by Morris West
Like all the initiates of the animistic cults, he was a man of singular intelligence and imagination. In any society he would have risen to eminence and the exercise of power. The whole history and tradition of his tribe was stored and tabulated in his memory. He knew all its chants and all its rituals, many of them hours long and all of them intricate.
The complex relationships of tribe and totem, of marriage and generation – the whole codex of human and animal relationships was as clear to him as the legal canons to a twentieth-century jurist. He was pharmacist, physician, psychologist – and within the limits of his knowledge and experience, good in each capacity. He was priest and augur, diplomat and judge in equity. Behind his broad receding forehead he carried relatively more knowledge than any four men in a twentieth-century society. More than most men, he understood social responsibility. He, and others like him, held the tribal life together and maintained it in a workable pattern against the constant tendency to disintegration.
This, in effect, was his problem now. He had ordered a killing: in the tribal code, a legal killing. But the legal process would fail of its effect if Mundaru killed the white man first. Adamidji, the white policeman, would see two crimes instead of one, and the punishment would be all the greater. Even tribal killings were forbidden by the white man’s law, and so, he could not explain, in any intelligible fashion, his effort at prevention and punishment. There were things the white man would never understand: like the exchange of wives to satisfy a quarrel, or to show hospitality; like the payment of blood for blood, and the need to keep certain things secret under penalty of death.
When a man stole another’s wife, or took to himself a woman of the wrong totem, the white man gave him sanctuary and protected him against the spears of the avengers. He impeded the course of age-old justice. When, in the old days, he drove a tribe out of its own preserves into a new territory – even a better one – he did not understand that he was signing the death-warrant of the social unit. There was no bridge between these two worlds – no concordance between their ethics and philosophies.
So, in this moment of crisis, Willinja must work alone, according to his own knowledge and tradition, a Stone Age Atlas, carrying the weight of his world on his own ageing shoulders.
From the shadowy recesses of a cave in the kangaroo rock the buffalo men came out, limping from the recent ordeal. Their feet were shod with the kadaitja boots – made of emu feathers and the fur of kangaroos and daubed with blood drawn from their own arms. When they walked they would not leave footprints like ordinary men – because until the act was done, they were not ordinary men any more. Even the spears they carried were special to the occasion.
When they came to Willinja they stood before him, heads bowed, eyes downcast, waiting his commands. They were crisp and clear, but ritually careful. Time was important. If possible Mundaru must be killed before he killed the white man.
The manner of the killing was equally important. He must be speared from behind – in the middle of the back. The spear must be withdrawn and a flake of sharp quartz, representing the spirit snake, must be inserted to eat the liver fat. The wound must be sealed and cauterised with a hot stone, and Mundaru, bleeding internally, with the spirit snake eating his entrails, must be driven forward until he died in his tracks. No woman or child must see the act or the death. The man who threw the spear must never be named, because this was a communal act, absolved from all revenge or the penalty of blood.
Did they understand it all? Yes. Did they understand that if they failed they too lay under threat of death? Yes.
He dismissed them curtly and stood a long time, watching their swift, limping run towards the river. Then he picked up his instruments of magic, wrapped them carefully in a bundle of paper-bark and strode back to the encampment.
The women were beginning to straggle back, loaded with yams and lily-bulbs and wooden dishes full of wild honey, but Menyan was not among them, and Willinja waited, puzzled at first and then uneasy, for the arrival of his youngest wife.
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS LATE afternoon when they reached the sandstone escarpment and pushed their tired horses through the gorge into the valley. The kites were still wheeling round the carcase of the bull and they rose in screaming, flapping clouds as the riders approached. The air was heavy with carrion smell, and Mary Dillon gagged desperately and reined in while Adams and Billy-Jo rode forward to examine the kill.
She saw them dismount, examine the kill and then begin casting the ground for tracks. They were like figures in a lunar landscape of raw colours, harsh contours and long, distorted shadows; but they moved her to sudden and vivid resentment. The males were in council. The woman must wait their pleasure, no matter how deeply she might be involved in the outcome.
Then she noticed a curious thing: the whole emphasis and balance of the tableau seemed to have changed. Although Billy-Jo was kneeling in the dust and Adams standing above him, it was the black man who was suddenly in command.
All the way from the homestead, she had hardly noticed him. He had that attitude of effacement, which the aborigine effects in the presence of the white man – a kind of grey, faintly-smiling acquiescence in whatever the white boss chose to do. He was no longer young. His hair was grey and his face deeply lined. He wore riding-boots, denims and patched shirt of check cotton. His shoulders stooped as if he were ashamed of being seen in the white man’s cast-offs. But here, in this wild landscape, he seemed to take on new stature and authority. His gestures were ample and expressive. When he spoke, Adams listened attentively; and when he stood up, his shadow fell giant-like along the dust.
In spite of her fatigue and ill-humour, she edged her horse closer to follow their talk. Before she had gone a dozen paces, Adams looked up and yelled at her :
‘Stay where you are! We’re having enough trouble. The stockboys have walked all over the ground.’
She was parched, dusty and aching in every muscle. This male brusqueness was the last straw. She propped the pony hard on his hindquarters and yelled back:
‘It’s my husband you’re looking for! Just remember I’m interested!’
He did not answer, but threw her an ironic salute and bent again to talk to Billy-Jo, who, crouched like a scenting dog, was moving away towards the far end of the valley.
As quickly as it had risen, her irritation subsided and she felt small, foolish and regretful. Loneliness invaded her – a sense of failure and inadequacy, as though she were built to breathe a grosser air, to demand a sicklier nurture than these sturdy, inland people. She felt like an exotic fish in a glass bowl, envious of the free life of the river reaches. It was the old problem in a new shape; but this time there was no Lance to blame for it. There was only Mary Dillon, cross-grained and saddle-sore, a nuisance to others and a singular disappointment to herself.
Twenty minutes later Adams and Billy-Jo finished their circuit of the valley, remounted and rode back to join her. Adams’s face was clouded with concern and his voice was oddly gentle.
‘Sorry to keep you standing about, Mary. We had some trouble picking up the tracks.’
Billy-Jo grinned at her in deprecation.
‘Stockmen stupid, Missus. Walkabout all over. Kick up ground alia same cattle muster.’
‘But you did find what you wanted, Neil?’
He nodded gravely.
‘It’s clear enough, Mary. The myalls were in the valley. Five, six, maybe more. They speared the bull, then broke his hind legs with clubs. They made a fire over there and cooked some of the meat.’
‘And Lance?’
‘Lance was here too. His pony has a worn hind shoe. He came in at a gallop, and there are two spots where the pony reared. He must have caught the myalls in the act.’
‘And they wounded him – is that it?’
‘It looks like it. The tracks show that he galloped through the valley, then out again. It looks as though he was wounded by a spear, because he wasn’t thrown or pulled out of the saddle
.’
Shame and a sharp cold fear took hold of her. Her voice trembled as she asked:
‘What happened then?’
‘We don’t know. We’ll pick up his tracks at the mouth of the gorge and just follow from there. The stockboys may have found something, but from the way they’ve been blundering round in here, I doubt it.’
They rode on in silence for a few moments while she digested this proposition, then she said in a small voice:
‘Neil, I’m sorry I was a nuisance. I’m scared and edgy.’
He turned and grinned at her in his quirky, sardonic fashion.
‘It’s a woman’s privilege, Mary. You’re doing fine. Just try to relax a little. Billy-Jo’s the best tracker from Broome to Normanton. We’ll know something soon. There’s still an hour and a half of daylight.’
‘Neil?’
‘Yes, Mary?’
‘What are the odds now?’
He frowned, considering the question, then he answered frankly:
‘They’ve shortened a bit, Mary. All this happened twenty-four hours ago. We don’t know how badly Lance was wounded, or how much he was hurt by the fall. There’s only one thing that tips the odds in our favour. He can’t be very far away.’
The answer seemed to satisfy her, and he was content to leave it incomplete. There was no point in telling her the other things that he and Billy-Jo had found: the ochre dust and the charcoal sticks and the animal fur, with which one of the myalls had been daubed, in preparation for a new killing.
When Lance Dillon crawled out of the water and back into the reeds, he was in an extremity of weakness. He was chattering with cold; his skin was crinkled and pulpy; one shoulder and breast was throbbing with pain, and his limbs were shaken with uncontrollable, spastic tremors. He lay face downward on the ground, gasping for breath and fighting desperately to clear his mind of the fever mists which were the prelude to helpless delirium.
He knew now, with absolute conviction, that unaided he could never reach the homestead alive. The infection in his shoulder was spreading and his strength was running out much faster than he could maintain it with the meagre, vegetable diet available to him. The least effort was a dangerous expense, which soon would become fatal.
He closed his eyes and tried to direct his vagrant mind to an assessment of his situation. The appearance of the aircraft meant only one thing: Mary had understood that he was in trouble and had summoned help. Even now they would be out looking for him. He tried to add the hours he had been wandering, the hours it would take mounted men to reach the area. But even this simple calculation was beyond him, and he slipped off in a dozing day-dream of Mary, of faceless horsemen, of aircraft turning into birds and circling above his own dead body.
The dream faded back to reality, and brief reason told him that he must get out of the high grasses and head back to the river, where at least he might have a chance of meeting the searchers. Here in the swamp-reaches he was buried, as if in a green tomb, and if the myalls had missed him the chances of being found by his friends were reduced to nothing. The waving stalks would cover him until he rotted into their roots.
The thought gave him a deceptive consolation. He need not run any more, need not fear any more. He had simply to sink down and let the grass swallow him like the sea. As if in confirmation of the thought, a schoolboy tag floated up into memory…
‘Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.’
The rhythm of it rocked him soothingly. The voices of the cicadas sank to an undulating drone. He felt himself slipping into a warm deep, like a waterlogged leaf, until a sharp spasm of pain jerked him back to consciousness.
This was the way death would come – an insidious luxury, robbing him of will. This was more dangerous than the myall spears. He must summon his strength and fight it. He looked up, trying to gauge the direction of the sun from the tangled shadows of the grass. It was afternoon. The sun was on his right, so the river must lie straight ahead of him. Now or never, he must begin to move.
Slowly, foot by painful foot, he began to drag himself slug-like along the ground, among the green-white stalks, whose crowns waved infinitely high above his head.
Menyan, who was named for the moon, and who was the youngest wife of Willinja the sorcerer, was digging yams on the river-flat. She was alone, which was unusual, because usually the women worked in groups or under the care of an old man, to keep them safe from the wandering bucks who sometimes tried to seduce them from their husbands. Except for a small pubic tassel of kangaroo fur, she was completely naked, and she squatted on her haunches prising up the long brown tubers with a pointed stick. It was an easy labour. The ground was soft and the ripe yams grew close to the surface; so that her thoughts wandered and she was able to enjoy the rare privacy and the warmth of the westering sun on her skin.
By the white man’s measure, she was fifteen years of age, and she had been married to Willinja from the time of her first period, but so far she was childless. Her breasts were still small, her belly flat, and there was no sign of the pain or the swelling, which the older women told her were the signs that a child had been dreamed into her.
This was the reason for her working alone. The older women had made fun of her. Willinja’s other wives had mocked her as barren and useless, until she had quarrelled with them and wandered off to escape their taunts. She knew as well as they did that it was not her fault, that old men did not make so many children as young ones; but the stigma was still there and she resented it deeply.
Tribally and personally, she was incomplete. Just as a man was not fully initiated until he had been circumcised and passed through fire and taken a woman to wife, so the woman was not fully admitted to the secret life until she had given birth to a child.
Some women, she knew, had made a quick progress to this last initiation. They had lovers who dreamed children into them in secret, or after the last dances of a big corrobboree. Some were lent as wives to a relative or in payment of a debt, and from these unions a child came sometimes more quickly than from an old husband. But so far, Willinja had kept her exclusively to himself, and she was afraid of the far sight with which the spirit men had endowed him.
Yet, all in all, she was not too unhappy. She was still child enough to throw off cares quickly, and still woman enough to hope that one day a young man might come to buy her from Willinja, or ‘pull’ her from him in the conventional elopement which might be absolved later by the payment of a suitable price. If she could choose – and choice was limited for a tribal woman – she would prefer Mundaru, the buffalo man.
There was a vitality about him, an urgent strength, that set him apart from the other bucks. He wanted her badly. Given the opportunity, he would try to take her. But now she knew she could not surrender to him. What the men did or said in their secret places was a forbidden mystery; but the women understood well enough that Mundaru had been named an outcast to be cut off for ever from the tribal communion. A woman might dare her husband’s anger to join herself with a younger man; but few would dare the interdict of the tribe. To mate with Mundaru now would be like mating with a dead man.
The thought chilled her and she turned away from it. There were other man who desired her and who might yet be bold enough to take her. She began to sing softly the song which the women used to call their lovers to them. Suddenly, there was a rustle in the grasses behind her. A shadow fell across her naked back, and on the warm soil under her hands. She looked up. Her eyes dilated, her mouth opened in a soundless scream as Mundaru, painted and armed for the kill, advanced towards her.
When they reached the mouth of the gorge, Billy-Jo dismounted and walked ahead, casting about for the tracks of Dillon’s pony among the newer prints made by the stockboys. Adams and Mary Dillon sat watching him while the ponies dropped their heads and began cropping the sparse tussocks at their feet. Adams mopped his face, took a couple of sips from the water-bottle and handed it across to Mary.<
br />
‘A thing to notice, Mary…’ He pointed across to Billy-Jo. ‘Billy-Jo has kept his primitive skills. The stockboys have lost theirs. They don’t have to depend on them any more to stay alive. They’re half-way into our world, but they’ve lost foothold in their own.’
She looked at him sharply.
‘Are you stating a fact, Neil, or pointing a moral?’
‘Read it any way you like,’ he shrugged off the challenge.
‘It’s still true. It’s the secret of living in a country like this. Make the earth your ally and you can survive. Make it an enemy and you’re fighting a running battle that you must lose in the end.’
‘I’ve lost mine, if that’s what you mean.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of you, Mary.’ His voice grew grave. ‘I was thinking of Lance. Back in the valley he was wounded – how badly we don’t know. Somewhere out there between the river and the trees, he dismounted or was thrown…’
‘Or finished off by the myalls.’
‘That too.’ He nodded a sober agreement. ‘But if he escaped, then his survival depends in part on his own physical condition and in part on knowledge and his sympathy with the country. It’s a good area hereabout. There’s the river and the grassland and the timber. Lots of game, lots of food, if you know where to find it.’
‘Lance used to say the same thing. I – I think he knows.’
A hundred yards away, Billy-Jo raised his hand in signal then pointed away towards the paper-barks. Adams waved an acknowledgment and they trotted over towards the black-tracker. Adams frowned in puzzlement and asked more of himself than of Mary:
‘I wonder why he headed that way, away from the homestead?’
It was Billy-Jo who supplied the first, tentative answer.
‘Wounded man, tired horse, both need water. Maybe make for river, maybe for shade under trees.’
Still walking, he led them step by step towards the paper-bark fringe, but before they reached it they saw the stockboys ride out, churning up the dust in a hand-gallop. Adams swore softly when he saw that they had not yet found Dillon, then he reined in and waited for them.
