by Mike Ashley
Now I was worried. Suppose they all died like the dingos!
“I wouldn’t do this for any ruggerlugs but you, Rev,” said McCubby, digging into his swag. “But I’ll squander some of my lollies on ’em.”
“What?”
“Chawnklit. It’s what I use for trading and bribing the Bingis. They like it a buggering sight better than beads.”
“But that’s Ex-Lax!” I exclaimed when he brought it out.
“That’s what they like about it. A pleasure at both ends.”
The events of the rest of that day are indescribable. But the setting sun picked bright glints from little heaps of beads here and there throughout the rolling land in the locality. And I was having troubles of my own; I had begun to itch intolerably, all over, McCubby wasn’t surprised.
“Meat ants,” he theorized, “or sugar ants, white ants, buffalo flies, marsh flies, blow flies. We also got anopheles mosquitoes. I tell you, Rev, missionaries ain’t got the hide for cavorting bare arse.” Not too regretfully, I abandoned my idea of living as primitively as my horny-skinned flock and went back to wearing clothes.
That day was not an entire waste, however. I reminded McCubby that we required a pool of water for the upcoming ritual, and he led me to the Anulas’ tribal oasis.
“T’ain’t much of a billabong in the Dry,” he admitted. The waterhole was respectably wide and deep, but it contained only a scummy, fetid expanse of mud, through which meandered a sullen greenish trickle of water, the thickness of a lead pencil. “But come the Wet and it’d faze Noah. Anyhow, I figure it must be the one in your Golden Bow-Wow. It’s the only water inside a hundred mile.”
I wondered how, if Frazer’s hero had been desperate enough to try conjuring up a rain, he had been provided with a pool to do it at. But I muttered, “Well, dam it, that’s all.”
“Rev, I’m surprised at your intemperate bloody langwidge!”
I explained. We would throw up a temporary dam across the lower end of the billabong. By the time the Anulas recovered from their gastrointestinal malfunctions, the water should have attained a level sufficient to our purpose. So that’s what we did, McCubby and I: hauled and stacked up stones, and chinked their interstices with mud, which the fierce sun baked to an adobe-like cement. We knocked off at nightfall, and the water was already as high as our ankles.
I awoke the next morning to a tumult of whoops, shrills and clangor from the direction of the Anulas’ camp. Ah, thought I, stretching complacently; they’ve discovered their new and improved waterworks and are celebrating. Then McCubby thrust his bristly head through my tent flap and announced excitedly. “War’s bin declared!”
“Not with America?” I gasped – his report had sounded rather accusatory – but he had as suddenly withdrawn. I dragged on my boots and joined him on the knoll, and realized he had meant a tribal war.
There were about twice as many blacks down there as I had remembered, and every one of them was ululating loud enough for two more. They milled about, whacking at one another with spears and yamsticks, flinging stones and hoomerangs, and jabbing brands from the cooking fires into each other’s frizzy hair.
“It’s their neighbor tribe, the Bingbingas,” said McCubby. “They live downstream on the creek, and this sunup they found their water turned off. They’re blaming the Anulas for deliberate mass murder, so as to take over their yam grounds. If this ain’t a fair cow!”
“We must do something!”
McCubby rummaged in his swag and brought out a toy-like pistol. “This is only a pipsqueak .22,” he said. “But they ought to nick off home when they see white man’s weapons.”
We pelted together down the slope and into the fray, McCubby ferociously poppopping his little revolver in the air, and I brandishing my New Testament to proclaim that Right was on our side. Sure enough, the invading Bingbingas fell back from this new onslaught. They separated out of the confusion and withdrew carrying their wounded. We chased them to the top of a nearby hill, from which vantage they shook their fists and shouted taunts and insults for a while before retiring, defeated, in the direction of their home grounds.
McCubby circulated through the Anula camp, dusting athlete’s foot powder – the only medicament he carried – on the more seriously wounded. There were few casualties, actually, and most of these had suffered only bloody noses, lumped skulls or superficial depilations where hair or whiskers had been yanked out. I played battlefield chaplain as best I could in dumb show, pantomiming spiritual comfort at them. One good thing. All the Anulas appeared to have recovered utterly from their bead-diet prostration. This early-morning exercise had helped.
When things had calmed down, and after some breakfast tucker and tea, I dispatched McCubby to search through the tribe for an unoccupied male of the clan which claimed the dollar-bird for its kobong, or totem. He did find a young man of that persuasion and, overcoming his stubborn unwillingness, brought him to me.
“This is Yartatgurk,” said McCubby.
Yartatgurk walked with a limp, courtesy of a stiff Bingbinga kick in the shin, and was bushily bearded only on the left side of his face, courtesy of a Bingbinga firebrand. The rest of the tribe came and squatted down expectantly around the three of us, as if eager to see what new and individual treat I had in store for their young man.
“Now we must recapitulate the procedure,” I said, and began to read The Golden Bough’s description of the ceremony, McCubby translating phrase by phrase. At the conclusion, young Yartatgurk stood up abruptly and, despite his limp, commenced a vigorous heel-and-toe toward the far horizon. All the other Anulas began muttering among themselves and tapping their foreheads with a forefinger.
When McCubby fetched the struggling Yartatgurk back, I said, “Surely they all must be familiar with the ceremony.”
“They say, if you’re so buggering thirsty as to go through all that taradiddle, it’d’ve been just as easy to lug an artesian drill in here as all them beads. Too right!”
“That’s not the point,” I said. “According to Frazer, the belief is that long ago the dollar-bird had a snake for a mate. The snake lived in a pool and used to make rain by spitting up into the sky until a rainbow and clouds appeared and rain fell.”
This, translated, sent the Anulas into a regular frenzy of chattering and head-tapping.
“They say,” McCubby interpreted, “you show them a bird mating with a snake and they’ll get you all the water you want, if they have to hump the bloody Carpentaria Gulf down here by hand.”
This was depressing. “I’m quite sure a reputable anthropologist like Frazer wouldn’t lie about their tribal beliefs.”
“If he’s any kin to the Frazer I used to cobber with – old Blazer Frazer – he’d lie about which is his left and right hand.”
“Well,” I said unquenchably, “I’ve come twelve thousand miles to repudiate this custom, and I won’t be put off. Now tell Yartatgurk to stop that screeching, and let’s get on with it.”
McCubby managed, by giving Yartatgurk a large slab of Ex-Lax, to convince him that the ceremony – idiotic as he might ignorantly think it – wasn’t going to hurt him. The three of us went first to check on the billabong, and found it gratifyingly abrim with repulsive brown water, wide and deep enough to have submerged our truck. From there, we headed into the endless savanna.
“First,” I said, “we need a snake. A live one.”
McCubby scratched in his whiskers. “That might be a wowser, Rev. The boongs have et most of the snakes within hunting range. And they sprag ’em from a cautious distance, with boomerang or spear. The wipers out here in the Never Never, you don’t want to meet ’em alive.”
“Why?”
“Well, we got the tiger snake and the death adder, which their wenom has been measured twenty times as wicked as the bloody cobra’s. Then there’s the taipan, and I’ve seen meself a horse die five minutes after it nipped him. Then there’s –”
He broke off to make a grab for Yartatgurk, who was tryi
ng to sneak away. McCubby pointed into the bush and sent the blackfellow horizonward with explicit instructions. Yartatgurk limped off, looking about him nervously and sucking moodily on his chunk of chocolate. McCubby didn’t look any too happy himself, as we followed after the native at a distance, “I wish it was your buggering Frazer we was sending on this chase,” he muttered spitefully.
“Oh, come,” I said encouragingly. “There must be some nonpoisonous variety that will serve our purpose.”
“Won’t help our purpose none if we tread on one of the others first,” growled McCubby. “If this ain’t the most nincompoop –”
There was a sudden commotion out ahead of us, where we had last seen Yartatgurk creeping, hunched over, through the tussocky grass.
“He’s got one!” I shouted, as the blackfellow rose up into view with a strangled cry. He was silhouetted against the sky, toiling desperately with something huge and lashing, a fearsome sight to behold.
“Dash me rags!” breathed McCubby, in awed surprise. “I ain’t never seen a Queensland python this far west before.”
“A python!”
“Too bloody right,” said McCubby, in unfeigned admiration. “Twenty feet if he’s a hinch.”
I gaped at the lunging, Laocoön-like tableau before us. Yartatgurk was almost invisible inside the writhing coils, but he was clearly audible. I wondered momentarily if we might not have bitten off more than we could chew, but I sternly laid that specter of uncertainty. Manifestly, the good Lord was following Frazer’s script.
“Yartatgurk is inquiring,” McCubby said quietly, “who we’re rooting for.”
“Do you suppose we’ll spoil the magic if we lend a hand?”
“We’ll spoil the blackfellow if we don’t. Look there.”
“Mercy on us, he’s spouting blood!”
“T’ain’t blood. If you’d just et a quarter of a pound of Hex-Lax and then got hugged by a python, you’d spout, too.”
We fought our way into the squirming tangle and finally managed to peel the creature loose from Yartatgurk. It took the utmost strength of all three of us to straighten it out and prevent its coiling again. Yartatgurk had turned almost as white as I, but he bravely hung onto the python’s tail – being lashed and tumbled about, sometimes high off the ground – while McCubby, at its head, and I, grasping its barrel-like middle, manhandled it toward the billabong.
By the time we made it to the pool bank, all three of us were being whipped through the air, back and forth past each other, and occasionally colliding.
“Now,” I managed to gasp out, between the snake’s convulsions. “He’s got to – hold it under – oof! – the water . . .”
“I don’t think,” said McCubby, on my left, “he’s likely to agree,” said McCubby, from behind me. “When I yell go,” said McCubby, on my right, “dowse him and the snake both,” said McCubby, from overhead. “Cooee! – GO!!!”
At the command, he and I simultaneously swung our portions of the python out over the water and let go. It and the wretched Yartatgurk, flapping helplessly along like the tail of a kite, disappeared with a mighty splash. Instantly the billabong was roiled into a hissing brown froth.
“Pythons,” panted McCubby, when he could get his breath, “hates water worse’n cats do.”
The entire Anula tribe, I now noticed, had come down to cluster on the opposite side of the billabong, and were attentively following the proceedings with eyes like boiled onions.
“Was you to ask me,” said McCubby, when we had rested a while, “I’d be hard put to say who was holding who under.”
“I guess it’s been long enough,” I decreed.
We waded waist-deep into the pool and, after being knocked about a bit, managed to grab hold of the slithery loops and haul the reptile back onto the bank. Yartatgurk, we were pleased to see, came along clenched in a coil of the python’s tail.
Somewhere along about here, our handmade dam collapsed. Its mud chinking had been gradually eroded as the water backed up behind it during the night and morning. Now the agitation of the billabong toppled the weakened structure, and all the collected water drained out with a swoosh. This would probably gratify the thirsty Bingbingas downstream, I reflected, if it didn’t drown them all in that first grand flood-wave.
The submersion had taken some of the fight out of the snake, but not a great deal. McCubby and I sustained numerous bruises and contusions during this stage of the struggle, while we fought to immobilize the forepart of the thing. Yartatgurk was not much help to us, as he had gone quite limp and, clutched by the freely thrashing tail of the serpent, was being batted like a bludgeon against the surrounding trees and terrain.
“It’s time for him to kill it,” I shouted to McCubby.
As the blackfellow whisked to and fro past us, McCubby listened to his barely audible mumblings and finally reported, “He says nothing would give him greater pleasure.”
Our fantastic battle went on for a while longer, until it became apparent that Yartatgurk wasn’t up to killing the monster anytime soon, and I called to McCubby to inquire what to do next.
“I’ll hang on best I can,” he bellowed back, between curses and grunts. “You run for my swag. Get my pistol. Shoot the bugger.”
I went, but with misgivings. I feared that we white men – perhaps unconsciously flaunting our superiority – were taking too much of a hand in this ceremony and, by our meddling, might botch whatever mystical significance it held for the natives.
I came back at a run, gripping the revolver in both hands. The python appeared to have recovered from its watery ordeal and was flailing more energetically than ever, occasionally keeping both men in the air simultaneously. In all that confusing uproar, and in my own excitement, nervousness and unfamiliarity with the weapon, I took quaking aim and shot Yartatgurk in the foot.
He did not make any outright complaint (though I think he might have, if he could have), but his eyes were eloquent, I could almost have wept at their glazed expression of disappointment in me. This was a chastening thing to see, but I suppose even the most divinely inspired spiritual leader encounters it at least once in his career. None of us is perfect.
Meanwhile McCubby had disengaged himself from the melee. He snatched the pistol from me and emptied it into the serpent’s ugly head. For a long time, then, he and I leaned against each other and panted wearily, while the blackfellow and the python lay side by side and twitched.
Yartatgurk’s injury, I am relieved to say, was not a serious one. Actually, he had suffered more from his stay underwater. McCubby pumped his flaccid arms up and down, disgorging quite an astonishing quantity of water, mud, weeds and polliwogs, while I bound up the hole in his foot with a strip torn from my own bandages.
A .22, it seems, fires a triflingly small pellet, and this one had passed cleanly through Yartatgurk’s foot without so much as nicking a tendon. As the lead did not remain in the wound, and as it bled freely, there appeared to be little cause for agonizing – though this he did, at great and vociferous length, when he regained consciousness.
I decided to let the fellow enjoy a short rest and the commiserations of his clucking tribemates. Besides, I was by now so implicated in the ceremony that I figured a little more intervention could do no harm. So I went myself to perform the next step in the rite: to set up the “mimic rainbow” of grass over the defunct snake.
After fumbling unsuccessfully at this project for a considerable while, I came back and said despairingly to McCubby, “Every time I try to bend the grass into a bow it just crumbles into powder.”
“Whajjer expect,” he said with some acerbity, “after eight buggery months of drought?”
Here was another verity – like the dried-up billabong – which I couldn’t reconcile with Frazer’s account. If the grass was dry enough to warrant rainmaking, it was too dry to be bent.
Then I had an inspiration and went to look at the muck of our recent dam-site pool. As I’d hoped, there was a sparse growth of grass
there, nicely waterlogged by its night’s immersion. I plucked all I could find and tied it into a frazzled rainbow with my bootlaces. This horseshoe-shaped object I propped up around the dead python’s neck, making him look as jaunty as a racehorse in the winner’s circle.
Feeling very pleased with myself, I returned to McCubby. He, like the Anulas, was sympathetically regarding Yartatgurk, who I gathered was relating the whole history of his wounded foot from the day it was born.
“Now tell him,” I said, “all he has to do is sing.”
For the first time, McCubby seemed disinclined to relay my instructions. He gave me a long look. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and took a contemplative turn up and down the billabong bank, muttering to himself. Finally he shrugged, gave a sort of bleak little laugh, and knelt down to interrupt the nattering Yartatgurk.
As McCubby outlined the next and final step, Yartatgurk’s face gradually assumed the expression of a hamstrung horse being asked to perform its own coup de grace. After what seemed to me an unnecessarily long colloquy between the two, McCubby said:
“Yartatgurk begs to be excused. Rev. He says he’s just had too much to think about, these past few days. First he had to meditate on the nature of them beads you fed him. Then he had to mull over the Bingbingas’ burning of his beard, which cost him three years to cultivate and got glazed off in three winks. Then there was being half squoze to a pulp, and then three-quarters drownded, and then nine-tenths bludged to death, and then having his hoof punctuated. He says his poor inferior black brain is just so full of meat for study that it’s clean druv out the words of all the songs.”
“He doesn’t have to sing words,” I said. “I gather that any sprightly tune will do, crooned heavenward in a properly beseeching manner.”
There was a short silence.
“In all this empty woop-woop,” said McCubby under his breath, “one-eighth of a human bean to a square mile, and you have to be the one-eighth I cobber up with.”
