The bushman who came back b-22

by Arthur W. Upfield

  Although it was now late and Sarah would ring the dinner gong any minute, the afternoon continued hot and still. The crows were waking into activity, and Bony idly watched three of them coming from across the lake while he continued to ponder on the character sketches presented by Constable Pierce. A willi-willi, red and dense and powerful, its column of dust and debris revolving at terrific speed, marched down the western dunes to the lake. Lake Eyre refused to feed it. It first cut off theWilli’s feet, then its legs, then masticated the swaying body, working upwards until only the head was left wagging stupidly a thousand yards high.

  Here, in this land, to run was to crawl. In this land, the ancient legends were reality; the lake was dead, but the surrounding land was sleeping under the hot sun, waiting for the water to return and transform its dust into verdancy.

  Another night came to comfort men as a cloak for the naked, and when another day dawned, Bony was astride his horse and travelling northward from Mount Eden.

  He followed the cement-hard white beach, flanked on one side by embankments of red sand, and on the other by the sea of rusty mud. Here and there the tracks of cattle told where animals had ventured on to the mud a few yards to lick the salt from its crust. He came at long intervals to the mouth of an ancient river, or to the lip of an inlet. The land constantly changed for him; the sea of mud never. The only thing lacking in this picture was water. Given water to hide the mud, to cool the breeze, this beach could be named Crescent Parade, and this one ahead Little Cove, and the one traversed a natural for a Nudist Colony.

  When Yorky with the child had left Mount Eden, he would have kept to this iron-hard shore, knowing that even the aborigines could not track them, and knowing, too, that he would have to step from it at some place or other, and that the aborigines would know that as well. He had certainly won a remarkable victory. He would have been guided by the Universal Controller of Life, Water.

  Bony found no sand-soakage in the creek beds. Once he walked out on the mud, when his feet sank ankle-deep into it, and with a digging stick he holed down to the clay bed, and found no seepage.

  Towards sundown he saw ahead a line of dots extending on to the lake. The dots grew to black columns, collapsed to become a row of drunken aborigines, and finally became fence posts, extending for a mile out, and the fence must have been hastily erected years back, following the swift slaughter of this inland sea. However, near the ‘coast’ new wires had been strung to keep Mount Eden cattle within the boundary, for this was the boundary fence once patrolled by Ole Fren Yorky, and which Bony now determined to follow, to examine Yorky’s camps.

  This night he spent beside a small iron hut near a bore. There was a gate here giving egress to the unfenced country to the north. Inside the hut were several thirty-gallon oil tanks now containing weevilly flour, and small tins of tea and sugar, matches and plug tobacco, light rope, tar in bottles, and kerosene in a tin; without doubt a camelman’s camp.

  The following night Bony spent at another of Yorky’s camps, this time a three-sided shed constructed with tree branches, and situated on the bank of a creek where water lay a foot deep above coarse sand. Long after the water had disappeared it could be obtained by digging.

  At neither of these two camps was there sign of human visitors. Bony had seen no human tracks beside the netted fence. He had observed no smoke signals, no suspicious movements amid the prevailing mirage, which hemmed him all day long.

  Next morning, the first warning stirred the hairs at the back of his neck. During the afternoon he was convinced that he was being followed. And when he camped again at one of Yorky’s old camps he was elated by his first evidence since he began this investigation, of the sand dune coming to him.

  It was the third night from the homestead, and he slept in a single blanket on aclaypan some hundred yards from the glowing embers of the camp fire. He was undisturbed, and started the following day before sun-up, keeping to the fence, his destination the next watering place but a mile from the road to Loaders Springs, the fence having followed a great arc.

  At noon he was still being trailed, and knew that the tracker was keeping several miles behind him. It was unnecessary for the tracker to see what he did, where he went, for the tracks left by his horses, and his own when he dismounted, would be easily read.

  In a city, of course, you slip around a corner and wait to see who comes after you. But how to deal with an Australian sleuth who maintains his distance from you by many miles?

  On coming to a mile-wide flat bearing nothing butfoothigh tussock grass, Bony decided to wait for the tracker beyond the low sand ridges on the far side.

  As anticipated, the terrain was suitable. He tethered his horses on a patch of wild rye amid a small area of wait-a-bit and box trees, and himself lay at ease in the shade cast by a cotton bush. Before him was the flat, gently pulsating in the ground mirage. He could see the opposing ridges over which he had crossed to ride down to the flat.

  An eagle came low to prospect him and the horses. He waved a hand to tell the bird there was nothing dead, and the eagle soared aloft to continue its eternal aerial patrol. Bony was lucky that the crows hadn’t followed him from the last camp, and that no others had yet taken up their espionage.

  It is ever an advantage to know what the enemy knows and does not know. The tracker knew that Bony was travelling from one of Yorky’s water camps to the next. Therefore, he could not know that Bony was now waiting for him. On the other hand, he would not know if Bony decided to deviate, chose to make temporary camp to brew tea, or take a nap, and so he would proceed with extreme caution, and when coming to the first flat he would watch for signs that his quarry could be lingering just beyond it.

  As usual at this time, the day was hot, and humidity low, the shade temperature at the distant homestead being in the vicinity of 120 degrees. There was no wind, and against the golden-dusted sky individual clouds were born, grew to giants, dwindled to dwarfs and died. They first appeared as white dots, swiftly extending, thus creating great shadows laden with cool air, and bringing about the disturbances fashioning the strictly local windstorms called willi-willies.

  The favoured march of the willi-willies is from north to south, and they were travelling this line, not many being in sight at the same time, seldom more than three. One passed close to Bony, whipping his hair and drying the perspiration on his face. It moved with steady speed at about thirty miles an hour, whirling sand and debris upward into its red body, roaring like a beast when passing over the scrub. Yet another halted on the flat, performed a jig, rocked as if about to collapse with fatigue, finally became thrice in size and reached high speed as though a living thing.

  What with the heat, the sticky flies, the eagles and the willi-willies, Bony was left with no cause for boredom. With the patience of his maternal ancestors, he waited, and was beginning to believe he would still be waiting the next day when a feminine willi-willi came tripping to the distant sand ridges. She paused there, seemingly shrinking from the open space, a little fearful of venturing farther. Then, mustering courage, she advanced cautiously.

  Wisps of dead grass and herbage formed her feet, shimmered her red gown with gold to the waist. Her slim body rose to several hundred feet, swaying gently in a swooning waltz as she proceeded. A gambler here would be in paradise, for he could back his hunch without taking into account pulled horses or stacked cards, and Bony was backing this willi-willi to pass on his left, when the unpredictable happened.

  As they are conceived by a gentle eddy so the willies die in an eddy. This one began to die when but a hundred yards from Bony. Something gross and unsporting punched her in the tummy, but she staggered onward in increasing tempo as though striving to keep up with the orchestra.

  Bony betted she wouldn’t reach his side of the flat, and won. Suddenly she lost her head, and lifted her skirt as though to cover her shamed head.

  Absorbed in the fate of the female, he saw not the male, for there was Charlie racing to cover, he having a
lmost crossed the flat in the centre of a revolving column of sand.

  Chapter Ten

  In Effort to Trade

  BETRAYEDBYthe willi-willi, Charlie gained the nearest cover at Olympic speed, ending the spring with a dive for Bony’s cotton bush.

  Following the dieting of the walkabout to the Neales River, Charlie had fattened on Sarah’s white-man tucker, and was now in excellent condition, his arms and legs of Grecian proportions, his tummy less to be admired. All he wore was a pair of dark-brown shorts; his only equipment a hessian bag subsequently found to contain a small calico bag of tea and a gnawed leg of fire-charred kangaroo. On coming to rest under the cotton bush, his head was within fifteen inches of Bony’s head. When their gaze clashed, Bony said mildly:

  “Good day-ee, Charlie! Are you travelling?”

  Charlie grinned, genuine humour associated with astonishment in his black eyes.

  “Day-ee, Mr Bonaparte. Bit hot in the sun, eh?” Then realization of the situation smote him and he shrank away without thought of the sunlight burning his feet beyond the bush. “Crikey! This your bush, eh? I’ll get going.”

  “We go together,” purred Bony, standing with Charlie. “We have much to talk about, and three miles’ travel to the next camp. We go that way, to my horses.”

  Charlie found dislike of the hard blue eyes and of the automatic directed to his stomach, and ultimately disliked the hard smile on Bony’s face. He was ordered to unhitch the pack-horse and lead it to Yorky’s next camp, and on glancing backward now and then, it was to see Bony mounted, the pistol in his right hand. Escorted occasionally by an indifferent willi-willi, they moved over the flats and the low sand ridges, through the swamp gums, across dry creek beds and narrower gutters, to arrive at a bough shed erected beside a lake of shallow water maintained by a bore half a mile away.

  Here Bony told Charlie to remove the load from the pack-horse. Then with his left hand he unstrapped one of the pack-bags and took from it a pair of handcuffs. They were not of the kind Charlie had seen previously, which are manacles rather than wrist-cuffs. Still, he knew their purpose, and he offered no resistance. The heavy pack-saddle was lifted into the shade of the bough shed, and then, before he understood what was going on, one of the cuffs was unlocked from a wrist and relocked to the iron structure of the pack saddle. Thus he had one hand free with which to protect his face from the flies, and if he wanted to run, well, the saddle went with him, and he wouldn’t run far and never fast.

  Save for its proximity to water, the camp site was unsatisfactory, open to the westerlies, unprotected from the dusty ground churned by the hoofs of nomadic cattle. Although brackish, the water was good enough for tea if taken with plenty of sugar, and the closer to the bore, so was the water more heavily laden with alkali, hot almost to boiling point at the mouth of the L-shape iron outlet pipe. Day and night gushed the water from the depths, year after year since the bore was put down.

  Bony made tea, gave Charlie a pannikin of it, opened a tin of beef for each of them. He tossed the charred kangaroo leg to the already gathered crows, and then when they were smoking and the sun had gone down, he began the interrogation.

  “You’re a rotten tracker, Charlie. Too much Mission learning, eh? You learn to read and write, but you’re no tracker.”

  “I followed you all the way from Mount Eden, anyway,” reminded Charlie, cheerfully, and yet with wariness in his eyes. “I done no wrong. Free country. Mr Wootton go crook when he knows about this.” He raised his cuffed wrist, and for the first time anger glowed. “I got my School Certificate, like Meena and the others. I’ll write to the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Adelaide.”

  “Do that, Charlie,” Bony said kindly. “Ask him to call on you in jail. You see, Charlie, I’m a terrible liar. I’m the worst liar you ever met. I may-it will depend on you-arrest you and put you up on a charge of interfering with a police officer in the execution of his duty, obstructing the police, assaulting a police officer, taking unlawful refuge inside a willi-willi, and several other matters I could think of.”

  “You got to prove all that.”

  Charlie was as yet unimpressed, because his respect for Constable Pierce was due to that policeman’s tolerance, and also to the result of a little learning and association with a Missioner. Evil white men hadn’t entered his ken. On the opposite side, Bony knew all too well that you cannot abstract with violence information from an unwilling aborigine. He was sure that Charlie hadn’t tracked him of his own volition, that he had been ordered to do so, and most likely was instructed not to divulge who issued the order.

  “You know Constable Pierce, Charlie,” Bony went on. “Some other place boss policeman over Constable Pierce, and some other place bigger boss policeman. Now I am a Big Chief policeman. I’m like Chief Canute. What I say goes. I tell lies about you and everyone believes me, not you. You tell the judge I’m a big-feller liar, and he’ll add six months more jail. I say you did all these things, and you go to jail for three years. Better for you to tell me where Yorky is, and then instead of jail Constable Pierce will make you his tracker.”

  “Sezyou,” scoffed Charlie, and Bony was dismayed because Charlie now appeared to be more sophisticated than he had thought.

  “You must have been to the pictures,” he said.

  “Too right! Down at Loaders Springs. Us Missionabos was allowed by the Missioner everySat’day night. Took us to town in his truck. We seen BobMitchum and Gary Cooper and all them.”

  “You astonish me, Charlie. The cinema on Saturday night and hiding in a willi-willi on Sunday morning. Singing in church on Sunday evening, and pointing the bone on Monday afternoon. Still, you’ll be seeing films in jail once every month, and singing songs when locked in a nice cold cell at night. And, Charlie, while you’re in jail, do you know what will happen?”

  “What?”

  “Some other aborigine is going to take Meena.”

  With boosted confidence, Charlie countered with:

  “Meena belongs to Canute. No blackfeller can take Meena.”

  “But you tried, Charlie. I saw you the other night. She slapped your face, and then let you kiss her. She let you kiss her twice when you made the doll of her and gave it to Linda. I know you like Meena. I know that she likes you, too. But you’re afraid, aren’t you? You’re afraid of old Canute. You know that if you run away with Meena, the bucks will track you and catch you, and you will be speared, and Meena’s knees will be broken so that she can’t run away another time.”

  The scenting nostrils were flaring, for love and desire are not the prerogatives of the white man. Almost dreamily, Bony went on talking.

  “You want to marry Meena, Charlie, and old Canute say: ‘No, you don’t. Meena’s my woman. I got her when she was a baby. I bought her from her father.’D’you know who Meena’s father was?”

  Charlie frowned, then shook his head.

  “Does Sarah know?”

  Now Charlie grinned, saying:

  “She’d know nothing like that for sure.”

  “Then who did Canute get Meena from when she was born? I don’t think Meena was promised to Canute ever. I think it’s a yarn. Having visited the white man’s halls of culture called ‘the pictures’, you’ll have heard the word ‘Sucker’ and will know just what it means. You, Charlie, Sucker Charlie.

  “Long time ago, and when I look back I’m astonished how far back on my tracks it was, I met my Meena,” continued Bony, and instantly Charlie’s interest was increased. “My Meena was lovely and soft and warm, just like your Meena could be for you. But my Meena made out she didn’t want me. You know, let me kiss her on the tip of her nose and only that. You know what theseMeenas are, I’m sure.

  “Well, a long time went by, and I only ever got as far as kissing my Meena on the tip of her nose. Then one day the Missioner came, and I asked him straight if he’d marry me to my Meena. When he said ‘Yes,’ I grabbed my Meena and ran her to the Missioner, and he read out the words, and when he asked me if I
would, I said, ‘Yes,’ and when he asked my Meena if she would, and she wouldn’t answer, I pinched her bottom till she did. D’you know what I did then?”

  Celibate Charlie was caught.

  “I dragged my Meena away from the Mission, and away from the camp, and soon she didn’t have to be dragged any more. She ran with me, and presently we came to a creek. Beside the creek was a great place where tobacco bush grew all round a billabong, and among the bush were ducks laying eggs, andwaterhens mating, and ibis standing in the water catching silver bream. Then I made a humpy of bush and gathered leaves to make the ground soft and warm. Andd’you know what, Charlie?”

  “What?” pressed the entranced Charlie.

  “Why, now I’ve got one son who’s a doctor missioner away up in Queensland, and two more sons as well. Of course, you won’t have any sons, and you won’t have any Meena in a nice warm humpy. Because you’ll be in jail. That’s if you won’t tell me what I want to know. Then what? Why, Meena will be looking for Charlie, and Charlie will be locked up in jail, and then she’ll come to thinking she’d like to have babies, and some other blackfeller will be waiting for her, and he won’t be so silly as to make me lock him up in jail.”

  By no means without imagination Charlie pictured his Meena in the arms of a rival while he himself languished in durance vile. He had never been in a whitefeller’s jail, but he knew there were no women in them, and once there he couldn’t go on walkabout whenever inherited instincts commanded.

  Seated on the ground, he rested his back against the pack-saddle, and by bringing his free hand close to the cuffed one, he managed to roll a cigarette and strike a match. It was almost dark, but the air was still heated by the hot earth. The stars were dancing their summer jig. A wedge of ducks whirred low, decided that the artificial lake was too small, and sped upward and away into the profound silence. Now and then Bony fed the small fire from Yorky’s reserve wood-pile, and the reflection of the lazy flames shimmered upon both faces, framing them within the shape of the bough shed.