at the nape of his neck, giggling to see the bulging and leaping behind the tight red naga.
The bush thinned, revealing ahead a grassy hillside. It was not part of the Plateau, the red and green wall of which could be seen a couple of miles away to northward. They crossed a little gully, to come into tall grass and skinny little trees and peeping antbeds. They had just got into it, when he stopped suddenly, pressing her ankles tight with elbows.
She breathed, ‘Wha’ nam’?’
He breathed, ‘Beinook.’
The hunting instinct in her kept her rigid. Imperceptibly almost he turned to the left. There only twenty feet or so away, popping above the grass like odd-shaped pods on thick grey stalks, were a brace of bustards, peering in their strange way with heads cocked so that they can see all round, suspicious of everything, cursed as they are with such delicate flesh, yet curious about everything. That blaze of scarlet suddenly risen out of the gully. The male spoke to his mate: a couple of drumming grunts.
Slowly Prindy sank down till Savitra’s feet were on the ground. ‘Danook!’ he breathed, and slowly withdrew from under her, moved further to the left, crouched on haunches, invisible because the same yellow-brown as the grass and so delicate of movement.
The male spoke again and advanced slowly to see what that pretty thing was, while yet keeping an eye on all the rest of the world, although perhaps now more out of habit than purpose. A small break in the grass revealed the plump grey bodies, the strong yellow legs. Spear ready in womera, Prindy aimed from haunches — ZIP!
The male went down with a hoarse croak, rose flapping great wings, overbalanced with the spear in his rump. The female took one quick look, then turned, ran into the grass, rose crashing from it, wings beating hard. The male got to his feet again, turned to bite the spear. Prindy leapt back to get the tucker-bag, snatched out the knife, pounced on the bird now belligerent in the face of doom, grabbed the head, slit the bristling gullet. The blood shot out. He dropped the bird to flap itself to death while he tore at a twig of a sapling and got a ribbon of bark. The bird was dead when he returned to it. ‘Poor bugger,’ he muttered as he withdrew the spear. He tied the great steel-like feet together, and with the ribbon looped heaved the bird up to the broken twig, and hung it there.
Wiping blood off his hands and off the spear and the knife with grass, he returned to staring Savitra. Taking up bag and weapons, he said shortly, ‘You stop here.’
‘Eh, look out!’
‘I only go up over hill there. Spone no horse, I come back. But horse here all right . . . look-see.’ He jerked his lips towards where the hen bustard had taken off. There was horse-dung, scattered as if the birds had been at it, and fresh.
She protested: ‘You can’t leave me behind!’
He growled, ‘Spone you foller me, I gallop that horse back camp . . . leave you behind altogether.’ He turned away, leaving her standing, still draped with the hood, gaping after him. He did not look back.
He reached the top of the slope. Under a clump of small trees he found a brumby stallion’s dunghill, recently trodden. The hill rolled gently down to a gully, climbed up again eastward, red with kangaroo grass. A mob of kangaroos, the same colour and distinguishable only by the bobbing of heads against the violet sky, were grazing away to northward. He took off the naga before descending warily. A flying mob of kangaroos could send a mob of brumbies heading tail-high for the horizon even with the thud-thud-thud of their panic-progress.
Just as well he had taken the precaution. He topped the next crest to see a dozen or so horses grazing only a couple of hundred yards away. The wind favoured him. He dropped down, to crawl to the cover of a bush.
There were only two Lily Lagoons beasts — those oldsters, Bay Rum Betsy and the gelding Snowball. The rest were brumbies, mares with foals, all poor specimens, and one rangy old stallion, grouped no doubt through common decrepitude.
Still hidden, he rose to knees, put fingers to lips, gave that whistle with which his grandfather was accustomed to call the horses. Heads were flung up. Ears flicked rapidly. Particularly startled were those who knew the call. But none moved. Prindy waited. The old stallion did not like it, began to ring his mob, tail-up, looking for the menace, looking everywhere, as were the others. Prindy whistled again. The heads swung towards it. Again. Betsy whickered. The others snorted. Betsy began to head that way, cautiously. Grabbing up the pfannküchen, he began to work his way into the open, but so carefully that only the keenest of eyes could have seen him.
Betsy was within thirty feet before she saw him. She stopped dead, ears flapped forwards, nostrils flared. He spoke to her, using the Mullaka’s form of addressing her: ‘Hello, Betsy, womany!’
The head jerked. He rose very slowly, with a cake held out as the lure of a piece of bread was. She sniffed. A moment. Then she whickered, came with a rush. She gave him one good sniff, one rub with her forehead, then snatched the piece. While she munched he embraced her neck, smoothed her shoulder, crooning to her, ‘Dear old Betsy . . . how you doing? Eh, look out! You binjibinji, ain’t it?’ Poor as her condition was otherwise, Betsy’s belly was rather too full, and her udders were not the shrivelled things they had been before.
The other horses had seen enough. The stallion whistled, wheeled his mob, put them on the run. But there still stood Snowball. Prindy called him by name. He neighed, came at a trot. Prindy had a job to share the rest of the pfannküchen between them. Looking them over, he clicked his tongue. ‘Proper bone-bugger, eh? How Mullaka goin’ ’o get you fat again?’
He tried to mount Snowball, but was butted away by Betsy. She whickered with pleasure when he mounted her. So the three of them went off back along his tracks. The kangaroos were back in the gully, staring this time. Up and over and down to Savitra, awaiting them wearing the sari again. The horses wouldn’t come up to her till she had removed it. He would have put her on Betsy, because old Snowball, for all his bone-buggery, was more fitted for his weight and the weight of the beinook. Betsy settled it by trying to bite her. So he had to bump her up onto Snowball and force her to carry the bird on threat of leaving her behind, because she objected to the blood. Now the Sun was well down in the trees along the creek. Prindy said it would be dark before they reached Mullaka’s camp, but there was Igulgul to help the horses pick their way over the last rough stretch of the way.
They returned to the waterhole, where the horses wanted to drink, and Savitra wanted to bogey again and this time getting Prindy in with her to play-about, got to wanting more. With eyes ashine, lips moist and wet and quivering, she dragged him by a hand up to the soft spot where they had camped briefly on first coming there, forced him down into that position in which to have herself served by him in so-called Blackfeller Fashion. Primitive it might be considered, yet actually the only way a human female may have coitus with satisfaction and dignity completely becoming a human being. The horses stood staring at them. Igulgul smirked at them out of a lilac sky. Wrong Side Bijnitch so early in his monthly round of encouraging it! But what really could be wrong with something that caused so much delight, as expressed by their gasping cries, when at length they fell locked in orgasm? Nearby a Willy wagtail sang of it: Kirrikijirrit, kirrikijirrit . . . kirri, kirri, kirri . . . sweet, sweet Wrong Side Love!
Drugged by the magic, they slept into the silvery darkness left by Igulgul’s vanishing. Savitra, waking hungry, as any healthy female should from fufilment of her function, demanded food of her spouse, wanted the bustard cooked. He said he had no matches for a fire. She complained: ‘You reckon you smart bloody blackfeller . . . wha’s matter you can’t make him fire from stick?’ He replied that he couldn’t find the necessary things in the dark.
She complained till he silenced her with his flute, to which soon she was singing, and sleepy birds twittering:
Okale pusili payra
Dodhi dudhoch bhatoch go . . .
Oh, Pigeon, I look-out you hungry-time,
Feed you my milk, my kunni.
> I never let you go, my Pigeon.
By’n’by I gitchim you in Nankura Town.
When he fell silent she thought of food again: ‘Dem bloody horse get my supper. All you-lot t’ink about, horse. All right . . . you can puggim dat old mare now . . . I hold him, up tail for you . . . you can’t have me no more. Oh, me hungry too much!’
He played again:
Talinjurdali, talinjurdali,
Ponnek kuru pontala coru.
She sang:
Dis lil Tali,
Dis gold Tali,
For my Hindu sweetheart,
For my Hindu bride.
Finally he silenced her by curling up with her, to fondle her with lips and fingers — till with the limitless appetite of adolescence they were in the clip of love again, this time entwined like mating lizards, stared at by the stars. They fell asleep as one. When they woke again the Cat’s Cradle was gone and the Snake high in the East. When she whimpered again, he appeased her yet again, so that she sighed snuggled up to him and slept again. No mopoke about. But curlews were crying near — about a baby?
At piccaninny dawn the butcher birds woke them. Prindy bounded out of the slim hands that held him, went to pee, to drink, to sluice, then went off to look for the horses. The beasts were not far away.
‘Me hung-greee!’ howled Savitra like a lubra.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Kulli-kulli. . . come on, get on old Snowball . . . we get back camp for breakfast.’
Within an hour they were within hailing distance of the camp — ‘Ku!’
The mature male voice answered not only caused the horses’ ears to flick, but their nostrils to dilate as if sniffing for a familiar scent. When the voice rang out again — Ku-u! — old Betsy flung up her head and neighed, and would have broken into a trot, only the going there was much too rough for her overgrown hoofs, and Prindy checked her by grabbing an ear. However, there was no holding her when she saw the beloved figure coming down through the rocks. Prindy slipped off and let her go whinnying for joy. Embracing her while she bumped him with her head, Jeremy sounded close to tears as he talked to her: ‘Dear old Betsy . . . dear old womany . . . it’s good to see you again.’
Poor Fellow My Country Page 238
