by Morris West
Adams leaned forward and tapped Gilligan on the shoulder.
‘That’s the best we can do from up here. Make for the homestead.’
Five minutes later they were bumping across the runway to where Mary Dillon was waiting for them.
She came to him, running, a slim, dark woman in a mannish shirt and jodhpurs, her face flushed from the sun, her hair wind-blown from the slipstream of the aircraft. At the last step she stumbled, and almost fell into his arms. He held her for a moment longer than was necessary, feeling her need and her relief and her unconscious clinging to him. Then, reluctantly, he released her. With Gilligan and Billy-Jo looking on, his greeting was studiously formal.
‘Hope you haven’t been too worried, Mrs Dillon. We made a circuit of the property before we came in.’
‘Did you see anything?’
The eagerness in her voice gave him an odd pang of regret. He shook his head.
‘Only your stockmen. They haven’t found anything yet.’
Her face crumpled into fear and disappointment.
‘We flew over the valley behind the sandstone bluffs. That’s where your husband was going, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. That’s where the breeding herd was. You didn’t see him there?’
‘No… But one of the animals was dead. It looked like the bull.’
‘Oh no!’
The terror in her voice seemed disproportionate to the occasion. Adams questioned her gently.
‘Is it so important, Mrs Dillon?’
Her voice rose on a high, hysterical note.
‘Important! Everything we had was there ! We paid three thousand pounds for that bull. Mortgaged ourselves to the neck to buy it. Lance said it was our only hope of holding out and making a success.
‘I’m sorry.’ What else was there to say? He shot a quick glance at Billy-Jo. The black-tracker’s eyes flickered in agreement with his unspoken thought. Dillon would not kill his own animal. If the myalls had done it and he had come upon them in the act…
Mary’s voice challenged him sharply.
‘What does it mean, Neil?’
‘We don’t know yet, Mary; and there’s no point in making nightmares for ourselves. As soon as we’re ready, we’ll ride out and see. Can you give us a quick lunch? It’s a half-day ride.’
‘Of course. It’s ready for you now. The horses are saddled and the packs are made up.’
‘Good girl!’ He turned to the pilot. ‘You’d better eat with us, Gilligan. I’ll want you to look out for a few things on the way back.’
‘Suits me, Neil. I’m hungry, anyway.’
‘Let’s go, Mary.’
They turned and walked towards the homestead, with Gilligan and the black-tracker walking behind them.
Luncheon was a hurried meal and a dismal one. Mary Dillon was full of questions which Adams parried carefully, because he did not want to be drawn into speculation on the fate of her husband. Gilligan’s attempts to brighten the conversation with territory gossip fell flat, and after a while they ate in silence. When they had finished, Adams sent Mary outside to check the supplies on the pack-ponies, while he had a swift, private conference with the pilot.
‘This looks bad, Gilligan.’
The pilot nodded.
‘Time’s running against us. We’ve got a twenty-mile ride before we even reach the Stone Country. Dillon could be dead already.’
‘What do you want me to do, Neil?’
‘Can you make another flight out this way tomorrow morning?’
‘If it’s a police matter, sure.’
‘How much runway do you need to land?’
‘Three hundred yards’ll do me. Provided it’s clear.’
‘I’ll try to find you one. When we catch up with the stockboys, I’ll set them clearing a strip. Billy-Jo and I will try to pick up Dillon’s tracks. Better we don’t have a whole mob milling about and messing up the signs.’
‘How will I know where you are?’
‘We’ll build a smoke fire. If we want you to land, we’ll lay the word in stones on the ground.’
‘If not?’
‘Make the same flight the following day. After that, I don’t think it will matter.’
‘Blackfellow trouble?’
‘I think, so.’
Gilligan whistled softly and jerked a significant thumb towards the door.
‘Are you going to tell her?’
Adams frowned and shook his head.
‘Not before I have to. When you get back, pass the word round, but keep it general. I’m not sure of anything myself yet.’
‘Will do, Neil. And good luck.’
They shook hands and walked out into the sunlight, where Mary was fixing the last straps on the saddle-bags and Billy-Jo was examining the shoe-prints of Lance Dillon’s pony. Gilligan made his farewells to Mary and Adams went with him to watch the take-off. When he came back, he saw for the first time that there were three saddle-horses instead of two, and that the pack-ponies also carried blanket-rolls and ground-sheets and water-bags for three. Before he had time to comment, Mary told him in a rush of words.
‘I’m coming with you, Neil. Lance is my husband and – and I think I’d go mad if I had to wait here for news.’
For a moment, he was tempted to refuse violently. All his experience – of the country, of women, and of himself – told him that this was a dangerous folly. Instead, he grinned and said simply:
‘Better bring something warm. The nights are damned chill. Pack some liniment too – you’ll have saddle sores before you’re much older.’
‘Thank you, Neil.’
She gave him a small, grateful smile and hurried inside. Neil Adams shrugged and began to check the saddle-girths and the set of the packs, while his private devils grinned sardonically at so easy a surrender.
Lance Dillon was very near to despair. The moment he had leapt up from his hiding-place and tried to signal the aircraft, he knew that he had made a fatal mistake. Even had the pilot seen him, he would have understood little of his situation, and even had he understood, there was little he could have done about it. The nearest safe landing-strip was at the homestead, twenty miles away, and no pilot on earth would have attempted a landing in the swamp-lands. In one futile gesture he had expended his strength, and the advantage he had gained during the night.
Now, for a certainty, his pursuers would be on his track. He had not seen them, but he had no doubt at all that they had seen him. Soon, very soon, they would come to beat him out of his hiding-place. He was trapped between the grass and the lily-water, a pale frog on a mud-patch waiting for the urchins to scoop him up in a bottle.
A sob of weariness shook him, and the first tears since childhood forced themselves from his eyes. Self-pity swamped him and every instinct urged him to lie down and wait for the merciful release of a spear thrust. He buried his face in his muddy arms and wept like a baby.
After a while, the weeping calmed him, and he began to take note of the swamp noises: the shrilling of the cicadas, the low buzz of the insects, the susurration of the grass, the occasional boom of a frog, and the chitter of a pecking reed-hen. There was a rhythm to it, he found, a comforting regularity, as if the giant land were snoring and wheezing in its noonday doze.
Suddenly, the rhythm was broken. Far away to his left, there was a shrill squawking, and a few seconds later a big jabiru flapped its ungainly way over his head. He knew what it meant, and the knowledge jerked him back to reality. The hunters had flushed the bird as, soon, they must flush the man. Desperately, he tried to discipline his thoughts. There was no way of escape, and there was no weapon to his hand, but the swaying reeds.
‘The reeds…!’
From somewhere out of a forgotten story-book, a picture presented itself, vivid as a vision: a prisoner, hunted by his gaolers, hiding in a stream and breathing through a reed. His reaction was immediate. He grasped a handful of reeds and tried to tear them out, but the tough fibres resisted him and the stalks fra
yed in his hands. A few second of reasoning showed him a simpler way. He knelt and bit off a pair of stalks close to the root. Then he bit off the tops, tested them by suction, and found that the air flowed freely.
With infinite care, he slid himself into the water, feet first, at a spot where the green scum had parted. When he found it deep enough, he exhaled, so that his body sank to the bottom, and then, anchoring himself to the mud, he worked his way slowly under the lily roots, feeling blindly for a snag or a sunken tree that might hold his buoyant body submerged. His rib-cage was almost bursting before he found it, but he hooked his toes under it and let his body lie diagonally under the surface, face upward, so that the reed projected upward through the lily pads. He had to blow desperately to clear it of mud and scum, but finally he was able to breathe in short, regular gasps through his mouth.
His body tended to drift upward against the anchoring feet, and the stretch of his muscles was a painful strain, but after a few moments, he began to hold himself in equilibrium, breathing the while through the slim reed. He could see nothing but the dull underside of the lily-pads, and the vague bulbous shapes of their roots; but he wondered desperately whether the myalls had come and seen his first blundering passage through the water and whether they might not be coming, even now, to gaff him like a fish, a man-fish, helpless under the pink lily blooms.
Mundaru, the buffalo man, was puzzled. He had moved fast and straight through the grasses, and now he was standing on the very spot where his quarry had lain. The marks of him were everywhere: the shape of his body in the mud, the crushed and torn reed-stalks, the place where he had slid into the lagoon. Yet there was no sign of him.
The surface of the pond was clear and unbroken. The green scum in the shallows was neither torn nor disturbed. The blue ducks were swimming placidly, the ripples fanning out in their wake. The egrets stood in elderly contemplation round the verge. A blue kingfisher dipped like a flash of lightning over the pink flowers.
Mundaru squatted on his heels and waited, his eyes darting hither and yon across the shining water and the broad, gleaming stretches of lily leaves. He waited a long time, but no alien sound disturbed the familiar harmony. The swamp-birds fed unruffled and the grasses swayed in unbroken rhythm to the warm wind blowing off the Stone Country. The white man had disappeared completely, as if he were one of those spirit-beings who could hide themselves in the crevice of a rock, or the trunk of a tree, or the hollow of a grass-stalk.
A small chill fear began to creep in on the buffalo man as the leaven of unacknowledged guilt began to work in his subconscious. Perhaps, after all, it was a spirit man. Perhaps the white man was already dead, drowned in the river, and his restless emanation was walking abroad, mocking Mundaru and leading him on to ultimate destruction. Perhaps he was still alive, but using a more potent magic than Mundaru had known or expected. Perhaps this was not white man’s magic at all, but the malignant working of Willinja, who had already begun to sing evil against him.
As the fear grew, the guilt thrust itself further and further into his consciousness, until, finally, it was staring him in the face. Like all his people, Mundaru was a believer in the supernatural; and, though he lacked the words to define it, he was facing the dilemma of all believers: the dichotomy between belief and practice, the conflict between tribal discipline and personal desire. By his own act, he had set himself outside the tribe, made himself an outlaw. The channels of strength and sustenance were closed to him for ever. His choice therefore was predetermined. He must go on to complete the killing cycle – be the victim ghost or man. He must survive by his own efforts, live on his own fat, and on the protection of his own totem.
Abruptly, but with a curious, inverted logic, his thoughts turned to Menyan, who was the wife of Willinja. Inside the tribe, she was denied to him, but now, an outlaw, he might take her, if he could, and whether she consented or refused. Afterwards, they could not stay in the tribal lands. But they could flee to the fringe of the white settlement, where other detribalised men and women lived a new kind of life, incomplete, but free at least from the threat of ancient sanctions. The thought pleased him. It gave him a new goal, a new, if temporary, courage against the influences working on him from hour to hour.
But first, he must find the white man…
The water was still unbroken. The reed-bed still whispered in the breeze. Wherever the white man was, he would be heading roughly in the direction of the homestead. His track must lie along the inner bank of the lagoon, nearest to the river and pointing down-stream. Mundaru picked up his spears and his killing club and headed off through the reed fringes.
When, a long time later, Dillon broke despairingly out from the lily-beds, the myall had disappeared and there was nothing to show which way he had gone.
Mary Dillon and Sergeant Neil Adams were riding stirrup to stirrup across the red plain, with Billy-Jo a few paces behind them, leading the pack-pony. The heat and the glare and the steady jogging of the horses had reduced them to a drowsy harmony, a laconic familiarity, as if they and their dusky attendant were the only folk left in an empty world. For long stretches, Adams rode in silence, staring straight ahead, absorbed in himself; but, just when it seemed to Mary that he had forgotten or was deliberately ignoring her, he would turn and point out a new thing to interest her – a strange bird, a distorted bottle tree, a pile of fertility stones raised by the aborigines. He had a care for her, an unspoken understanding, and she was grateful to him.
But there was still something that needed to be said, and she put it to him calmly.
‘Neil, there’s something I want to say to you.’
‘Go ahead and say it.’
‘You mustn’t try to hide anything from me – anything at all.’
He shot her a quick, shrewd glance from under his hat-brim, but his face was in shadow so that she could not see whether he smiled or frowned. Only his voice held a hint of humour.
‘I’m not hiding anything, Mary. I don’t know anything yet.’
‘But you think it’s serious, don’t you?’
‘Any accident is serious in this country, Mary.’
‘But you don’t believe this is an accident. You think it’s blackfellow trouble, don’t you?’
‘I told you, I’m guessing. I don’t know anything.’
‘But Lance could be dead…killed.’
‘He could be. He probably isn’t.’
‘It might be better if he were.’
The bleakness of the statement staggered him, but he had been long drilled to composure. His eyes never wavered from the vista before him and the ponies continued their steady amble over the plain. After a moment he said quietly:
‘Do you want to explain that?’
‘There’s not much to explain, Neil. We’re head over heels in debt to the pastoral company, and they told us last month they wouldn’t advance us any more. If the bull is dead, as you think, we’re finished – ruined. I don’t think Lance could stand that. I’m sure I couldn’t.’
‘Aren’t you under-rating yourself – and him?’
‘No. It’s the truth.’
They rode on a while in silence, then Adams reined in and said casually:
‘Let’s rest awhile and cool off.’
He dismounted and came to help her out of the saddle. She was stiff and cramped and she had to hold to him a moment for support. He grinned and said lightly:
‘That’s nothing to the way you’ll feel tomorrow.’
‘I’m tougher than you think, Neil.’
‘I believe it,’ he told her soberly, and moved off to water the horses while she drank greedily from the water-bottle. Later, when they were sitting in the shade and smoking a cigarette before remounting, Adams picked up the thread of their talk. He asked her:
‘Do you really think Lance would crack?’
She nodded emphatically.
‘Yes. I think it’s quite possible. I know him very well, you see. He has great courage, great endurance. But he’s too
single-minded – too dedicated, if you like. Everything in his life has been subordinated to this ambition of his – even me. He’s gambled everything on this breeding project, and he’s told me more than once it was his last throw. I believed him. I still do. There are people like that, you know, Neil. So long as the goal is clear and possible, they can take anything. But when the goal is unclear or beyond them – they snap. Lance is a man like that.’
‘And you?’
His eyes were hooded, but she caught the undertone of irony in the question. Her answer was blunt.
‘I’m one of those who survive by walking away and cutting their losses.’
‘You’d walk away from Lance?’
‘From the country first. But from Lance, too, if he insisted on staying. I’d already made up my mind to do it before this happened.’
If the answer shocked him, he gave no sign, but looked at her with level eyes and said:
‘Don’t you love him, Mary?’
‘Enough to be honest with him – yes. But not enough to stay and let this blasted country wear out everything that was good between us. Does that shock you, Neil?’
He shrugged and gave her a sardonic sidelong grin.
‘Nothing ever shocks a policeman. Besides, it’s a pleasure to meet an honest witness. If you’ve finished your cigarette, we’d better move. I want to get to the ridges before sunset.’
He turned, and began walking away towards the horses, but her voice stayed him.
‘Neil?’
‘Yes?’
She moved to face him, her eyes cool and challenging.
‘One question, Neil. What odds will you give me on Lance being alive?’
He chewed on the question a moment, then answered it flatly:
‘At this moment, even money. But the odds might be better on the course… Come on, let’s ride.’
But the longer they rode, the more the question nagged at him: which way did she want the odds – longer or shorter? And which way did he want them himself?
Willinja, the scorcerer, was waiting for the buffalo men to complete their ritual preparations and present themselves to him, ready for the kill. He, too, had his own dilemmas of time, circumstance and responsibility.
