Death of a Lake

by Arthur W. Upfield

  There being nothing to shout unnecessarily, Bony deferred an acknowledgement of welcome until he stood watching the trapper laying a bread dough in a bed of hot white ash.

  “Thought I would put in a night with you,” he said. “How is the fur coming?”

  “Staying the night! Good on you. Fur’s coming in like a ruddy flood. Two thousand pelts last night. Could have got five thousand if Red had been with me. You sighted him at all?”

  “No.”

  “Give us a bit of a hand in the morning?” Barby asked, anxiously. “Tea’s in the billy. Sugar and pannikins on the table.”

  “I could lend a hand for a couple of hours,” Bony said.

  He filled a pannikin, added a morsel of sugar. The dogs subsided. The cats daintily rubbed against his legs. The galah waddled over the ground on its clumsy pigeon-toed feet, tumbled on its back and looked up at him with hard bright eyes.

  Barby covered his bread dough with the ash, plus an addition of tiny red coals, careful to spread the heat. Because his face had been darkened by the sun his eyes were inconspicuous, but they were no less quick, no less alert.

  “Goin’ to be even hotter tomorrow, by the look of that sun,” he remarked. “Hope it keeps up. Hotter she is the thirstier the rabbits.”

  “Did you see the birds go?”

  Barby nodded.

  “You don’t see a sight like that down in the stinking cities,” he said with emphasis. “Or that.”

  Bony followed the direction of his out-flung hand and witnessed a rabbit unhesitantly come running from the dunes, its normal timidity vanquished by the onslaught of thirst. It followed a straight line to the truck, stopped in its shadow for a moment, moved on and over the foreleg of one of the dogs. The dog lifted its upper lip in a sneer of disdain and continued panting. It did snap at a fly. The rabbit ran on to the flat, seeking the water it must drink or perish.

  “Why in hell I own dogs I don’t know. Fat lot of use, ain’t they? Well, I’ll knock up a stew for dinner.”

  “What can I do?” asked Bony.

  “Do! Nothing, just yabber. How’s things on the other shore?”

  “Everyone is a little moody.”

  “Watchin’ each other, eh?”

  “And the Lake.”

  The galah determinedly tried to detach tabs from Bony’s riding boots ... until a flock of galahs whirled overhead, when it twisted its head to look up at them. Barby shouted to Bony to “grab him”, but Bony was too late. The bird took wing and sped upward to join his kind.

  “Now we’ll see something, I hope,” Barby predicted. “But one day he won’t be coming home.”

  Barby’s bird joined the flock, which proceeded to put on a turn of aerobatics for the benefit of the stranger. The stranger could not be distinguished, for its performance was as flawless. They flew about the camp tree, shrieking at each other and the watchers, and presently there emerged from the general cacophony a sepulchral voice:

  “Ole fool! Ole fool!”

  The same line was repeated several times, when the entire flock converged upon one member. The movement revealed the Ishmael, who, uttering a wild shriek, headed for the camp and arrived fast, to land on the cabin of the truck, skate off to fly in a semicircle to Barby’s feet, skid to the ground and then swear with extraordinary fluency.

  “That’ll be enough out of you for one day, my lad,” Barby said, severely. “Where you got that Australian language, I don’t know. You never got it off me.”

  Taking up the bird, he locked it in the netted cage and, continuing to glare like the parent of an unruly child at a party, proceeded with the preparation of the stew, saying not a word until a vast shadow moved over the camp. The caged bird muttered threats, but not at the passing eagle.

  “Plenty of them about,” Barby told Bony. “Ordinary times they keep to their own beats. Now they’re here in thousands.” The eagle, golden of neck and wedge-shaped tail, swung out over the flats, and the trapper carried forward the argument whether eagles do greater good by killing rabbits than the reputed destruction of young lambs.

  The sun went down when the stew-pot was simmering, and Barby lifted from the ashes the feather-light loaf of baking-powder bread. The rabbits were leaving the uplands, crossing the dunes like drops of dark-brown ink, passing the camp on either side, taking no fright of the dogs and the cats, and unnoticed by them. An uncountable host was beginning to converge on Lake Otway.

  Barby fed his dogs on kangaroo meat and filled their drinking dish. The cats received smaller pieces of meat, and he put a handful of sunflower seeds on a plate with damper crusts and passed it to the galah. The galah promptly emptied his dinner on the floor of the cage and threw the plate away.

  Night appeared ... stepping from the Lake. Night draped its garments over the surrounding flats, pulled down the red dunes, reached for the slopes of the uplands. The pestiferous flies went home, and the men ate at peace with themselves and with this land which never has been and never will be the servant of man.

  Barby went to work on one of the wings of the fence-V, and Bony attended to the other, lowering the netting, making sure the selvedge lay flat. The hole at the apex of the V inside the great trap was examined by Barby. The stars were hazy, and the silence was hot.

  Afterwards they squatted on their heels either side the camp fire, where Barby drew at his pipe and Bony smoked cigarettes and betrayed his maternal ancestry by constantly pushing together burning ends of wood.

  “I looked into that discarded tank at Johnson’s,” he said. “D’you happen to know what is in it?”

  “I do. Shags. Millions of ’em.”

  “How do you think they died there?” prompted Bony.

  “Don’t know. No one does. It happened after the flood came down, when the Lake was pretty full, so there was miles of water for them birds to swim in.”

  “How soon after the floods arrived?” pressed Bony as Barby appeared to be thinking, on something quite different.

  “How soon? It must be about three months after the Lake filled up that I was at Johnson’s, and the shags were in that tank then and ponging high.”

  “Although the tank was discarded, it could have held rainwater?”

  “That tank wasn’t discarded,” Barby said. “She was took there from the River to make an extra reservoir tank, but before the stand could be built the flood was coming, and nothing was done about it.

  “Martyr and me and Ray Gillen was deciding about them shags one night. Just after the flood entered Lake Otway it rained more’n five inches in one hit. That was the first rain for fifteen months, and the last decent rain we’ve had. It must have put five inches into that tank.

  “The shags, of course, are flying round. You know how they get wet and sit on fence posts and up in dead trees, droopin’ their wings to dry off. There’s water then in a bit of lake down the creek, too, and those birds was flying from one to the other. One of ’em sits on the tank to dry off, and he could’ve seen a tadpole in the rainwater and went down for it. Then there isn’t flying-room for him to get up, and while he’s flopping round, a cobber sees him and went in, too. Then the others followed on to get trapped in the same way.”

  “It could have been like that,” Bony conceded, doubtfully.

  “Never heard of a better argument to explain it.”

  One of the cats jumped to Barby’s shoulder, settled there and purred like an engine. Foxes barked near and distant. The faint sound of rabbits passing by could be heard when the men were silent. Presently Bony asked:

  “D’you think Martyr is careless with guns?”

  “Didn’t ought to be,” replied Barby. “Been handling guns since he was three and a bit. Why?”

  “It appears he was cleaning a shot-gun late last night and it was accidentally discharged.”

  “What time last night?”

  “About twenty minutes after ten.” Bony related the details. “There’s an inaccuracy in Martyr’s story. He said that the shot went downwards in th
e floor, but there’s a hole in the roof which wasn’t there in the afternoon. The situation of the hole in the roof is peculiar. When the gun was discharged it must have been pointing upwards at the ceiling in Joan Fowler’s room.”

  “Perhaps the gun was pointing at someone, and someone else knocked the barrel up just in time.”

  “If it was like that, George, then the two women and Martyr are hanging well together. There was no one else in the house.”

  “And Ma yelled and screamed, and had to be slapped down.”

  “We could hear the slaps.” Bony repeated the talk in the men’s dining-room at the morning smoko, adding: “It appeared to me that Lester, for preference, thought one of the women might be in the kitchen and wanted her to know that the tale of the accidental gun discharge wasn’t believed.”

  “Could be that way,” agreed Barby. “Lester’s more cunning than the other two added up. Born and reared in this part of the country. Like me, the other two wasn’t. Where d’you reckon Harry Carney could have planted the money he took from Gillen’s case?”

  The tacked-on question astonished Bony, but gave him an instrument to use in the near future.

  “Under that load of cormorants,” he replied, chuckling.

  “By heck, you may be right at that, Bony. Fancy burrowing down among all them birds to plant a wad of money. Imagine the pong while he was doing it. Well, we’d better think of some shut-eye, for we’re due to rise at sparrow-chirp. I can lend you a wool-pack to lie on.”

  Bony slept on the wool-pack until an hour before dawn, when Barby beat him to the bell by announcing breakfast consisting of kangaroo steak, damper bread and coffee.

  Soon after the meal, the Lake began drawing Night down from the upland ridges, and Bony sat with Barby on a low dune providing a clear view of the latter’s trapping plan. A little wind came from the north, and even after all the sunless hours it was hot.

  The rabbits that had been drinking when the netted arms of the V were lowered had, of course, found their way back to the shore dunes blocked by the fence, and taking the course of least opposition had arrived at the point of the V. Inside the trap all the ground was covered with them, and at each corner living rodents sought freedom by standing on a heap of suffocated rabbits.

  Outside the trap the animals were vainly seeking passage to the dunes and, like drops of water trickling from a tap, so they found the hole at the V point and trickled into the trap. Farther out on the flats rabbits ran as though from an enemy, to be slewed by the fence arms and so to run towards the point.

  “You’ll see something in a minute,” forecast Barby.

  Bony saw the eagles, winging low along the verge of the water. One angled and skimmed the ground, then shot upward: another came on and delayed its swoop until opposite the camp. The rabbit leaped but failed to evade the talons. It screamed when a thousand feet high. Now all along the shore the eagles worked, their wings spanning six to seven feet and as rigid as the wings of a plane until they needed power for the lift. To and fro flew the eagles, and all the rabbits out in the open raced for the dunes and cover, and all the rabbits inside the tips of Barby’s V raced dunewards, to arrive at the trap.

  No eagle missed. Some snatched the victim without touching the ground with a claw; others paddled like the pelicans for a yard or two. Some dropped their catch from a height and swooped to retake the victim before its muscular deathtwitching ceased.

  “They do that every morning for me,” Barby said. “Good workers, eh?”

  “Saves you a lot of rushing about,” agreed Bony.

  “They don’t last, though. One rabbit to each eagle and the supply of eagles soon runs short. We’d better get out there and stop them rabbits breakin’ back.”

  The dogs went with them as they circled eventually to walk inwards between the extremities of the fence. The men shouted and hoo-hoo-ed as though droving sheep, but the dogs were blasé and useless.

  The rabbits crowded into the V point. Many hundreds did manage to break back, and when Barby cursed a bored dog, the animal deigned to grab one and break its neck.

  Bony assisted Barby with the skinning, raising his hourly tally to eighty-three. At the end of the third hour, thanks to Barby, they completed this chore with the night’s catch of close on two thousand rabbits. Barby was most appreciative when Bony left him slipping the skins over U-shaped wires to be stuck upright in the sand to dry.

  Chapter Twelve

  A Night Out

  WITHIN BONY'S PHILOSOPHY of crime investigation was the conviction that if the criminal became static immediately following the unlawful act he had every chance of escaping retribution, and when this, rarely, happened in an investigation he was conducting, he countered by prodding the suspect to activity.

  On his way back to the out-station, he decided on a little prodding, and the opportunity came at the afternoon smoko when again he met the two women, Lester, MacLennon and Carney, the men having returned early.

  “Have a good time?” asked Carney, and MacLennon raised his dark brows and seemed to await the answer with unusual interest.

  “Yes. Quite a change from horses,” Bony replied. “Helped George to trap and skin just under two thousand. He netted the same number the night before.”

  “My! What a big pie,” exclaimed Mrs Fowler, again vivaciously dark and off-setting her daughter’s vivid colouring.

  “You wouldn’t believe how thick they are a bit away from here,” Lester put in. He sniffled before adding: “This side of Johnson’s Well they’re thicker than sheep being druve to the yards. And foxes!”

  Bony, munching cake, was conscious of Joan’s eyes, but resisted looking at the girl in order to outwit the watchful Carney. MacLennon grumbled:

  “And after what they said the myxotossis would do, too.”

  “If the floods and droughts can’t wipe out the rabbits, the mosquitoes and germs haven’t a chance,” Lester said. “Look, four years ago there wasn’t a rabbit anywhere within a hundred and fifty miles of this place, and I hadn’t seen a rabbit for eighteen months. Then one day I saw a rabbit on a sandy ridge, and a month afterwards rabbits were burrowin’ and breedin’ like mad. Them city fellers can’t even imagine how big Australia is. They think the rest of Australia is another suburb or something.”

  “And they won’t believe rabbits drink water, either,” declared Mrs Fowler. “When I said they did, I was called a liar.”

  “Caw!” Lester sniffled twice. “Rabbits’ll drink water and they’ll climb trees and gnaw off the suckers and then go down to eat the leaves. When there an’t no grass, they’ll scratch up the roots. And wild ducks will lay their eggs a mile from water, and lay ’em up in trees, too. Won’t they, Bony?”

  “Yes. And cormorants will fill a three-thousand-gallon water tank up to the brim.”

  “Ah! You had a look in there?” asked Joan, and Bony now met her eyes and, while nodding assent, decided they were blue.

  “George was telling me how it must have happened,” he said. “But what I don’t understand is why the topmost birds died there when they could have waddled to the side, stepped up to the rim and flown away.”

  “But...” Carney began and trailed, and impulsively Lester asked:

  “How far down from the rim d’you reckon them birds is?”

  “Three inches. Not more than six.”

  The almost colourless eyes dwindled, then flashed examination of the others.

  “Them birds was down eighteen inches when I seen ’em last.”

  “When was that?”

  “When? Year ago, could be. You tell George about that?”

  “That the level of the birds was almost up to the rim? No.”

  “I wonder what raised them,” murmured Joan, gazing steadily at Bony.

  “Some chemical change which has gone on since Lester looked in the tank. The action of heat and the air and what not might have caused each carcass to expand a fraction.”

  “Sounds likely,” supported MacLennon. “I s
till can’t believe the yarn how they got there.”

  “Give us a better one, Mac,” urged Mrs Fowler.

  He shook his head, grinned and lurched to his feet. “I’m no good at inventing lies,” he said, and went out. There was silence for a space, broken by the girl.

  “You sure, Bony, about the level of the birds?”

  “Reasonably so, but I could be mistaken,” replied Bony. “I merely pulled myself up to look over the rim just to see what was inside. A few inches down from the rim was the impression I received.”

  “I expect the crows got at the carcasses and stirred them up,” Carney volunteered. “Say, Bony, did you ever see the sun suck a dam dry?”

  “Only once,” recalled Bony, aware of the effort to change the subject. “It was one of those days when the sky is full of dusty-looking clouds that never pass under the sun to throw a shadow. I happened to be heading for a dam containing seven feet of water in a twelve-thousand yard excavation. It was 112 degrees in the shade, like today, and no wind. When I first saw it the water was being sucked up in a fine mist you could see through. The mist thickened to a light-brown rod, and then the rod densed and became dark brown, almost black, and suddenly it looked like a water spout upside down. At the top it formed a white cloud, and in two minutes the bottom of the rod was drawn up like those pelican chains we saw. When I reached the dam there wasn’t enough moisture, let alone water, to bog a fly.”

  “It doesn’t often happen, then?” asked Mrs Fowler, keenly interested.

  “So rarely that people who haven’t seen it won’t believe.”

  “I believe it. I believe anything can happen in this country,” Mrs Fowler claimed, and Lester sniffled and told a story about fish coming up three thousand feet from an artesian bore. After that the “party” dispersed, Bony satisfied with the initial effect of his prodding.

  When darkness spread over the Lake he was sitting on his favourite dune well to the right of the bluff, and when the night was claiming the dunes, he caught sight of the figure stealing between the dunes and taking advantage of the low but sparse scrub trees. He thought it could be Lester.