The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall

by Alan Marshall

  The log grunted, rumbled as it moved to the pull of the winch. It slid over its curved bed of crushed fern and bark, slowly raising its tethered end to the bull wheel on the bobtail. The winch’s cable drum screeched in protest, then held the weight in silence.

  ‘Let her go,’ said Steve.

  The tractor roared forward, then, the treads failing to grip, it dug into the ground like an echidna, piling heaps of soil at the rear of its steel tracks. Granite stones, bared by the revolutions, smoked as the steel plates skidded, then gripped on their surface.

  The log lurched forward, one end held high above the ground, the tail swaying and rolling from side to side like a fish fighting against a hook.

  But its movements were slow as though it were tired. It lumbered heavily, rolling against tree-ferns that shook their green crowns frantically.

  Dead saplings snapped and crashed at its impact. It gouged a groove for itself in the ground and slid over littered bark with a scraping hiss.

  The tractor stormed ahead, filling the bush with its clamour.

  ‘See how the log toms along,’ said Blue, watching it.

  ‘Come on,’ said Bill. ‘We’ve got to log this tree yet.’

  They returned to the fallen tree and marked the limbless section of the trunk into sections for cross-cutting into logs.

  ‘There’s a twelve, a fourteen, an eighteen, a twenty-eight and a twenty,’ said Blue placing the measuring stick on the ground. ‘What does that make?’

  Bill took the stub of a pencil from his pocket and wrote figures on a smooth piece of bark.

  ‘A hundred and sixteen,’ he said.

  ‘He’s a good stick,’ said Blue.

  They cut a ring of bark from around the trunk and, standing one each side of the fallen tree, they drew the long saw across the peeled section.

  ‘Anyway, he hasn’t bridged,’ said Bill, falling into a rhythmic swing. ‘We won’t have to saw him upwards.’

  The saw snarled through the sap wood, then changed its note to a higher key. White sawdust gave way to that of a darker colour. The two men, joined by the saw, moved with the even drive of a machine.

  ‘I can’t help thinking about your back,’ said Bill. ‘You’d’ve thought you’d’ve gone mad being burnt like that.’

  ‘You don’t feel it,’ said Blue. ‘You’re too busy trying to live. It’s afterwards you feel it. A crown fire only takes about ten minutes to go over, you know, and in that ten minutes you think of nothing but breathing.’

  ‘I always thought bushfires were the same,’ said Bill.

  Blue stopped sawing and looked at him across the log.

  ‘Listen. There’s three kinds of bushfires. One just creeps along in a calm. It burns leaves and that on the floor of the bush. It’s easy to belt out. This one behind Barret’s is a scrub fire. It can travel at a fair bat, but it stops below the heads of the trees. But say it comes out hellishun hot and a north wind comes up. The scrub fire gets going then. It climbs up the messmate bark and sets off on its own. It travels in the tops of the trees.

  ‘It makes a wind that’d blow you flat. Underneath the scrub fire races to keep up. Flames go ahead flappin’ like sheets. They’re hundreds of feet high. It’s not only the bloody trees that are burning, it’s the air.

  ‘See this mountain here,’ Blue pointed to the slope rising behind him. ‘A crown fire’d leap that like a kangaroo. It jumps a gully like I’d jump a gutter. Little fires start up miles ahead of it. Then they join, and the crown fire swallows the lot in a bloody roar that’s in your ears for hours afterwards.

  ‘Before it hits you a black-out comes and you can’t see your hand in front of you. The smoke’s that bad you don’t know where the little fires are starting. They bust into flame at your feet. And all this before the fire reaches you. God Almighty! you don’t know what to do.

  ‘Blokes that have never been through a crown fire always say, “Why don’t you get out into an open space?” “Why don’t you lie in a creek?” Little creeks boil in a crown fire, and there’s no open space in this bush big enough to save you. People don’t seem to think that air can burn. Well, I’ve seen it and, by cripes, I’ll see it again if a north wind and a hot day gets that fire going.’

  It’s a Hen’s Track

  The Mission of Mapoon lies on the West Coast of the Cape York Peninsula. It was here that I met Aelan and Raymond.

  Raymond was four and Aelan was six. They were sons of Mr Kane, the Missionary in charge of Mapoon.

  At first we were reserved in our conversation, then our relationship reached a stage where we mutually respected each other. We engaged in long discussions on various matters and found we agreed on most things.

  They constantly supplied me with information which they insisted I record in my note book for future reference.

  Raymond was sturdy and adventurous and since, like his brother, he wore nothing but an abbreviated pair of shorts, his perfect body was burnt to a deep tan. He would attempt any deed of prowess and his obvious superiority in this respect was readily admitted by Aelan, who constantly advertised his younger brother’s daring.

  Aelan was not so sturdy a build and specialized more in mental adventuring in the realms of philosophy. His profound observations were eagerly awaited by Raymond, who paid him the tribute of a respectful attention when he expounded a viewpoint.

  Only that morning when the three of us were discussing pets, Aelan delivered himself of this story:

  ‘I had a little pig but it died, and Raymond had a little pig but it died too. My little pig ran out in the rain—pitter, patter, pitter-patter. Then he ran in—pitter-patter, pitter-patter. Then he ran out—pitter-patter, pitter-patter.

  ‘And he lay down in the rain and Rosie—that’s our cook—brought him in to the fire. That was supposed to make him open his eyes. But he didn’t open his eyes. Then he was really and truly dead. I cried a lot that night.’

  ‘It is sad when they die,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s wrong that little children should have little things that die. Little dogs are like that. A man doesn’t run round with a dog and he doesn’t mind if it dies. Little children run round with dogs and they miss them.’

  Now he came walking towards me as I sat resting on the sand. Behind him walked Raymond and a little black boy.

  They confronted me and demanded that I fulfil a promise I had made to them that morning.

  ‘Have you forgotten the walk?’ asked Aelan.

  ‘No,’ I answered, ‘but it’s not cool enough yet.’

  ‘I feel it very cool at present,’ said Raymond.

  ‘Do you?’ I said without enthusiasm.

  ‘We’re ready,’ said Aelan. ‘When you’re ready we’ll all be ready.’

  The little black boy said nothing. He stood in the background, sucking his finger and watching me nervously.

  ‘All right,’ I said, I’ll come.’

  Raymond, being the gentleman that he was, placed his hand upon the little black boy’s shoulder and said, ‘This is John. He’s coming too and we like him.’

  The finality in this statement was, I felt, introduced in anticipation of a possible objection from me, but I removed the slight tenseness by exclaiming:

  ‘Hullo, John. I like you too.’

  John was a silent but appreciative companion who was used by Raymond as a recipient of whispered confidences delivered with an arm across his shoulder and a mouth against his ear. What these confidences were, I never learnt.

  They were always accompanied by a pause in our progress, but resulted in no change in our plans.

  Tracks in the sand interested me. Each morning I could see where lizards, beetles and snakes had passed. Everything that moved on the fine sand beneath the coconut palms left an impression.

  ‘I never see any lizards, yet the sand is covered with their tracks,’ I observed.

  ‘They come out at night, but I have seen them,’ said Aelan.

  ‘The snakes must come out a
t night, too,’ I murmured.

  ‘Most animals walk in the night,’ said Aelan.

  ‘Here’s a hawk’s track,’ announced Raymond, squatting beside some tracks he had discovered.

  I looked at them.

  ‘A hen’s,’ I corrected him.

  Raymond gave another quick look at the tracks.

  ‘A hawk’s,’ he said, his lips closing firmly.

  ‘A hen’s,’ I repeated stubbornly.

  ‘A hawk’s.’

  ‘A hen’s.’

  A delicate situation had developed. Our expedition was in danger. I could see no solution to the impasse and mentally forecast that we would all part company.

  John then came forward and examined the tracks with a slight frown on his face. He refused to comment, but I noticed that he walked over and stood beside Raymond. This was a bad sign.

  Aelan took control. He knelt beside the tracks and looked at them in silence. At length he rose and addressed Raymond.

  ‘It is a hen’s track, Raymond,’ he said, then turning to me, he added, ‘Raymond has found hawk’s tracks before, anyway.’

  ‘Plenty of them,’ said Raymond promptly.

  John confirmed this by scratching himself enthusiastically.

  ‘I am sure he has,’ I said.

  The tension left us. We moved together and wandered on discussing tracks in general.

  ‘Are you going to write down what we tell you when you go inside?’ asked Aelan.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you needn’t go round asking anyone else about tracks. We are telling you all about tracks.’

  ‘I wouldn’t think of asking anyone else,’ I said. ‘You have told me all I want to know.’

  ‘We know a lot more yet,’ said Aelan. ‘If you keep walking with us, we will tell you a lot more about tracks, won’t we Raymond?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Raymond.

  John’s admiring glance at Raymond showed he agreed with this.

  I suggested a paddle in the sea, but the quick, ‘No fear,’ from Raymond made it seem far too dangerous.

  ‘There is a jelly-fish that has a long blue sting,’ said Aelan. ‘Oo-oo, they chase you with it, then you are dead for life.’

  Aelan was interested in death. The body of an insect covered with ants claimed our attention. With his face twisted in keeping with his thoughts, he said:

  ‘That was a living thing once. Now look at it. It is dead. It will never walk on trees again.’

  ‘It dies so that the ants might live,’ I said.

  ‘It is better than the ants,’ he said. ‘It should come first.’

  Raymond had grabbed a rope hanging from a tree. He swung wildly, putting all his energy into hurling himself higher and higher. He suddenly let go and flew in a curve through the air. He hit the soft sand with a thud, rolling over and over. John ran to pick him up, but he rose unaided grinning proudly.

  ‘When you are big, you will be in a circus swinging on a trapeze,’ I said.

  ‘Raymond can do anything,’ said Aelan, then added, ‘Sometimes, I would like to be big.’

  ‘You are really lucky,’ I said. ‘When you are small you know you will be big some day, but when you are big you know that you will never be small again, and that is sad.’

  ‘You can be two things when you are small, then?’

  ‘Yes. You see, I am big but I can never be small. That is sad. You are small, but you know you are going to be big. It must be good to know that.’

  ‘I don’t want so much to be big,’ he said. ‘I’d like to do brave things,’ and he looked at the rope.

  ‘So would I,’ I said. ‘I would like to do brave things too.’

  ‘Have you got to be big to do brave things?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You can be big when you are small, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes. You are like that.’

  ‘Aw!’ he exclaimed, embarrassed. He kicked the sand with his bare foot.

  ‘Doesn’t the hot sand burn your feet?’

  My feet were bare and a few minutes before I had made desperate bounds to reach the shade of a tree.

  ‘When we were little, it did,’ he said. ‘But you see, our feet are tough now. Look!’ and he stood out in the sunshine.

  ‘That sand would cook my feet,’ I told him.

  ‘It will cook an egg,’ said Raymond.

  ‘Once a hen laid an egg and we found it,’ said Aelan, ‘and it was cooked. It might have needed a little more on the fire but not much.’

  We had reached the end of the palm grove that sheltered the mission buildings. Ahead of us was a wide stretch of grassland beyond which lay the bush, now distorted in the thick heat that shimmered above the earth.

  I had noticed Raymond wearing a brass whistle suspended from his neck by a piece of string. In the side of this whistle was a small compass which he frequently consulted. He would blow the whistle loudly, then snatch it from his mouth and gaze sternly at the compass as if it contained information of great urgency.

  ‘We can’t get lost with a compass,’ he told me in explanation of his frequent absorption in the movements of its needle.

  ‘How does it work?’ I asked him. ‘Why can’t you get lost?’

  ‘You go where the little wiggley thing points,’ he explained.

  ‘But, look!’ I exclaimed. ‘It is pointing away over there,’ and I nodded towards some trees that lay in the opposite direction to the house.

  ‘If you walked over there, you would get lost.’

  ‘We wouldn’t get lost with my compass, would we, Aelan?’

  ‘No,’ said Aelan. ‘We would come to the beach and then we would follow the beach home.’

  ‘There you are,’ said Raymond, triumphantly.

  ‘Let us go where it points, then,’ I said.

  We moved across the open grassland and came to a large wire-netting trap for crows. It contained a large pile of bones and dried entrails and one crow. The crow was afraid and flew frantically round inside the cage, colliding with the sides.

  Aelan, like a guide on tour, explained it to me.

  ‘This is a crow trap. The crows get in here’—he pointed to a funnel-shaped hole at the top—‘and they can’t get out. Then you get a stick and you put your arm through here and you hit them dead.’

  He thrust a stick through the hole and struck at the bird. It became frantic. Its bill was open and it was panting.

  ‘Don’t do that. It’s cruel,’ I said.

  ‘Crows must be killed,’ he said firmly.

  ‘But you are tormenting that one,’ I said. ‘It should be killed quickly.’

  He withdrew his stick and looked at the crow in a troubled way.

  ‘A crow is a mistake,’ he said. ‘Anything you have to kill is a mistake.’

  I wanted time to consider an answer to this, but he turned to me and said, ‘Is there anything more you want to know about crows?’

  ‘I think that is all,’ I said.

  ‘Now don’t go asking anyone else about crows. We have told you everything and you can write it down when you go back.’

  We left the trap and passed into a bush of twisted acacias, hakeas and casuarina trees. I stopped and assumed the role of a leader of explorers.

  ‘Gather round,’ I demanded.

  They gathered round me with faces made serious by my tone.

  ‘We are short of water, men,’ I told them in a solemn voice. ‘It will be touch and go whether we will reach civilization. We are at least a hundred miles from home with only our friend John, here, to save us.’

  This statement disturbed Raymond who, obviously, had little faith in John’s ability as a guide. He looked quickly at his compass, then back towards the mission buildings which could just be seen through the trees.

  The sight reassured him and he became more cheerful.

  ‘A hundred miles away, we are,’ he said excitedly.

  ‘Lead on, McDuff,’ I said to John.

  ‘His name is John,’ said Raym
ond.

  ‘Lead on, John,’ I said.

  John went ahead, walking with the graceful stride of a blackfellow.

  Behind him, Raymond and Aelan marched with heads erect, arms swinging, feet lifted high.

  John was tireless and would have led us to Central Queensland had I not demanded a halt and an examination of the compass.

  A leaning tree, the sort small boys love to climb, was beside us and I ordered them aloft to look for ‘signs of habitation’.

  The tree was the home of vicious green ants that ran up the boys’ legs and fell on their naked backs from higher branches. My head, as I stood beside the leaning trunk, was quite close to their legs as they climbed.

  I saw their flesh pucker into ridges where the jaws of the ants gripped it.

  But they were unconcerned and merely brushed their legs mechanically with a free hand and continued climbing.

  But mosquitoes routed us. They came from the trees in myriads until we fled followed by a cloud which harried us right to the mission gates.

  Here we parted and here John made his one solitary contribution to the day’s conversation:

  ‘It was a hen’s track,’ he said.

  How My Friends Keep Me Going

  It is ten a.m. and I have just finished a cup of black coffee sweetened with glucose. Alf recommended it. I have finished massaging my head with the hair restorer Bill gave me and have taken the cod-liver oil supplied by my grandmother.

  In two hours I will take four concentrated liver pills, a dessertspoonful of digestive powder and a swig of olive oil, all endorsed by my friends. I will then lunch on nuts and raisins and finish up with a teaspoon of my after-meals digestive powder and a wineglass of tonic.

  I will massage my head for the second time and have a eucalyptus inhalation. By this time I will be feeling pretty bad and I will have to lie down to get strength to go through it all again at dinner time.

  I blame my friends for my lamentable condition.

  A few weeks ago I could eat pork chops and cucumber salad. Now a raisin makes me bilious and the sight of a plum pudding brings on a state resembling sea-sickness.

  It is all due to my desire to ‘keep going’.