The Naked Country

by Morris West

  From this moment, she was lost to Mundaru. But he still desired her. He sought occasions to meet her alone, to speak with her, out of sight of the other women. He was young, while her husband was old. He was pleasing to her. Her eyes told him that; but she was afraid of her husband – as Mundaru was afraid. Because Willinja’s cold eyes could look into the marrow of a man’s brain and his spirit travelled abroad out of his body, seeing what was done in the most secret places.

  Even now, on the edge of sleep, Mundaru could feel his hostile presence, shepherding his thoughts away from Menyan. He must not fight him – yet. But with the white man dead, and the white man’s strength absorbed into himself, then, he might be ready to enter into open conflict. A small, cold tremor of anticipation shook him, then burrowing deeper into the warmth of the sand, he composed himself for sleep.

  The bucks watched him, with sidelong speculative eyes. They talked a little in low voices, then they too stretched themselves on the sand and before the flames had died to a dull red glow, they were snoring like tired animals.

  To Lance Dillon, penned in the small, liquid darkness under the pandanus roots, had come a small ray of hope. It was a moonbeam, slanting down from a point above his head and falling on the black, still water in front of him. Inch by inch, he slewed himself round in the confined space until, looking up, he could see a narrow opening between the upper roots and the mud bank. It was, perhaps, three feet above his head, and he judged it almost large enough to take his head and shoulders. If he could reach it and pass through it, he might scale the high bank under the shadows of the bushes and head across the grass flats away from the sleeping myalls.

  It was a big ‘if’. He was very weak. One arm and shoulder were useless and this gymnastic effort might well prove too much for him. The slightest noise would brings the myalls leaping to their feet and splashing across the river. The first problem was the bank itself. The black soil was damp and slippery and its contours were clotted into large projections, any one of which might break away and fall noisily into the water.

  With infinite care, he began to scoop out with his hands, a foothold just above the water-line. As each handful was dug, he laid it gently in the water, letting it float soundlessly away from his palm. He dug deep, so that his feet would not slide, he groped around the mouth of the hole, feeling for friable pieces that might fall away under pressure. Then, when the two lower holes were dug, he reached up and hollowed two more above his head.

  It was a child’s labour, but before it was done, he was trembling as if in ague and the sweat was running down his face. Then, new risks presented themselves. His clothing was full of water. The moment he climbed upwards, it would spill out, noisily, into the pool. The roots above his head were matted and rough. They might tangle themselves in his belt or in the loose, flapping fabric.

  Bracing himself against one of the log roots, he bent down into the water and took off his boots. The simple operation took a long time. The laces were leather, tight-drawn and slippery. He had to rest many times before he was free of them. Trousers and shirt came next, and, as he worked his way out of them, he could feel the leeches, squamous and bloated, clinging to his flesh. He tried to pull them off, but they clung all the tighter. He must endure them a while longer while they drained him of blood he could ill afford to lose. He crouched mother-naked in the pool, debating whether to try to salvage his clothing against the heat of the coming day. Finally, he decided against it and let the sodden garments sink to the bottom of the pool.

  He was ready now – ready to make the attempt on which his life depended. He looked up towards the narrow opening where the moonlight gleamed, then, with a wracking effort, hoisted himself into the first foothold. Behind him, in the water, floated the spearhead and the broken haft which had slipped, unnoticed, from his grasp while he was preparing himself for sleep.

  CHAPTER THREE

  FOR SERGEANT NEIL ADAMS, Northern Territory Mounted Police, the dog days were coming. He knew the symptoms: the day-long depression, the restless nights, the itch in the blood for whisky or a woman or an honest-to-God brawl – anything to break the crushing monotony of life in the outback emptiness. The disease itself was endemic and recurrent – regular as the lunar periods. It had a name in all languages: Weltschmerz, cafard, and, here in the territory, they called it simply ‘gone troppo’.

  It began as a languor, a distaste for the repetitive elements of living: food, work, company and confinement. It built to a brooding moroseness, which lasted sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, and in chronic cases, became permanent.

  Its climax was a feverish melancholy which broke usually in a catharsis of violence or drunkenness but ended, sometimes, in suicide or murder.

  No one who lived long in the Territory escaped it utterly. All, in one fashion or another, were marked by it, as folks are marked by the yellow tinge of latent malaria. The ‘hatters’ surrendered themselves to solitude and crazy contemplations. The cattlemen and the drovers hit the outback settlements and launched themselves into a week of drinking and fighting. The stockboys and the station aborigines grew sullen and disobedient and finally went walkabout into the bush. Women became tearful and shrewish. Some of them lapsed into brief heart-breaking love affairs with the nearest available man; so that one more item of gossip was bruited in the bars from Darwin to Alice Springs, from Broome to Mataranka. Only the intelligent, the disciplined, the responsible managed to suppress it, as malaria is suppressed, by therapeutic treatment.

  For Sergeant Neil Adams, the treatment was simple – work, and more work.

  His headquarters were at Ochre Bluffs, a small huddle of clap-board buildings under the lee of a range of red hills. His territory extended a hundred miles in every direction and included a mixed population of cattlemen, publicans, storekeepers, two doctors, four bush nurses, transient pilots, stock inspectors, well-sinkers, drifters and whites ‘gone native’. His duties were legion. He took the census, sobered drunks, tracked down tribal killers, settled disputes on brands and boundaries, registered births, marriages and deaths, leprosy and syphilis.

  Much of it was paper-work in the dusty office of his bungalow at Ochre Bluffs. The rest of it meant days in the saddle, nights by a camp-fire, with Billy-Jo, the aboriginal tracker, for company. Yet in the sprawling, inchoate life of the territory, he was a symbol of security, of ultimate order. He could not afford to be a drunk or a lecher or a chaser of tribal women. At the first lapse, his authority would be destroyed completely.

  So, when the black mood began to grow on him, he would saddle and ride away from Ochre Bluffs, into the myall country. Billy-Jo would pick up the tracks of a nomad group, and follow them – for days sometimes – to a water-hole or a river-bed. He would talk with the elders, look to the sick, note the new-born and the dead, pick up hints of feuds and medicine killings. At night, he would sit by their fires, listening to their songs, watching the dances of the men, piecing out, step by step, the intimate progression of their lives, adding a new word or a new symbol to his knowledge. Practice had made him proficient in the exercise, and after a while, his old identity would fall away; he would find himself absorbed in an ancient, complex life, from which he would emerge relaxed, renewed and ready for a new effort.

  He had one inflexible rule. At such times, he never went near a homestead unless called to an emergency. He was thirty-five years of age, six feet tall, handsome in a rugged fashion and full of the sap of manhood. He knew himself too well to trust himself to the company of a lonely woman whose husband might be absent for days at a time. He had learnt his lesson early, at the cost of one near-tragedy. He liked his job. He had the taste for dependence and authority. He knew the price he had to pay to keep them. For the rest, there was a month’s leave every year; and what he did with it was his own affair.

  So, a few minutes before nine on this raw, hot morning, he sat in his office, smoking the first cigarette of the day and waiting for the radio circuit to open. Soon, the monitor station at Jami
eson’s Creek would come on the air, calling in, one by one, the homesteads and the mission stations and the police offices over three thousand square miles of territory. They would report their needs and their problems. They would pin-point the locations of the flying doctor and the bush nurses and the mail-plane. Adams would detail his own movements and tell where he could be found on each day of his trip. Telegrams would be passed; news and gossip exchanged. When it was over, he would be free to go and purge his own devils in the privacy of the emptiest continent on the planet.

  He walked across to the set, switched on and waited. Dead on the hour, the voice of the monitor came crackling in:

  ‘LXR…Jamieson’s Creek calling in Network One. Check in everybody, please… LXR, Jamieson’s Creek… Nine o’clock call-in. No traffic until everyone has reported. Come in, Coolangi…’

  And then roll-call began.

  ‘This is Coolangi. We’re in.’

  ‘This is Boolala…’

  ‘Hilda Springs in and waiting…’

  Behind each distorted voice was a face, a family, a community, and Neil Adams knew them all. Knew them by name and habit, by bank-roll and taste in liquor. They were, in a very real sense, his people. The monitor went on calling steadily through the checklist and each station answered briskly and briefly. But when he called Minardoo homestead, there was a change. A woman’s voice, high and urgent, answered.

  ‘Hold it, please! Hold it! This is an emergency. I’m Mary Dillon.’

  The monitor reassured her, calmly.

  ‘O.K., Mrs Dillon. We’ve got you. Let’s have it slow and clear. What’s the trouble?’

  Neil Adams turned up his amplifier and listened attentively. Mary Dillon’s voice filled his small room.

  ‘It’s my husband. He was due home last night. He didn’t come. The stockboys found his horse wandering near the homestead this morning. There was blood on the saddle. I’ve sent them out to look for him, but I’m worried, dreadfully worried.’

  Fifty listeners heard her, and felt for her, but only the monitor answered.

  ‘Hold it, Mrs Dillon… Did you get that, Sergeant Adams?’

  ‘Adams here. I’ve got it. Let me talk please. Mrs Dillon, can you hear me?’

  ‘I hear you, yes.’

  ‘I want you to answer my questions clearly and simply. First, where did your husband go yesterday?’

  ‘He went to a breeding pen we’ve got, just behind red ridge. Twenty miles more or less from the homestead.’

  ‘Anyone go with him?’

  ‘No. All the stockmen were out mustering.’

  ‘When the pony came in, was he lathered?’

  ‘No. Jimmy, the head stockman, said he must have just ambled home during the night. He was reasonably fresh.’

  ‘Has anyone gone out to look for your husband?’

  ‘Yes. Jimmy and four boys.’

  ‘What did Jimmy say about the blood on the saddle?’

  ‘He-he said he didn’t like it. But he wouldn’t add anything.’

  ‘All right, Mrs Dillon, just sit tight a moment. I’ll talk to you again… Does anybody know if there’s a plane near Ochre Bluffs? Over.’

  Out of the crackle of static, a new voice answered, a thick Scots burr with an edge of humour under it.

  ‘This is Jock Campbell, laddie. Gilligan’s due in with the mail in twenty minutes. He’s flying the Auster. Do you want me to send him over for you?’

  ‘Yes, please, Jock. Tell him two passengers with packs. Me and Billy-Jo.’

  ‘Will do, laddie. I’ll tell him the score. Expect him in about an hour and a half. Over.’

  ‘Mrs Dillon? Sergeant Adams again. I’m coming over with Tommy Gilligan. With luck I’ll be there in three hours. I’m bringing a tracker. I want two saddle-horses and pack-pony. Also, make me up a medical kit. Bandages, antiseptic, sulpha-powder and whisky. Is that clear?’

  ‘Quite clear. I’ll be waiting.’

  ‘Jamieson Creek? Pass the word to the doctor. Keep a check on his movements. I may have to get in touch with him in a hurry. Is there anything more for me?’

  ‘No… All clear, Neil. We’ll hold the routine stuff. If anything urgent crops up, we’ll know where to get you. Good luck. Good luck, Mrs Dillon, and we’ll be waiting for news. Don’t worry too much. Over to you, Neil.’

  ‘Thanks, man. Ochre Bluffs, over and out.’

  Neil Adams flipped off the power and began to pace thoughtfully up and down the narrow office.

  Mary Dillon’s report troubled him – for more reasons than one. At first blush, it was a commonplace bush accident: a man thrown from his horse and sweating it out with a broken arm or leg until the stockboys came to find him. Some survived it, some didn’t. But, normally, the policeman simply took the reports and waited until the station staff had made their own search; by which time it was a case either for a doctor or an undertaker. But blood on a man’s saddle meant trouble – blackfellow trouble: and this was always police business.

  Tribal violence against the white had died out long ago. Single incidents were now so rare as to be sensational; and they were generally connected with women, smuggled liquor or the intrusion of shady characters into tribal preserves. But, whatever their cause, they were a headache to the local police authority. Native affairs were a tender political issue in the Federal Capital as in the Territory itself. The Government needed to make a good showing in United Nations, to bolster its Trusteeship claims in New Guinea. It fostered education, social betterment, ultimate integration. The cattle interests were less enthusiastic. They depended on aboriginal and half-caste labour to run their holdings cheaply. They were committed to the status quo – and they opposed anything that looked like soft handling of the natives. The unwary policeman was apt to find himself caught between the upper and the nether millstones.

  All this was only part of Adams’s problem. The other half it was Mary Dillon herself.

  Of all the women in his territory, this was the one to whom he felt himself the most vulnerable. He had seen her first at a dance on Coolangi Station, a slim, dark woman in a modish bouffant frock, strangely out of place among the local matrons and their suntanned daughters. He remembered the smile she gave him when he asked her to dance, the feel of her body as she relaxed in his arms, her relief when he was able to talk about things that interested her, the hint of fear and discontent when she talked of her own life in the Territory. He understood how she felt. Lance Dillon was a man ploughing a rough furrow, a driving, persistent man, with little understanding of women. He had neither the time nor the wit to give this one what she needed.

  But Neil Adams understood. Neil Adams had time, passion and a practised bachelor’s way with the ladies. While Dillon was swapping stories at the bar, he squired Mary through the introductions, charmed her with tales of his roving life and made her laugh with the spicier gossip of the outback.

  They had warmed to each other, but a mutual caution had made them withdraw from intimacy of voice or gesture. When the evening was over, she had thanked him without coquetry and let him hand her back to her husband. Three or four times since then, he had met her at the homestead with Dillon and they had welcomed him with the offhand friendliness of the bush. But the memory of that first night still clung to him: the sound of her voice, the heady drift of her perfume, an itch in his blood when the dark moods took him.

  Now, they must meet again, alone with the unspoken attraction between them and her husband hurt or dead on the fringe of the Stone Country.

  He frowned and ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of impatience and indecision; then he walked to the door and shouted for Billy-Jo, the black tracker.

  Willinja, the sorcerer, sat in the shadow of a high rock and waited for the men of the tribe to come to him.

  The rocks was shaped like Willinja’s own totem, the Kangaroo – broad base, which was the rump of the animal, tapering upwards to a small head, on which two projections stood up like the pricked ears of the marsupial. W
hen the sun was climbing, as it was now, the shadow fell upon Willinja, and the small head lay forward of him, the ears pressed to the dust, listening.

  Behind the rock, in the full blaze of sun, was a water-hole which, even in the drought time, never quite dried up. There were thus the sun, the water-hole, the rock, the man, and the shadow covering the man and extending beyond him. Their positions, their relationship to one another had ritual significance.

  The pool took knowledge from the sun, which saw everything. The rock drank knowledge from the pool, but sheltered the sorcerer from the malignant reflection of his own magic. Through the shadow, it passed on power and protection, and the listening ears searched out secrets even in the dust.

  Willinja himself sat cross-legged on the ground, his face turned towards the encampment from which the men would come to him. In the dry dust, he had drawn, with a sharpened stick, the totems of the tribe: the great snake, the buffalo, the crocodile and the fish which is called barramundi. Each drawing showed the outline of the animal, and the framework of bones inside it, as if an all-seeing eye had stripped off the meat and muscle to come to the core of the being.

  Behind the drawings were laid out the instruments of Willinja’s magic: a round river stone, marked with ochre; a long sliver of quartzite pointed at one end, and at the other, coated with gum and trailing long strands of human hair; a small bark dilly-bag containing human bones.

  The sorcerer was a tall man, strong but ageing, so that the skin of his body puckered and wrinkled over the long decorative scars on his chest and belly. His mouth was wide and full of yellow teeth. His broad, flat nose receded into the craggy brows, from which quick eyes stared out across the sunlit plain. His hair and his beard were grey, but powdered with ochre dust, so that against the dark skin of his face, they stood out like fire.