The Great Trek

by Zane Grey

  “My God! Red. All same just another bloody rustler?”

  “All same jest another bloody cow thief, like hundreds we’ve knowed an’ some we’ve hanged. Only this bird is long on good English talk an’ manners, an’ short on rustler brains an’ cunnin’.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Yes, you can. You do. But you’re humped because he’s Ash Ormiston of Australia. Hell, pard, if he had bucked you at home as he has heah, why he’d be daid!”

  “Stanley Dann will never believe that until too late.”

  “Reckon not. We might talk Slyter into realizin’ what it’s all about. Queer deal, ain’t it, pard?”

  “Queer and extraordinary,” returned Sterl with a hard breath.

  “Wal, only thet last ’cause we’re heah. The size of the herd, near eight thousand haid, is enough to make it turrible. Onheard of! An’ the men involved…except you an’ me…jest men who have run cattle for years without learnin’ thet big herds in wild places breed easy money an’ all thet goes with it.”

  “Red, we can’t let it go…come to a head. We can’t,” Sterl declared.

  “We jest can, my love-sick gazabo!” retorted Red. “For the present, I’m in love with Beryl wuss than I ever was with any other girl. An’ with less hope. But Ormiston will have to kill me to get her. Savvy? An’ I’ll bet my all that you’ll kill Ormiston before he gets anyways near takin’ Leslie.”

  “You’re talking facts now,” said Sterl stridently. Then he eased up on the harsh speech. “Red, I haven’t let myself believe I love that kid. But if I don’t, I ought to.”

  “Thanks, pard. I reckoned you was already. No matter. A few more months on this trek will answer for that. An’ I’m glad.”

  “Ours is the biggest issue. At the least it means the lives of these two girls, who have been forced into this raw country by blind fathers. To hell with the cattle! Let’s go out and clean up Ormiston’s outfit.”

  “You’re gettin’ mad too soon. No call for thet yet, as I can see. We’d queer ourselves with Allan Hathaway, who’s a weak member, with Eric Dann, mebbe with Stanley. No, pard, we’ve stood this deal for months. Let’s stand it some more, a lot more, before we get mad. Somethin’ will happen one of these days, jest like that crack of Ormiston’s I heahed today, an’ always there’s the chance Beryl will put us wise to Ormiston. She thinks he’s a prince. Told me so. Prince? Good Lord! An’ she’s gone against her dad, as grand a man as ever had a daughter. I’m layin’ low, Sterl. I’m playin’ safe. I have eyes in the back of my haid, an’, believe me, I’ll know pronto if any of thet outfit tries to sneak up on me. Never was so sore, so keyed up in my life. Darn’ if I don’t almost like this set-up. It’s somethin’ to figger out. Pard, we’ve been in some tough places. This is shore the toughest. Let’s never let it get the best of us.”

  “Red Krehl, did I have to come ’way out here to Australia to appreciate you?” demanded Sterl.

  “Dog-gone if I know,” replied Red in dubious surprise. “I reckoned you always had me figgered, pard.”

  “No, I’m afraid I didn’t, Red,” Sterl returned reluctantly. “Maybe it took this trek to make me. Maybe you sense things beyond my powers…. But, old-timer, I swear I’ll rise to this thing as you have risen. And see it as you see it. And I’ll take a long hitch in my patience, and what ever else it calls for.”

  Chapter Eleven

  The trek plodded on day after day. And more and more Sterl felt himself slipping back to the level of the unconscious savage as represented so strikingly in the black man Friday, who had mental processes, it was true, but was almost wholly guided by his instincts and his emotions. It was a good thing, he reflected. It made for survival. Thrown against the background of the live and inanimate forces of the earth, he reflected, man had to go back. He discussed his mood sometimes with his companions of his campfires. Slyter laughed: “We call it ‘gone bush.’ I would say it denoted mentality!” Leslie gave proof to his theory by flashing: “Sterl, you make me think. And I don’t want to think!” Stanley Dann said: “Undoubtedly a trek like this would be a throwback for most white men…unless they found their strength in God.” Well, he himself had a job to do—to deal with Ormiston.

  Stanley Dann eventually arrived at the conclusion that somewhere back along the trek they had crossed Cooper Creek, famed in the pioneer explorer annals. Any one of several streams could have been Cooper Creek. But he admitted that he had expected a goodly stream of running water. Long ago, Sterl thought, Dann should have been warned by a sun growing almost imperceptibly hotter that water would grow scarcer. So it had proved to be. Still, always in the blue distance, mountain ranges lent hope. The ranges were watersheds and from them perennial streams wore down to the grasslands.

  Through this bush, the endless monotony of which the interminable glory and green and gold, the everlasting area of gum trees and mulga scrub and spinifex, wore so strangely on the trekkers that desert country would have been welcome, they never made an average of more than five miles a day. Dry camps occurred more often; two-day stays at water holes further added to the slowing up. But the drovers plodded on and on, and ever on, which was the realization of the dream of Stanley Dann.

  In October the trek at last worked out of the “always-always-all-same-land,” as Red Krehl had named it, on to the gradual slope of open grass leading down to what appeared a boundless valley in the west and purple mountains to the north. Water would come down out of them. A wandering thread of darker green, crossing to the west and losing itself in the vastness, promised a river or stream. The absence of game and fowl, however, had an ominous significance. Stanley Dann trekked fifteen miles that day, from dawn until dark, and then had to make dry camp. A second day ended almost as long a trek without coming to water. A third day’s journey, prolonged to the point of exhaustion, brought the drovers to stream and jungle and looming ranges and was none too soon to save the cattle. They dammed the stream. Many of them drowned; others were mired in the mud; a few were trampled to death by the frenzied mob. The horses fared badly, though not to the point of loss.

  “Make camp for days,” was Stanley Dann’s order, when mob and remuda had been droved out upon the green. The night watch was omitted. Horses and cattle and trekkers rested from nightfall until sunrise.

  Day disclosed the loveliest site for a camp, the freest from flies and insects, the richest in color and music of innumerable birds, the liveliest in game that the drovers had experienced. But ill luck still dogged the trek, or, in Stanley Dann’s version, just the daily vicissitudes to be expected.

  Larry stalked to breakfast to inform Slyter that horses were missing from the remuda. This was serious for the horse drover. It turned out that some of Slyter’s wagon teams had been driven off or had wandered away. Red’s favorite horse, Jester, a gift from Leslie, and King and Lady Jane were gone.

  “Friday told me no black fella close up,” Slyter said. “So they can’t be stolen.”

  “King never ran off before,” rejoined Sterl.

  “Not on this trek,” said Slyter. “But he has. All the horses have a wild streak. Maybe brumbies led them off. Sterl, I suppose that you, being a cowboy, can track a horse?”

  “Used to be pretty good,” Sterl said. He got his rifle and started.

  But he only lost himself in the deep bush, and continued to be lost for three days. Afterward, he looked back on this adventure with mixed feelings of chagrin and of glory in the experience. The chagrin rose from the fact that in an obscure stretch of jungle he mistook the faint tracks of a band of cassowaries for those of King’s shod hoofs, nor realized it until he came upon a flock of these great, awkward, ostrich-like birds staring at him with protruding, solemn eyes. The rest he remembered afterward only in snatches: an open space where foliage and a cascade of the stream caught an exquisite diffused golden light breaking through blue rifts in the green dome overhead. Tiny butterflies, or flying insects, like sparks from a fire, vied with wide-winged butterflies i
n a fascinated fluttering over a pool that mirrored them, and the great opal-hued branches above, and the network of huge-leafed vines, and the spears of lacy foliage. Fly-catchers, birds too beautiful to be murderers, were feeding upon the darting, winged insects.

  “Wal, if I gotta die,” mused Sterl, quoting Red, “let it be heah!” And Sterl found a seat on a mossy rock to forget his hunt. Of the many trees that sent lofty branches above to reach out, twine, and roof this glade, there were four that were remarkable. The nearest to him was some kind of a gum, huge in girth, white as snow in that restrained light, spotless and branchless for over a hundred feet, where it split and spread in great gnarled arms with opal patches between areas of peeling brown bark that lost themselves in the green. Another was a gray tree, ten feet thick at the base, encompassed and lassoed and criss-crossed by a thick bulging vine, like a boa constrictor, that grew tightly into the trunk, all the way up in triangles and squares that left little of the tree exposed. And this giant of the jungle was dead, killed by the parasite. The third tree was one of which Sterl had seen a number, though none approaching the grandeur of this one. It was what Slyter had called a mountain ash, and from a fluted trunk twelve feet thick it sheered up branchless and noble to refuse to mingle its outspread top, high above the green dome. The fourth tree was like an enormous banyan, of which Sterl had seen pictures. It resembled the banyan in the way it sent down innumerable branches, all to become rooted and spread wide.

  A splash in the water, and a movement of something alive, distracted Sterl’s attention from the tree-tent he was examining. He saw a strange animal slide or draw out on the bank. It had a squatty body that might have resembled a flat pig, but for the thick fur on its back. It had a long head, which took the shape, presently, when Sterl located the eyes, of an abnormal and monstrous bill of a duck. Sterl stared disputing his own eyesight. But the thing was an animal and alive. It had front feet with long, cruel claws. Its back feet and tail were hidden in the grass. All of a sudden Sterl realized that he was staring at the strangest creature in this strange Australia, perhaps in the world, no less than Leslie’s much-vaunted duck-billed platypus. Then, as never before, Sterl wished for his skeptic cowboy friend. If that queer cross between a duck and an egg-laying mammal had not slid back into the pool, Sterl would have watched it till dark.

  Taking up the horse tracks again, Sterl reluctantly left the shining, silent glade and went on. Tree ferns high over his head, drooping fern leaves twenty feet long, appeared in spots where their crowns could catch the sunlight. And the deeper he penetrated upon the course he had decided upon, he began leaving a trail his black man friend could follow at a trot. Every few steps he broke the tips of brush or stripped the tufted grasses or crashed through the scrub.

  He followed an irregular, flowing stream into level, rocky country where, if the jungle still persisted, its luxuriant growths were wanting. The great gum trees, however, spread on interminably. Light ahead and open sky prepared Sterl for a change in the topography of the bush. And a low hum of falling water was the voice of a waterfall. Out from behind giant trees he stepped to the brink of a precipice and to a blue, sun-streaked abyss that brought him to a standstill.

  It was sunrise. The sun, gloriously red and blazing, appeared again to be in the wrong place. Sterl had to reconcile himself that this burst of morning light came from the east. No matter how badly a man was lost he dared not deny the sunrise. The abyss at his feet had the extraordinary beauty, if not the colossal dimensions, of the Arizona cañons he had known from boyhood. Sterl was an expert in cañon walls and depths. Up from his right seared a low, thunderous roar. By craning his neck he saw where the stream leaped off, turning from shining green to lacy white. It fell a thousand feet, struck a ledge of broken wall, cascaded over and through huge rocks, to leap from a second precipice from which purple depths no murmur arose. Walls opposite where Sterl stood, rust-stained and lichened, sheered down precipitously in shadow. On his own side the sun tipped the ramparts with rose and gold and blazed the great wall halfway down.

  The space across the neck of this cañon appeared narrower, perhaps, than it really was. It widened away from that notch where Sterl stood. Far down the cañon green slopes met in a dark line, where outcropping crags of yellow broke the dark monotony. Above these crags a bulge of timbered slope brunted the cañon and split it. To the left it yawned into purple space, and to the right a smaller branch led Sterl’s searching gaze to another waterfall, a wedge-shaped column of exquisitely sunrise-tinted white that fell down and down, like smoke, to disappear without a murmur.

  “Well, Australia, as if I hadn’t already seen enough!” was Sterl’s tribute. It was hard for a lover of cañons to turn away from that superb sight, and Sterl did so reluctantly. But he was lost, seriously lost. He pushed on, turning away from this deceiving sun, marveling that such a huge break in the earth could occur on what had apparently been a level terrain with mountain ranges rising. It added another proof of the immensity and diversity of this hinterland.

  Strange birds caught his attention, one of them a black parrot, and gigantic beetles, dragon-flies, spiders. He pushed on, resolutely opposed to the instinct and passion that had led him into the predicament. A gigantic snake in his path, however, stopped him agape, alarmed, his rifle thrust forward ready for an attack. But the mottled reptile, neck as thick as his arm, body as large as his thigh, glided away, lengthening out to fully twenty feet.

  “Whew! He was a humdinger,” burst out Sterl, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  Sterl decided he would shoot a wallaby, or rabbit, or even a Koala bear, if he met with one, and have the meat in case he was held up in the bush another night. He saw three kinds of snakes, all of which slipped away out of sight. Once he had a shot at a bush turkey, running like a streak across an open place, but he missed to his chagrin. “Never could hit turkeys running crosswise,” he grumbled. He passed nests of some kind, all of twice his height, and from one a big bird, to judge from the roar of wings he made, flew off unseen into the bush.

  But Sterl did happen on a bird so beautiful in appearance and astounding in action that it halted him in his tracks. The spot was open to a little sunlight, carpeted with fine brown needles like those from a pine tree. The bird espied Sterl, but that did not change its strange and playful antics. It was bright with many colors, not quite so large as a robin or meadowlark. This fairy creature of the bush skipped and hopped around so friskily that Sterl had to look sharp and long to locate its lovely hues. But the most pronounced was a golden-yellow. There was brown, too, marked with white, and a lovely sheen of greenish-olive, like that on a hummingbird, and its under-part appeared to be gray. Its exquisite daintiness and sprightliness gave the bird some elfin quality, some spirit of the lonely bush. It seemed to Sterl that the lovely creature’s dancing movements were a sort of playing with leaves and twigs. It saw him, assuredly, out of bright, dark eyes, and, for all Sterl knew, it might have been the incarnation of joy and life in that bushland. Then again he remembered Leslie’s lecture on Australian wildlife. It was the golden bower bird.

  The day passed like a dream, and he did not kill any meat to eat or find his way out of the bush. The thousand and one animate creatures he sighted made those hot hours pass. But sunset found him more honestly lost than ever, and, as nightfall approached, apprehension, with its attendant depression, fastened upon him. He could not remember a time when he had found building a fire so desperately hard. At last he accomplished it, just in time to have the smoke save him from being eaten alive by mosquitoes. He had to hold his head over the smoldering fire until he was almost suffocated, and then, when he bent aside to catch a breath, he would be assailed by the fierce, humming, long-billed, blood-sucking devils.

  That turned out to be a terrible night, sleepless, without rest, miserable to the point of exhaustion. When it ended and day came, Sterl set out again, blinded, poisoned, and in a frightful condition. He could not travel fast, even if that had been wise. Sterl’s
consideration of his situation convinced him that he should halt and wait for Friday to find him. The black man would be far on his trail by now. He had not the slightest doubt of that. He should stop and wait. To go on might just prolong the stalk and the agony. Any moment he might fall over the rocks or into a hole, to break a leg, or otherwise injure himself so that getting back to camp would be a grievous, almost impossible task. To that end Sterl chose the first open spot near water that he came across. It was high noon and hot, even in the shade. He lay down to rest before gathering a store of wood for several fires, and almost at once he went to sleep.

  He was roused by a voice and a hand shaking his shoulder. A black visage, beaded with sweat bent over him. Great black eyes pierced into his very being.

  “Friday!” Sterl cried in a husky voice, and he struggled to sit up. “You found…me?”

  “Yes, boss. Black fella tinkit boss sit down quick.”

  “No. Boss fool!”

  Friday had his wommera and spears in one hand, a small bag in the other. “Meat,” he said, and opened it for Sterl. Inside were thick strips of beef, cooked and salted, some hard damper, and a quantity of dried fruit. Sterl felt his mouth water, and the fragrance of the meat distended his nostrils. He tore a strip in two, and handed half to Friday. When had meat ever tasted so good?

  “How far camp, Friday?” he asked between periods of mastication. “Close up.” And the black made circles with his finger in the mat of brown needles to indicate how Sterl had traveled around and around. It was a humiliating thing to have verified, although he had been afraid of that. Sterl did not choose to betray his fear that he might never have gotten out. But that had been very possible.

  “Boss track cassawary,” said Friday.

  There could not be any possibility of hiding physical things from this black. “Cassawary? All same like emu?”