by Alex Miller
It was with a feeling of relief about myself then that I realised, without needing to debate the matter, that I was not going to abandon him but was going to stick by him, and that if it came to it I would prefer to perish with him there on Gnapun’s mountain than make the attempt to save myself. It was an enormous relief to know this. It was a joy. It made me happy to know it. When the end came I would hold him in my arms while he wept for his loss, just as he had held me in his arms that night at the Nebo River while I wept for my loss. He was a bewildered old man and he needed his friend at his side.
I gripped my thigh with both hands and, setting myself to struggle to my feet, I looked up. He was gone! He and his bitch. I let go of my thigh and grasped his mother’s stick, put my weight on it and stood. I groaned aloud as the pain flashed through me. There was no sign of them. I stumped across the terrace to where the rock prow jutted out over the valley and, stepping to the edge, leaned and looked down. A jumble of great stones and thorny plants greeted my eye. There was no sign of him. I turned and looked about me. Standing there, it seemed to me that the peculiar waiting silence of the bush would soon bring my every belief into question. I could hear it, a creaking, a kind of singing in the air. What was it waiting for? I called his name aloud. ‘Dougald!’ My voice called back to me, once, twice, then faint and failing into the valley. Professor Max Otto calling in the wilderness. I called again more boldly. ‘Dou-gaaald!’ There was no reply, except the echo of my own voice. I could make no impression on the silence. The world in which I stood had been there forever. Soon I would be gone and nothing would have changed. It seemed foolish to call to him again. I had seen how old men decline and die with a suddenness that takes us by surprise. Hadn’t I seen my father become a lost child in the last days before his death? He had seemed innocent then at last in his childish happiness when I smiled at him and held his hand in mine. Had he been comforted and consoled by the presence of his son?
As I stood there at the edge of the terrace I willed Dougald to reappear in front of me. We would sit side by side on the log and rest a while. I would light a fire and brew another pannikin of tea. If we don’t find the cave today, I would say cheerily, then we can return and search for it again tomorrow. But this was nonsense. It was gibberish. I knew it for what it was. Either we were to find Gnapun’s cave today or we were never to find it. That had always been the reality. I do not know how long I had been standing there thinking about these things, when suddenly a dizziness passed over me and I swayed, leaning and pivoting on my stick, and was forced to take a quick step forward in order to prevent myself from falling. For an instant, teetering on the brink of that rocky prominence, it seemed possible that Dougald had ceased to imagine me and that I had therefore vanished from his landscape and that I stood in another, a place unknown to him. I knew this not to be a sensible thought, but it possessed nevertheless a quite compelling reality for me. I tottered back to the log, my one certain point of reference, and I lowered myself onto it with care. I would wait for him. He would return eventually and explain his absence. I did not know what to think of my situation. I closed my eyes. I had not minded the idea of dying with Dougald in my arms. There had seemed to be some point to that for both of us. But I did not want to die here in the escarpment on my own. I rested my arms on my knees and held my head in my hands. Somewhere far off a dog howled. I lifted my head and listened. Was it one of my dogs? They had been missing all day. Or was his bitch calling to me? Had he fallen and was he lying helpless and injured somewhere among the rocks?
Dusk was rapidly closing on the terrace now. I fancied I could hear a faint whispering nearby. Violet and purple shadows billowed around me like clouds, the air suddenly cold and shifting. I shivered. Then I realised what the whispering was and looked up. A gilded speck lanced through the sky far above me, leaving its white trail. I thought of the people in their seats, eating those meals that we are forced to eat and watching films that we would not otherwise watch. The faint whispering set the air trembling delicately around me. I looked again at the place where I had last seen him, willing myself to believe he would soon reappear and come towards me, waving cheerfully and calling to me to come on and to follow him, his confidence restored. The howling of a dog again broke the silence. It was distant, possibly even in the valley far below, holding to a flute-like note, then dying away, only to rise again. It was a beautiful and melancholy sound, almost the sound of a lamentation. If he had fallen and injured himself, then the sooner I found him the better. If I were to leave it too long before setting out after him I might not find him alive. If he were dying and in pain he would need my comfort. But to go in search of him in the dark would be to panic. That is the form panic would take, rushing off into the dark and calling his name. I decided to give him another quarter-hour by my watch. If he had not returned by then, by the precise and reckoned time of watches and clocks and not by the insistent urgency of the panic that was gathering in me, then I would go and look for him. I would go carefully and steadily, making certain of my bearings as I moved from one place to the next. And I would call his name every so often, then stand in the stillness and listen for his answering call. And sooner or later, if I were careful and methodical in my search, I would find him. He was here somewhere. He could not be far away.
When I checked my watch the quarter-hour I had allowed had already passed. But still I did not get up off the log. I had a dread of what I might find, and a greater dread that I might not find anything at all and would be confronted with the bleakest prospect. But to do nothing and to just sit here waiting would be a miserable and a cowardly way to end this thing. How would it sound in my book of account? I waited. I do not know how long I had been sitting there musing on my situation, when it occurred to me that Dougald had forgotten me. He has forgotten you, said the voice of my superior other, my ever-rational brother. Old men forget, it was true. How they forget. Dougald had not fallen over the edge of the terrace, and he could not have climbed the cliff at my back, so he must have gone down through the copse of stunted trees directly in front of me and to the left of the prow, forgetting that he was leaving me behind. I must follow him at once, or there would be no hope of ever catching up with him.
I got to my feet and stumped across the grass towards the dark silhouettes of the copse, planting my stick and swinging my hips as if I was my uncle out in the night in search of straying cattle. There was no track or any indication of a possible trail. Once I had got in among the bushes I clambered about aimlessly, lashing out with my stick at the prickly branches. The bushes grew lower to the ground and were more dense as I descended the slope, and I made headway with great difficulty. Then, in one step, I was out of it. I was standing on the stony bed of a dry creek. The bushes and creepers through which I had been clambering overhung the creek and formed a kind of canopy or tunnel. Crouching, and in pain, I made my way forward. I had been going along in this manner for some time, so preoccupied with my progress that I had more or less forgotten that I was supposed to be following Dougald, when I lost my footing and fell violently over an abrupt drop of several feet.
I lay on my back on a mattress of flood debris, winded and too confused and exhausted to make the effort to get up. I closed my eyes and rested. I was not too uncomfortable so long as I did not attempt to move. Astonishingly I was still clutching my stick. It seemed a triumph to have retained my grip on it. I think I must have gone to sleep then, for some time later during that night Winifred came to me. I was enormously grateful and was astonished to see her. I said, ‘Oh, Christ, is it really you my darling?’ I laughed and wept with relief to see her standing there just above me and to the left—for some reason her precise position was important to me. So, from the very beginning, had this all been nothing but an elaborate dream? She did not speak or try to reach me, however, but stood looking down at me silently from her slightly superior position. It dawned on me then that she was actually taking her final leave of me and was gazing sorrowfully into the coffin of her
beloved husband. So I had died before she had? Just as we had expected me to. I noticed then that my father was standing behind her in the shadows. One of his hands was resting on her shoulder, as if he wished to comfort her, or to make the point that he stood with her at this moment. The sight of my father standing there in the shadows made me begin to suspect that they were not real. Why could Winifred not have come to see me on her own? I did not want to see my father. They stood looking down at me and gradually, as I watched them, I ceased to believe in them and they faded away.
When I woke again I smelled smoke and saw the gipsy girl clambering up the side of the creek. She was just leaving. Had she lit a fire for me? Surely she had been watching over me? I called to her, ‘Please don’t leave! Tell me your name!’ But she paid no heed and was soon gone among the dark foliage of the trees. ‘You are not forgotten!’ I called. ‘Your courage is not forgotten.’ Tears ran down my cheeks. We were only children, she and I, but we had known everything there is to know; all that we were and all that we had ever been was contained for us in our meeting that day in the hazel coppice. I knew this with absolute surety. I understood it. It was not Winifred and the decades of our companioned lives, not my years of teaching, not my friendships with colleagues and students, not my father and mother, it was the enigma of my meeting with the gipsy girl in the hazel coppice that golden evening of my boyhood. It was that I valued more than anything else in my whole life. Within the brief circle of my meeting with her, the prophetic significance of my entire existence had been portrayed. Understanding this, I was suddenly content to die there alone in this remote escarpment of the Expedition Range. It was not such a strange place after all. Lying there on my back on the stones and roots of Gnapun’s mountain that night, my recollection of my meeting with the gipsy girl was more consolation to me than all the rest of it. Though why this should have been so, I cannot truthfully say now as I sit here reflecting on the events of that night. I knew it in my heart, let us say, where our knowing, as I have said before, is of another kind. I did not mind this death. To lie up here with the bones of Gnapun was not such a terrible thing. I was as much at home with him as with anyone. I was a man, as he had been. In a way, he was my hero too. We all die, after all, it is the least reducible fact of our existence. I regretted only that I had not known her name. It was my one regret that I could not at this last speak the name of the gipsy girl aloud to myself.
I woke to the touch of a cool rough tongue on my cheek. I opened my eyes. Dougald’s wolf-like bitch licked my face, her grey eyes gazing steadily into mine. Behind her head a disc of silver slid between the trees, touching the rocks with its aluminium light—it was Gnapun’s awakening! I laughed at the excess of this thought and reached and drew her shoulder against me. She was trembling and I could feel her rapid heartbeat through her ribs. While I struggled to my feet she stood looking on, waiting for me. We did not have far to go.
‘You know where you are now, old mate,’ Dougald called cheerfully as I came up to him. It evidently amused him that he’d had to send his bitch to fetch me. He squatted by a small fire alongside the log on the terrace, his features ruddy in the flames, the sky behind him the palest saffron with the approaching dawn. ‘Me and Granddad spent the night here beside this log, paying our respects, before we visited Gnapun.’ He twisted around and pointed to the cliff at the edge of the terrace behind him. ‘We’ll go up there when we’ve had this drink of tea.’
I stood looking down at him. He was himself again, the fire-light flickering on his dark features, his eyes alight and youthful, his vigour recomposed within him. He poured steaming tea from the billy into a mug and stirred in sugar and handed it up to me.
I took the mug and thanked him and drank from it.
He looked narrowly into my eyes. ‘Pity we ate all them arrowroot biscuits,’ he said and leaned forward to tend the fire, finding small sticks and poking them in under the billy, which he had set to boil again.
I sat on the log and cupped my hands around the hot mug and sipped the sweet tea and I closed my eyes. After a while I opened them. He was watching me. I said, ‘I had visitors last night.’
He nodded solemnly. ‘Well that’s good, old mate.’
I was grateful there was no hint of irony in his tone. I waited for him to speak of his own visitors, but he said no more and looked into the fire.
When it was light I followed him around the base of the cliff. There was a natural cutting in the rock wall which formed a gentle incline like a ramp. He stopped ahead of me on a narrow shelf ten or twelve metres above our campsite and waited for me to draw level with him.
It was obvious the moment I saw it. A dry stone wall was built into the face of the low cliff. It was such a considered, man-made feature in that otherwise entirely natural landscape that its presence was as startling, and as beautiful and mysterious in its way, as the ruins of an ancient temple. Seeing it there, it was possible to imagine strange gods. Dougald said nothing, but turned to me as I came up to him and put his arm around my shoulders. I was moved by this unaccustomed intimacy.
‘I would never have come back here on my own,’ he said. He left his arm around my shoulders, and we stood together thus, looking at the stone wall in the deep quiet of that wilderness, the morning chorus of birds far below us in the valley. ‘My grandfather set up this wall to protect his father’s bones. The day he brought me here I saw it for the first time as you see it now. It is just as I have seen it in my memory since.’ He laughed softly, marvelling at the perfect register of his boyhood memory with the intact wall in front of us. ‘All my life,’ he said with a kind of wonder, ‘I have been able to close my eyes and to count every one of those stones.’ He turned and examined me. ‘Me and Grandad looked into the cave, then we set each of them stones back in place before we left here fifty years ago.’
He continued to stand with me, looking at the wall. I had begun to think he intended to approach no closer, when he dropped his arm to his side and made his way forward the last few metres. When I hung back he turned and beckoned to me to join him. The stones were flat and long and had been carefully selected. He lifted the topmost of them from its place and handed it to me. ‘Set it on its base,’ he instructed me, and he watched while I carefully laid the stone on the ground at my feet before he turned and handed me the next. He might have been handing into my care not stones but the precious antique volumes of his library. I thought of the poet’s line, Stones on which there was nothing mortal. ‘They have to go back just the way Grandad set them.’ When we had removed three courses of stones down to a level with our chests he reached his arm around my shoulder and drew me towards him and we leaned together and looked into the cavity.
It was a rock shelter rather than a cave. The low ceiling sloped down and met the floor no more than three metres from the entrance. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the shadowed interior. The skull was the first thing I saw. A human skull is such a distinctive object that there is no mistaking it for something else. The bones were not so obvious at first. The skeleton was half-buried by an accumulation of debris that had evidently leached from the roof over the years. A tiny black bat, no larger than the final joint of my little finger, clung to the ceiling above the skull, its eyes the bright jewels of a funeral decoration. Its body trembled as if in anticipation of flight.
Dougald said, ‘I liked the way you got that into the story that Gnapun and the leader were brothers. Those two brothers, you know, the sons of the leader who were bringing the sheep up through the scrubs? They didn’t join in with the retribution afterwards but gave shelter to the messengers’ people who survived the killing that went on in the days and months after the massacre. Years later those two boys had fellers working on that place with them that they knew had probably been involved in the massacre of their own family. They accepted something deeper than a need for revenge about what happened that day between their father’s party and the local people. I think their dad would have been proud of the way they ac
ted.’ He fell silent, looking in over the lip of the partially dismantled wall. ‘Gnapun remained a stranger to his people. After the massacre he took a woman to live with him and they had my grandfather. The three of them lived up here on their own until old Gnapun died. After his death my great-grandmother moved down into the valley, and my grandad began working for the stations around the place. I think he went over to that country one time and did some fencing on that place where the massacre was. When Gnapun was old he must have regretted the deaths of those people. Only a young man could do something like he did that day.’ He was silent. Then he said, ‘He is my hero.’
He seemed to wait for me to say something. ‘I had an uncle,’ I said, and as I said it I realised that my uncle had not been one of my ghosts last night. ‘He too loved his land and lived and died alone for the sake of it. I am the only one who remembers him now. I believe he also came to prefer his solitude to the company of other men, though I don’t know what led him to that. He did not have Gnapun’s reason for it.’
‘Gnapun had to live with what he had done,’ Dougald said. ‘Old men don’t make good killers.’
We stood a while longer, then Dougald said, ‘We’d better close her up and get going.’
I paused on the way down and looked back at the wall of stones that Dougald and I had carefully set in place again. They would remain undisturbed there long after he and I were dead. I turned away and followed him and his pale bitch down the incline. Stumbling over loose rocks in my town shoes, and flailing his mother’s stick in the air and letting out a yelp whenever my ankle went over, I followed him down the mountain. It took us less than two hours to reach the camp. The two brown dogs were lying in the shade waiting for us at the truck. Dougald lit a fire and made a brew of tea and we looked at each other and smiled to think what we had done.
