Preservation

by Jock Serong

  When we had finished the meal, children came forward to collect the oyster shells. The man in the opossum cloak sat next to my father, who placed a hand on his knee and said the word we had heard from the old man on the other bank. Guyangal.

  The man’s eyes lit with great pride. He placed his hand on his chest and repeated the word, and the other one, Thaua, back to my father. Then he swept an arm around all of the people there and said it again.

  You were keen to make it known we were walking north: they pointed into the bush and drew maps in the sand that made clear we should walk inland, but you corrected them each time. This went on for some time—each time you insisted they would turn to each other and talk with serious faces, then nod together. Then they would point inland again. It tested your patience. You sighed, turned to the others and stood up to show it was time we left. The meeting ended with the man in the cloak appointed as our guide, and we set off, the senior man and his two friends at the front, pointing out things they thought important.

  The flies moved lazy over our skin, stopping at the places where we were cut. I would forget them, only to find them crowded at some sore like beasts at a waterhole. Under our feet passed ashy streaks of burnt ground, tiny shoots coming through.

  The Mussulman Mohan fell in beside me.

  How do you feel? I asked him, as he was among the oldest of us.

  I hadn’t seen him smile in days. I am all right, he said. My mouth hurts.

  I reached for his mouth—may I?—and he opened it and pulled his lips back. There were cruel sores all along the gums, some around his few teeth, showing their crumbled roots. I looked down, shamed by my pity for him. His shins were crossed with scratches from the stiff twigs, like all of ours were, but then I saw his feet. This ground tore the ends off every man’s toes, but his looked like some animal had tried to eat them, all blood and torn skin. Small clouds of eager flies tried to settle as he walked.

  The women came out this time, he said, puffing a little.

  It took me a moment to understand. Ah yes, I said to him.

  I think they mean friendship. As I didn’t answer he went on. These are not the—what did you call them?—the Kurnai. We have crossed a border and been passed to these Thaua people.

  If he was right and the natives were not just ‘natives’ but all sorts of different people, and we were being passed between them, then much else was possible. Word of our progress—and our misdeeds—would travel ahead of us. And the other thing: our efforts to learn any language, or follow any custom, must start anew each time we crossed a river and found ourselves among new people.

  We had eaten little that day, had made do with sucking at flowers as we had seen our guides doing. They showed us shoots and berries that were good to eat. There was a small white berry that grew in great numbers and had a seed in it. It tasted much like a crisp apple, but the Thaua men laughed and made clear we should not eat too many of them, making great gushes with their hands at their backsides. We understood perfectly.

  When the dark came we were too tired to make a fire. One by one we lay down where we had been standing as the Thaua disappeared into the bush. They attached no importance to goodbyes.

  Early the next morning Mr Clark was up and busy with his journal. It was, he told us, the thirtieth day of March, just over seven weeks since the ship ran aground.

  We crossed a small river on foot as the morning lit up. We came under thick smoke from the burning grasses for eight miles or so over the shallow growth on the hills. Eyes stinging, we came to a larger stream. This time we Bengalis were sent in to test its depth: we were down to the depth of our heads within yards of the shore.

  Mr Kennedy took out his tools and we were sent for logs: the slow work of raft-making began again. But this time days of waiting and working were saved by the return of our Thaua friends. They had brought with them two younger ones, around my age. They watched the work, bent with their hands on their knees, then waved to us to stop. Mr Kennedy looked angry.

  The Thaua men stepped into the heavy bush behind the riverbank where the tall tree-ferns made shade and moss, moving expertly over the wet ground. In minutes they had each found the head of a long, fallen trunk. These, I could see, were chosen, and not just any timber. Each had been cut down and each was slender and straight.

  They pulled one free of the scrub and stood it on its end, as tall as the river was wide. Moving up to a small rock that stood higher on the bank, they let the trunk fall. It landed perfectly on matching rocks on the other side. A bridge, fixed at both ends by piers of rock. Back they went into the bush to repeat their steps, and when they had done it three times, they’d laid the three trunks as straight as rails next to each other. Two heavy boulders wedged them at either end so they wouldn’t roll, and over we went, jumping from the logs in high spirits when the crossing was done. Even you, sir, managed to swallow your scorn for a moment. Mr Figge looked amused, but then he always did: amused and interested. So much of life was a bug in a jar to him.

  The men took up their bridge and stored it on our side of the river. I thought them to be good men: they treated each other well in their work. They stayed with us as we pressed north into the evening, the heath turning to forest now and the forest to rainforest, thick with drips and shudders. Four miles of hard going under great thickets of ferns and palms, then a fork in the trail, and we were forced to bow our heads to pass under branches. The undersides had been cut back. Some of the cuts were old, and the bark had grown over the knots. The work must have gone back generations. The path led deeper among ancient things, and the trunks beside me were worn smooth. I let my hand fall on them as I passed and found it followed the same shine on those trunks.

  Just on dark, the path opened into a clearing, as when I was first taken in by the Kurnai. Again the sound of gathered voices, but this time a great many more. Slices of it through the trees, colour and movement. And then out and down a short hill into a place where we stood in wonder. Understanding for the first time.

  Of course we were watched, I thought. Of course there was such certainty, so much understanding in everything they did. For there in front of us was a village of perhaps fifty or sixty houses, set apart from each other with space between. Fireplaces and stacked grain. The trees around the edge of the place marked with symbols, so clear they could have been ship’s ensigns. There were people moving about dressed in opossum cloaks or simple animal skins. One coat I saw was like the fur of a cat, dark and covered in perfect white spots. Mothers carried fat babies. Children played. Men reclined together and talked. Families sat around their evening meal, dogs waiting beside them in hope of scraps. But it was the houses that stopped me.

  I studied the ones closest by, a cluster of them built the same way: framed in bones. Huge ribs had been dug into the earth on their heavy ball-end, and they speared high into the centre of a circle as they narrowed. Whales, one of the Javanese said. Where the bones met they were tied off with something that looked as strong as the best cordage on a frigate, and the spaces between bones were thatched with sticks and grasses, reeds and other things. The very best pair of ribs at each house had been kept to frame the doorway, the door itself a sheet of soft bark.

  The families that belonged to these houses ate from bark sheets, but their food came from clay vessels, charred around their sides like they had been fired. Their water was poured from tied-up animal skins that made me think of the water-boys of the Hooghly. These were people who wanted for nothing. It was us who came to do the begging.

  There was singing, dancing, heavy sticks driving rhythm and men who barked and yelped. As we sat and watched, the old people checked my body for wounds with their soft hands on my arms and legs. They washed the sores they found with oil, smeared thick grease on the worst of them. I didn’t see my father during all this but I later learned he was well cared for. He, and the old Mussulman, Mohan. And I am sure you too, Mr Clark.

  We had come more than a hundred miles on foot already, you told us
that night. But you had no map to confirm it. You wrote our progress in your journal by the firelight, checking the brass dials we had saved for you from the dying longboat. The natives watched with interest, sensing that in some way you were consulting their universe. How far to go? we asked, because we knew it to be the real question. You guessed four hundred miles.

  That night I was taken into a hut to sleep, and the earth under my head smelled of other people. The ground and the sweat of a living body. I slept alone, neither on duty for you nor beside my father. The first night I ever spent on my own terms.

  A hundred miles, and we had not lost a man. Not a hand had been raised against the natives. The only hands raised were between us.

  In the morning I woke in the knots of a dream I could not separate from thoughts of the evening before.

  The Thaua were running about in great excitement. Children took me by the hand and pointed to the sea. Other children had hold of my countrymen and my father. I saw you, Mr Clark, being pulled to your feet and hurried on. At first I feared some disaster, but there was a look of great excitement on every face, and they were using a single word, over and over. Garuwa! they cried, and it whipped them ever higher.

  I followed where I was taken, along with the others, down new paths over a large, low hill where we could see the sea. The whole of the village was with us, led by one old man with a most wonderful silver beard. They honoured him as they went, jumping about him and calling him guman.

  I watched the others in secret as they were hurried down the same path. Mr Kennedy and Mr Thompson, reluctant again, complaining as they went. You wanted your pride, Mr Clark: the keeper of our records, hugging your journal and your bag of brass instruments to your chest. And Mr Figge, enjoying the scene too much for words, his huge paws resting on the heads of the children and in his eyes some hideous thought on a low fire. I cast him from my mind, so much did I want to keep hold of the joy around me.

  Down the hill, faster and faster until I feared my feet would fail me, and then we burst out of the scrub at the edge of the beach and onto the open flat sands. In front of us was a wide circle of bay, surrounded by hills like the one we’d come down. Most of the Thaua were already there on the sand. They were looking out to sea, looking at the great, tall fins of killer whales working the glassy surface not far from shore.

  There were three of the huge fish there, fins taller than the men pointing at them, circling and circling. The wide tails broke the surface and smacked it, and between the three fins there was a stirring in the water. The movement of something very large. The reflections on the surface swirled away and now the thing was clear: a whale calf, caught in the herding of the killers; rolling, twisting but trapped where they could have it easy. All four of the animals spouted seawater: from the killers this was a fierce jet, but the calf ’s was ragged and airy. And with every loop, they drove it closer to the beach.

  Some of the younger men had waded into the water, taking care not to get too close to the great fish in their struggle. A stray fin, a blow from the mighty tails would crush a man’s bones. But the Thaua shouted and laughed, sometimes at each other, sometimes at the whales. The sunlight appeared now, from where the sun worked its way through the trees on top of the ridge behind us. These blankets of light fell on the moving animals, gleamed on their backs, and they fell on the young men also, finding the ripples of their bodies.

  Eyes turned, among all this, to the beach. Two strong timbers had been driven into the sand, about forty yards apart. Between them ran the old bearded man—shouting and dancing, waving his arms in the direction of the whales, somehow urging the animals towards shore.

  The killers were ramming the calf now. It bellowed its lost hope, broke the surface with its giant head, pleading for the old man to dream something else. A flash of its eye, then gone. They slammed it again: its tail rose and fell in the beautiful sun, perfect white beneath. Impact, shudder, a rush of bloody froth. The old man thrashed on the sand, digging clumps with his feet, head back and roaring, sweat shining on his back and the flying sand sticking to it.

  His pace grew ever more urgent. He bent now, throwing handfuls of air from the sky to the ground. Birds made loops over the sea, then arrowed into it one after the other, as if he had told them to. The crowd was parting, some to see the killing in the shallows, some the old man. But he was tied to a giant force: he knew nothing of what was around him.

  I knew this was their matter, not mine, but my heart cried out for the whale. The killers were baring their teeth as they plunged into the suffering head, and the gusts from its spout were pink now with bloodied air. The three killers turned away from the whale, knowing it was past escape. They took themselves further out from the beach and I waited with dread for them to turn. And so they turned, gaining speed as they came. A great roar came up from the crowd on the beach: they hammered my ears with their shouts and clapping and in those moments as the killers closed in I was no longer passing through but staked to the day. The dancing bodies, the fierce will of the animals, the sand and sky: none of it paid heed to me. The moment only demanded that I see.

  The whale had rolled side on to the beach and now they struck it at full speed, forcing another gust of dying breath. They struck it so hard it slid up onto the sand and the men closed in with their spears, launching them one after another into the soft flanks. Streaks of blood ran from each buried spear and from the comb that lined the downward corner of its great mouth.

  I looked back to the old man. He had sat in the place where he’d been dancing, around him all the stirred sand. His head was down, chest rising and falling, forgotten by the crowd.

  The calf was helpless on the wet sand. Its tail curled upwards as though terrible agony clenched its belly. Once they could see the spears had done their work, the men removed them with a twist to get the barb away clean. They came round the seaward side to roll it further out of the water. The sand, clinging in great wet clumps to its skin, slid down as it rolled. The whale was perhaps twenty foot long and all of their effort would move it no more than a few feet. There it rested: upside down, white belly offered to the sun.

  The men slapped the hide of the whale and made approving sounds to one another. Although its carcass was higher than the tallest of them, a boy had somehow climbed up on the far side and now ran along it—a woman who might have been his mother roared at him and down he came—and now the men closed in around the mouth. I could see that they had tools: short axes like ours but made with a stone head. They chopped away at the comb, cutting and pulling until it all came away like a wet sail. This was taken to the women with great ceremony. The men now heaved open the great mouth and stood it that way using the spears. The first few shafts bent under the weight of the jaw, until more were put in to spread the load.

  From where I stood I could see only some of this. A man climbed inside the mouth, a job I would not have taken for any amount of money. The killers were still cruising just off the beach, and I thought I understood. They were the wallahs awaiting their coin. The whale’s capsized eye ref lected the circling fins in sorrow and confusion.

  And this is how all of us are taken down.

  Mr Figge had moved in beside the men who were working on the whale’s mouth, and I saw him lift the knife he carried: the largest of the ones we had saved from the longboat. He passed it to the men: they examined it, then cheered and patted his back and passed the knife into the mouth, to the man in there, working in the half dark. Their voices rose, Mr Figge made a sound like Ho! and they all reached in, pulling out a huge slab of soft meat: the tongue of the whale.

  They struggled with it: it slid from their hands every time they tried to lift. Others arrived with cut branches and they slid these under the tongue, rolling it onto them so they were able to pick up the ends and carry the meat like a tikathee. They walked like this, into the water and up to their waists, and I felt the river again and the dogs of the dusty city just quick, before they rolled the tongue off the timbers and int
o the water. It floated there, the pink thing with no shape, trailing its sinews.

  The fins came in to the offering. The heads and bodies of the killers appeared, their patches of black and white. They fell upon the tongue like mad dogs, no heed to each other or the natives. For a moment their power boiled the water and the work of their teeth bloodied it.

  But then the surface was still and all was done. The women led their children back up the hill and the men prepared themselves for the long work of butchering.

  25

  ‘How are your hands?’

  Grayling stood framed in the doorway of Clark’s small house, having found it open. The flies were gone now; the season was at an end. People were leaving their houses open to air the smells that the summer heat had trapped.

  The lascar boy stood beside Clark’s bed, lifting him forward to wash his back with a wet towel. The door between their two rooms was open. Clark held his hands up feebly. Both were still bandaged.

  ‘May I?’ On receiving a small nod of assent, Grayling walked in. Propelled by some opposite force, the boy finished his work, draped a blanket over Clark’s shoulders and left the room.

  ‘Improving, thank you.’ Again, that wariness. ‘Are you wanting to question me further?’

  Grayling attempted a smile. ‘Well, we’re still a long way short of Sydney.’ Receiving no response, he continued. ‘When we left off a couple of days ago, you were telling me about the walk along the beaches towards the east. I then took up the story with Mr Figge and he was able to describe the point of land where the coast swung north. He told me of your meeting with the natives he called the’—Grayling checked his notes—‘the Kurnai people, and then he said that you got to a river and that was the end of their lands.’

  ‘That’s his assumption,’ Clark answered gruffly. ‘I saw no clear evidence of the beginnings and ends of lands, or whether they even had borders. Once we crossed that river, the Nadgee they called it, I heard all sorts of names being tossed…’ He was racked momentarily by powerful coughing. ‘Tossed about. Yuin, Guyangal, Thaua…’ His hands rose and fell with exasperation.