by John Marsden
My parents had called up a few times and were quite happy to have Melanie come and stay with us in the holidays, though they weren’t so happy about my staying with her. ‘Not when you’ve been away at school for so long already,’ my mother said, which I guess was fair enough. They hadn’t been able to make it to the CCS, but they were excited about how well I’d done, and they’d seen my name in the papers and all, so that was a big thrill.
Crewcut wanted me to keep training and go for the State titles during the holidays. I just didn’t know. I felt I’d been through that scene already — when I was too young to handle it, if you want to know the truth. But I was still doing a million kilometres every other day, in case I got enthused. And I didn’t like to let Crewcut down — he was so damn keen. Funny, we were getting on well these days, like ole buddies. Most afternoons when I finished training we’d sit around and talk. Melanie would come over too when she didn’t have sport or detentions. I’d never have thought the day would come when Crewcut and I would talk like regular people. Life’s strange sometimes. Even the door marked ‘Exit’ goes somewhere. At least on the hike there’d be no pool to swim in. I wondered if by about the third day I’d be flapping around on the grass, gasping like a fish pulled out of the water.
The night before the hike, everyone was a little crazy. We’d been given rucksacks and sleeping bags and stuff like that, and we’d done all of our packing, except for food, which we were getting in the morning. Our packs seemed so full, we couldn’t figure out how we’d get any more than a couple of sultanas in them. Then about ten o’clock everyone started fooling around. We’d short-sheeted Hanley-White’s bed, but the little rat was so small that he’d got in and curled up ready to go to sleep without even noticing. So we threw him and his bed out into the corridor. Then we dared him to do a streak around the outside of the girls’ wing. Only Rob the Rat would even consider a dare like that, but in his case it took all of thirty seconds to talk him into it. I swear to God, he had as much sense as a dead tonsil. Anyway, he put a pillowcase over his head and off he went, his little legs pumping away at a K a minute, two white cheeks gleaming back in the darkness. The only people who saw him were a couple of year twelve kids, out for their evening smoke; they just told him how sad he was.
Before he got back we did the old ‘bucket of water on the door’ trick, to be ready for him. I mean, this stuff is so unoriginal that I’m embarrassed, but that’s what we did. We figured on his coming through the door so fast that he wouldn’t even be thinking about booby traps. What we didn’t figure on was Mr Gilligan coming through the door a full minute before the Rat, to check up on what the noise was about. And that wasn’t all. Instead of the bucket tipping over and dropping a load of fresh cold water on him, the whole thing dropped like a rock and hit him square on the head. I mean, can you imagine what a bucket of water weighs? So there was Gilligan, staggering around the dorm white-faced and moaning, holding onto his head with both hands, and in the middle of all this, Hanley-White comes screaming in naked at the speed of light, his pillowcase over his head, yelling, ‘Rape! Rape!’ When he took the pillowcase off I saw something I’ve never seen before — a human being go green with fright. It was quite something. They made an odd contrast really, especially as Gilligan’s normal colour was green. It was at that moment that Ringworm chose to ask a question he had probably been pondering for weeks. ‘Mr Gilligan, sir, have you ever wondered what happens to your tongue when you go to sleep?’
It was a miracle that any of us actually got to go on this hike, after all that. They probably realised that we weren’t exactly in a frenzy of delight about the whole deal anyway, so it wouldn’t be much of a punishment to stop us. We left early the next day in a mini-bus and a Landrover. Mr Gilligan wasn’t out the front waving us goodbye.
We drove for hours and hours, sleeping most of the way, as we hadn’t had much rest the night before. We stopped every once in a while to swap seats or buy food or take a leak. It was the kind of trip that made you feel like going and watching a cricket match instead. The most exciting thing that happened was when Mr Dunne went through an orange light. But by lunchtime we were up in the mountains, the roads got rougher, there was less and less traffic, more squishes of red dead animals on the road, and the air was like a menthol cigarette. We reached our jumping off point at about three o’clock. We unloaded the vehicles, ate a couple of oranges and listened to a lecture from Mr Dunne about how we shouldn’t tear down the trees, set fire to the tents or strangle the wildlife. That seemed fair enough. Then we were off, slinging our massive packs on our backs and trudging up a faint track towards a rocky point called Mt Willis. After we’d gone only a couple of hundred metres Evan Simpson turned to Ringworm and said, ‘Ring, shouldn’t you have a rucksack?’
‘Oh yes,’ said the Worm, looking about him in a sudden flustered anxiety. ‘Where is it? I must have left it back at the car.’ We waited patiently while he trotted back to get it, fairly confident that this wouldn’t be the last delay he would cause on this trip.
It was a nice feeling being up there in the high country. It was enough to make a man start singing John Denver songs. It didn’t take us too long to get to the campsite, in a saddle just below Mt Willis. But before we got there we had to cross a river that was belting away quite strongly. It was too much for Rob Hanley-White — about half-way across he got off-balance and the weight of his pack pulled him over backwards. He lay there in the water, kicking his legs and arms like a beetle flipped on its back. We rescued him, but not for a little while. He squelched up to the campsite muttering grimly under his breath.
The first thing we had to do was collect firewood. Mr Walker came with James and me, and for some stupid reason we decided to pick up a huge dead log and carry that in.
‘Now boys,’ said Mr Walker, squatting down on his haunches at one end of the log. ‘I’ll show you how to lift without breaking your back. You might split your trousers but you won’t break your back.’ With dazzling grace he began to lift, while James and I watched in admiration. Suddenly there was a terrible ripping sound as his trousers split right down his backside.
‘Gee sir,’ said James, as we struggled, with tears in our eyes, to hold each other upright, ‘How’s your back?’
But one thing about Mr Walker, he could laugh at himself. We staggered back with the log, passing Crewcut on the way, who had an armful of kindling.
‘Oh sir,’ I said, ‘is that the best you can do? I’ve got toothpicks at home that are bigger than those bits.’
‘Yes,’ said Crewcut without the slightest pause, ‘but then you’ve got such a big mouth.’
The fire was flickering into life already, so we dumped our log and went to put our tents up, which didn’t take too long, considering that Adam Marava had left his pegs at school and a day-boy named McLean Smith had brought two flies instead of a fly and a tent.
The temperature was dropping fast and it was a good feeling to chuck a few sausages on the fire and get on with the job of cooking the evening meal. Mr Dunne divided us into groups of five, and we had to concoct a meal between the five of us. My group was James, Ringworm, Evan Simpson, a guy called Sam Downey, and me. To our amazement Ringworm turned out to be quite a good cook. We ate well, a kind of sausage stew, then some chocolate instant pudding. God it was great, sitting there with full stomachs, watching the moon rise among twenty million or so stars, and seeing dark trees silhouetted against the sky. The wind was getting up and the branches of the trees started kicking around wildly. Sparks from the fire went showering in the air. I was hoping that we’d all sit by the fire and tell ghost stories, but it seemed like everyone was too tired, so most people were heading off to bed by nine o’clock. I was sharing a tent with James Kramer; we talked for a while but eventually the tiredness crept up on us too and we both passed out.
Next morning was quite a sweat. We’d climbed Mt Willis by about ten but it was a hell of an effort. The wind had picked up even more and it was a battle to stay on
the spur.
‘Trouble is, if you want to get to the top you gotta go up,’ said David O’Toole. I thought that was pretty deep.
We got to the top, and despite the gale the view was something else. It was, like, hypnotising. In every direction all you could see was mountains, stretching away, calm and vast and high and each one different. They were big and they were beautiful and they sat there the way they’d sat for a billion or so years. They were pretty serious mountains. And somehow that sobered everyone up. Before, they’d been laughing and kidding around — that is, when they weren’t gasping for breath — but now they were very quiet, just looking out over that view. No-one could bring himself to break the silence. Finally however Rob Hanley-White spoke. ‘This wind’s so strong it blows the snot out of your nose.’
Rob always did have a feeling for words. It seemed like he’d said it all. Mr Walker gave a kind of deep sigh but without anything else being said we gathered up our packs and moved on to the next target, Mt Austin.
Now Mr Dunne started throwing in a few complications. ‘Get your maps out boys. I’m going to give out a few compasses and we’ll have a lesson in navigation.’
‘But sir, if we navigate with compasses, won’t we just go round in circles?’ asked Ringworm.
There was generous applause: that was considered pretty good for Ringworm. I only hope he had intended it for a joke. Anyway, we had our lesson, and then we had to work out a bearing for a saddle on the way to Mt Austin. Then we had to track off on the bearing and hope we made it. That set the pattern for the rest of the hike. The teachers kind of followed us as we worked out the bearings and routes and tried to get to our next point without getting disastrously lost. Every so often Mr Dunne would pull us up for another lesson, so we got taught to do stuff like resections. It wasn’t a bad way to learn actually, and I enjoyed the navigation. It made it more interesting. But we sure spent a lot of time going off the wrong way. Sometimes the teachers would let us go quite a distance before pulling us up; sometimes they’d stop us right away and ask deep and meaningful questions, like: ‘How do you know if you’re on a spur?’
‘The ground falls away from us on both sides.’
‘Right. Is the ground falling away from you on both sides now?’
‘Oh . . . no. What happened to the spur?’
Quite often Mr Dunne would make us stop and show him where we were on the map by using the compasses and landmarks and stuff. That was really hard. About lunchtime we arrived at a high point that looked like it could have been the summit of Mt Austin, but it was hard to tell, because there were a few high points all close together.
‘Well, where are we?’ asked Mr Dunne. ‘Is this the summit?’
‘Nah,’ said Clune contemptuously, ‘they wouldn’t put the top of a mountain here.’ Turned out he was right, so we kept going. Two knolls later Mr Dunne stopped us again. ‘Where are we this time?’ he asked.
‘Well sir,’ said David O’Toole, ‘the big hand’s on the twelve and the little hand’s on the one, so I’d say we’re at our lunch spot.’
This style of navigation suited me OK, and everyone else too it seemed, so we dropped off our packs and pigged out on biscuits and cheese and salami and oranges. The best part came after lunch though: we stretched out for an hour or so, using our packs as pillows, and dozed in the sun. I could have stayed there quite happily, but this Dunne guy was some slave-driver and by about 2.30 we were on the move again, chucking away all the height we’d worked so hard to gain, as we followed a faint track down a spur towards our second night’s campsite, near a place called The Pimple.
‘Named after your face, Clune,’ said Winnie the Punk.
‘Yeah, matter of fact most of these mountains remind me of you,’ I threw in, never liking to pass up a chance to have a go at Rockhead. But he was too tired to give much cheek.
Before we got to The Pimple however we got hopelessly lost in a big clearing with tracks leading off in all directions. We were milling round trying to figure it out, except for a few people like Clune, who sat on a rock looking sulky, and Ringworm who chatted to the teachers about UFOs.
‘I know where we are,’ said the Rat brightly.
‘OK, where?’ we challenged him.
‘We’re lost,’ he answered with an air of finality, then ran and hid behind a tree. Gradually we all started getting discouraged, and arguing.
‘We should go that way, ‘cos the sky’s blue that way,’ said Sam Downey.
Finally Dunne took us firmly in hand. ‘Now James, where do you think we are?’ he asked Kramer. James studied his map and compass long and hard.
‘We’re over there, sir,’ he said at last, pointing to a sharp rocky ridge line about five kilometres away.
Mr Dunne started getting angry. ‘What’s that little ‘SP’ on the map mean?’ he asked.
‘Sign-post,’ we all chorused.
‘But sir, there’s no signpost round here,’ said Adam Marava.
‘Isn’t there? Try using your eyes.’
We hunted around for a bit before David O’Toole realised that the tree Rat was hiding behind had a whole lot of directions chiselled into it, including an arrow pointing the way to The Pimple. So off we set and just as my legs were starting to feel like tree trunks we hit the campsite. It had been a long day, but a good one. After I got my pack off I walked round for a few minutes feeling light like a moonwalker, floating five metres with each step.
There was another group of hikers at the campsite — four adults. They seemed OK. We talked to them for a little while.
‘You actually do this stuff for fun?’ I asked them.
That night was quite spooky. Round about dusk we could hear howling noises in the distance.
‘They’re feral dogs, wild dogs,’ Mr Dunne explained. As darkness fell they seemed to get closer. We all huddled in around the fire, and Mr Walker chose that moment to start telling a ghost story.
‘This is a true story,’ he said, but then they always say that. ‘As a matter of fact it happened only eight years ago. I was living near a village called Valley Reefs, where there used to be a lot of mining. At the end of my road was an old slate quarry that hadn’t been worked for forty or fifty years. It’s a bit of an exaggeration to call it a road though: it was an old dirt track that wound down to the quarry, round a lot of hairpin bends. My house was on one of these bends and it was the only house on this road at all, apart from a little weekender further up the hill that never seemed occupied.
‘Now there were a lot of semi-wild cats living around this house when I moved into it. They’d been pets of the previous owner. In fact it was hearing the dogs tonight that reminded me of this story. I got into the habit of going out and feeding the cats at about dusk every night; not because I like cats — I don’t, I can’t stand them — but I thought that if I fed them they’d be less likely to kill birds and wildlife. I should have shot or trapped them I suppose, but I didn’t have the heart. So anyway, I’d go out there with these scraps, and the tamer ones would take food from my hand, but most of them just watched from a safe distance until I was back in the house. Then they’d come out and take the food away.
‘But some nights while I was doing this I’d become aware of a strong smell of pipe tobacco coming from a patch of shadows under a tree opposite the house. And I’d become aware of someone standing there — a person standing under the tree, smoking a pipe. I could feel his presence there, even though I couldn’t see him and I knew it was impossible that anyone could be there. This was a dead-end dirt track. It was miles from anywhere and it led nowhere. No-one ever came down that way.
‘Anyway, this went on for a few months. I’d have to say it didn’t worry me greatly but I did feel uneasy when this presence was around. It didn’t seem like he was aggressively hostile but he certainly didn’t seem friendly either.
‘But one night I found myself at the Valley Reefs pub, having a drink with an old miner named Len Bishop. Len was about eighty I’d say, and had
lived in the area all his life. He pottered around with a metal detector most of the time, looking for gold, but I knew that way back in his youth he’d worked in the slate quarry. So I told him about these strange episodes with the pipe-smoker in the darkness at the bend in the road.
‘“Oh,” said Len, “that’ll be Jimmy Withers. You’re not the only one to have run into Jimmy, over the years.”’
‘“Who’s Jimmy Withers?”’ I asked.
‘“Well,” he told me, “Jimmy worked for the quarry, same as me. Jimmy was the bullocky. He and his bullock train would bring the blocks of slate up the hill. Up where your road meets the Arkleigh Road there was a processing plant, see, where they’d split the blocks up in sheets. There was a railhead there in those days, and they’d load the sheets straight onto the rail. You can still see what’s left of the plant and the rail down at the corner there, near Riley’s place.
‘“Well it was a long haul up that hill, see, and a lot of weight for those bullocks. ‘Course Jimmy, he never fed ’em properly anyway. So he’d stop ’em half-way up on each trip and give ’em a breather, and he’d have a pipe himself. And half the time he’d have a nip as well. He liked the grog, Jimmy did. It was your corner he stopped at each time. Those bullocks were like a milkman’s horse. After a while they pulled up there automatic, whether they were going up the hill or down it. They wanted their smoko, and so did Jimmy.
‘“Then one day we knocked off work at 4.30, like always, and waited for Jimmy to come down for his last load, so we could get a lift up the hill. Well, we waited until nearly dark, and there was no sign of him, so we started walking up the hill. And then we found him. He was there at your corner and so were the bullocks. It was a bit hard to say what happened ’cos, you see, he’d been run over by his own bullock team. I always reckoned myself that he’d finally had one grog too many and was stretched out on the ground snoring away. It only would have needed those big bastards to see a good patch of grass and they would have gone clean over the top of him. Poor bugger. No matter how under the weather he was, I reckon by the look on his face that he knew at the last second what was happening to him. He didn’t die too peaceful. ‘Course there’s not much you can do about it if you’ve got twenty tons of slate being dragged over the top of you.”
