Walking the Boundaries

by Jackie French

  ‘All but Nellie.’

  ‘Nellie wouldn’t go.’ Meg paused, and brushed away a fly from the corner of her eye. ‘The land is Nellie’s too.’

  ‘I thought it was your ma’s?’

  Meg seemed to hunt for words again. ‘The land is ours because a bit of paper says it’s so. It means that other white people can’t take it from us. But Nellie . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s like she is the land as well. It’s as though you can’t separate the two.’

  ‘So you think it’s hers?’

  ‘And Ma’s. She walked the boundaries too. Like Gran as well. That’s why Nellie looked after her, why the blacks helped us build our farm. When I walk the boundaries,’ said Meg, ‘it will be mine. I’ll have land too, and no one will ever be able to hurt me like they did my da. I’ll raise my sheep and build another house. I’ll be as rich as any of the snotty families nearer town.’

  She jumped to her feet. Martin pushed himself stiffly after her, watching her stride ahead. Suddenly she turned.

  ‘It was Da’s dream,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m doing it. Da made me talk like him and Gran. He made me practise saying my words clearly. Ma talks too much like Nellie, that’s what Da would say, although he’d laugh and kiss her while he said it. He said one day I’ll learn to be a lady, I’ll get the education. All I need is money, and my land.’

  They walked in silence for a while. A wallaby watched them, scratching its red belly, before bending down to eat again as they ignored it and walked on. The slope grew steeper. Martin’s legs felt heavy. His knees and ankles whispered pain. He had to urge them on. If only they could go downhill just a little way. If only Meg would stop, and let him catch his breath. How could she stride on like that, as though the grass were helping her with every step? You’d think she was a kangaroo.

  Meg turned round and caught him panting. She grinned. ‘They could hear your breath a dozen hills away,’ she informed him. ‘You’re slower than a turtle sleeping in the sun, weak as a baby magpie fallen from its nest. Here, try some of these. They’ll pick you up a bit.’

  She reached up and picked some orange berries from a vine clinging to a wattle tree. She handed a couple to Martin.

  ‘Can you eat these?’

  ‘Of course. You’ve got to eat your fruit, Ma says, or your teeth’ll rot from your mouth, like the sailors’ teeth do.’ Meg picked some more, and crunched them with her teeth, then ate some green vine tips for good measure.

  Martin tasted the berries cautiously. They were sweet, and tart, but soggy like wet cardboard. The seeds stuck in his teeth. Martin hoped they’d give him energy to keep on going. How come he could play soccer all Sunday afternoon and Rollerblade for hours after school, but puff like this while Meg just leapt along?

  It wasn’t fair!

  They began to walk again. Martin concentrated on placing one foot after the other. Step . . . and step . . . and step. That way he could keep walking, no matter how steep the track became. Step . . . step . . . He tried to think as well as walk. It was hard to clear his head, as though the lack of air had made it fuzzy.

  Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

  ‘I think Nellie knew they’d hunt the blacks away,’ said Meg finally from up ahead. ‘Nellie knows things like that. That’s why she taught me things.’

  ‘What things?’ panted Martin, his mind still on his feet.

  ‘Just things,’ said Meg vaguely. ‘Women’s things. You wouldn’t understand.’ She hitched the blanket roll to the other shoulder again. The hill was steeper now. Even her breath was getting short. ‘She says I’m all she’s got to tell things to now. I’m the only one left who can stay with the land. My skin’s the wrong colour, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She says if I walk the boundaries I’ll understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’ said Martin.

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Meg. ‘She said I would when I was through. She was watching me last week, dagging the sheep — they get mucky when it rains like this — and she said it was time I walked the boundaries too. She said I’d meet people as I went.’

  ‘That’s why you asked me to come with you?’

  Meg nodded. She shifted the roll again. ‘We’re nearly at the top,’ she said.

  The sweat was trickling down Martin’s back, cold against his hot wet skin. He tried to force his brain to clear. There couldn’t have been blacks living here only a few years ago. And when had Ted sold them the place, if Meg’s mother had always lived here? And what about the mail cart, and her father with the plough? Surely the potato famines were in Ireland in the 1800s?

  The mist had lifted now. Martin hauled himself up the final slope. They’d come to the top boundary. This was the end of Ted’s land — if Ted did own it. It would be good to see something instead of bush for a change. He was starting to feel that the bush was all that was real in the world. There’d be paddocks in front of them, instead of bush, and brown cattle on improved pasture, the sheep like fat grey rocks, the barbed-wire fences in neat squares, and the smooth grey snake of the bitumen road . . .

  The trees stretched in front of them like a waving ocean. Even the horizon was green. A thin stream of smoke drifted up in one corner of the sky, and that was all.

  Martin sat down and leant against a tree. He had to catch his breath. Finally he thought he understood.

  FIVE

  Meg’s World

  THEY SAT AGAINST THE TREE and chewed on thick slices of cold pudding. It was better than the pasty, a sort of Christmas pudding thing filled with currants, sweet with treacle and some sort of spice. Martin tried to explain what he thought had happened.

  Meg stared at him, dazed. ‘But you can’t go back in time!’ she protested.

  ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense.’ Martin tried to think how to convince her. ‘I mean, you thought my shoes were strange, and . . .’

  ‘Any fool can have strange boots. It doesn’t mean they’ve gone traipsing through the centuries.’

  What would convince her? If only he had his pack . . . or a computer game . . . or . . . Martin thrust his hand into his pocket and brought out a dollar coin. ‘Look at the date on this.’

  Meg handled the money gingerly. ‘I’ve never seen a coin like this. Maybe that’s not a date at all. Maybe it’s a . . . Well, how should I be knowing? But people don’t go journeying through time, except in stories, the sort of stories Nellie tells . . .’ She broke off and stared at him. ‘When I set out,’ she whispered, ‘Nellie told me to mind where I put my feet. I said I’d walked this place a hundred times. And Nellie laughed. She said no one knows where their feet will go when they walk the boundaries. They could go to yesterday or tomorrow or the time when the hills were still white light . . .’

  ‘Then you believe me?’ asked Martin quietly.

  ‘I must believe you, mustn’t I? You say the world has changed? It’s not like this for you at all?’

  Martin gestured at the green horizon. ‘It’s all paddocks out there in my time,’ he said. ‘Except for the roads and a few houses. It’s like that all the way to town.’

  ‘No trees at all?’ Meg sounded shocked.

  Martin shook his head. ‘Some. Not like this.’

  ‘But what about the animals?’

  ‘The sheep and cattle?’

  ‘The roos and murriwan — I mean the wallabies — and wombats and possums and bandicoots and all the birds . . .’

  ‘I don’t know. They died, I suppose. It’s been cleared a long time now.’

  ‘But how?’ cried Meg. ‘Why did it all change so much? It must be ugly.’

  Martin gazed at the trees around them.

  ‘Not ugly,’ he said. ‘Just different. Golden instead of green.’

  ‘But it must be empty,’ said Meg softly. ‘So empty . . . just filled with humans and their animals . . . just sort of simple . . . not like this at all.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Martin. ‘It’s not like this.’ He tried to wor
k it out in his mind. It wasn’t something he’d ever really thought of before. ‘I suppose it just changed gradually,’ he said. ‘People cleared bits, then more bits. They wanted to breed more sheep . . . and the sheep ate the new trees when they came up.’

  Meg was silent for a minute. ‘You mean if I have sheep I’ll lose the bush?’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Martin. ‘I mean, you can’t have a farm and the bush too. You can’t make any money from the bush.’

  ‘I never thought,’ said Meg slowly. ‘I always thought the bush would be there forever. There’s so much of it.’ She looked up at the trees, as though asking for their help, and then looked back at Martin. ‘Is the whole world like that in your time?’

  ‘No,’ said Martin. ‘Not all of it. A lot of it is cities, and houses. There’s national parks too. There’s Ted’s place. Ted won’t have many sheep, just a few in the paddock by the house. He made his living selling a few trees for fence posts, keeping bees, and things like that.’

  Meg was very still. ‘Ted’s place is this place? My place? A hundred years away?’

  ‘Just about,’ said Martin.

  ‘And it’s still bush?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Martin. ‘It’s worth a mint, too.’

  Meg was silent. A bat flitted past them through the growing dusk. On the horizon the clouds turned grey and pink.

  ‘Do you believe me?’ asked Martin finally.

  Meg nodded. ‘I know things can change,’ she said slowly. ‘When Ma was young there were a thousand blacks here, maybe. Now there’s only Nellie. I suppose if we can wipe out the tribes we can wipe out animals as well.’

  ‘There are some animals,’ said Martin. ‘Sheep and cattle and dogs and cats and foxes . . .’

  ‘None of the ones that belong here,’ said Meg. ‘Just humans and their pets and hangers-on. The bush is more than that.’ She searched for words. ‘It’s the way things fit together. The way the birds eat the beetles, and the beetles eat the leaves and sing on summer days; the way a wallaby dies and its body turns into soil and grows a creeper on the hill. It doesn’t need humans. It just is.’ Her voice shook. ‘I never thought that I could hurt this place, and love it too.’

  An owl hooted slowly in the distance. Was it the great-great-grandmother of the owl he’d heard last night? Martin scratched his ankle where an ant had bitten him.

  ‘If what you say is true,’ said Meg finally, ‘I have to choose. I can have sheep and be rich, rich as anyone, rich as the scoundrel who ruined Gran, rich like Da always wanted me to be. But if I do I hurt the bush, and if I hurt the bush I hurt me too, and Nellie, and everything that lives in it. It just boils down to that — a sheep farm or the bush.’ She nodded sadly. ‘That’s why Nellie sent me out here now, I reckon. She fancies I like my sheep too much. Nellie knows things. She sees a lot, Ma says.’ She was silent for a while. A chorus of frogs barked suddenly from down the hill, then quietened as quickly as they’d started.

  ‘How will you get back?’ asked Meg at last. ‘Do you have to stay in this time?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Martin thoughtfully. ‘It’s funny, I should be scared. But I’m not. I think Old Ted expected something like this to happen. He kept hinting. I think all I have to do is exactly what Old Ted told me to do. I have to walk the boundaries. When I get to the finish I’ll be in my own time again.’

  The bat flicked by again. Somewhere the owl hooted again, echoing from hill to hill. ‘I think I came into your time when I fell asleep. It must have been. The rain would have woken me if I’d been there to feel it.’

  He paused, trying to work things out. ‘Maybe that’s what happened to my father. Why he didn’t make it round the boundaries. He said he got heatstroke. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe something strange happened — like it happened to me — but instead of going on he went back.’

  Meg chewed the end of one of her plaits. It was tied with a sort of string, Martin noticed, like the fibres of some plant wound together.

  ‘Maybe that’s what Nellie meant,’ she said finally. ‘She said I’d meet people as I walked. I wondered what she meant. There aren’t any people round here. Not since they hunted the camp away.’

  ‘Don’t you have any friends?’ asked Martin shyly.

  Meg laughed. ‘Lots. There’s Beatrice and Mumu and Mirragong . . .’

  ‘But I thought you said . . .’

  Meg grinned. ‘Beatrice is a wombat, bless her muddy whiskers, and Mumu’s a wallaby and Mirragong’s my dog.’

  ‘Oh, animals . . .’

  ‘Animals are good friends,’ said Meg fiercely. ‘Better than any person.’

  ‘I suppose,’ agreed Martin. It wasn’t worth arguing about. Meg lost her temper faster than anyone he’d ever met. Besides, he’d never had a pet, or known any animal well. Mum said she couldn’t afford the fuss and expense of a dog — and anyway, pets weren’t allowed in the flats. If they were rich, Mum said, then maybe he could have a dog, a little one, that didn’t shed its fur . . . He supposed an animal could be a friend if you were lonely enough.

  Meg got to her feet and threw her plaits behind her. In the fading light they were the same colour as the gum tips, a smoky red. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It’s nearly dark. We’d better get a fire going or we’ll catch our deaths of cold. We need something for dinner too.’ She reached up and pulled down an overhead branch.

  ‘What are you doing?’ demanded Martin. ‘You can’t burn that stuff. It’s wet.’

  ‘It’s dry enough if it’s on the tree,’ said Meg. ‘Don’t you know anything? You always gather twigs from a tree branch for a fire when it’s wet. There’s always a few dead twigs on a gum branch. Go on, you get some bigger branches for later. No,’ she said firmly before Martin could object again, ‘I know they look wet. But they’ll be dry inside. They’ll burn once the fire’s hot enough.’

  Martin shrugged. Maybe she knew what she was doing. He began to hunt for dead wood. There seemed to be plenty on the hill top — rotting branches half turned into soil, great limbs that looked like they’d fallen only yesterday, the wounds still fresh where they’d cracked from the tree.

  Meg was crouched over a pile of twigs. She was fiddling with something. Suddenly a thin spire of smoke rose from the ground. Meg fanned it with a small piece of bark, and added more tiny twigs, till it crackled red up into the air. She sat back and began to tap a bit of bone onto the ground.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Meg glanced up at him. ‘Haven’t you ever seen a bone carrier? Nellie gave me this one. You put a kunnamarang, a live coal, in it in the morning, then wrap it in back in your blankets. The coal burns bone through the day, really slowly, just keeping it alive. Then you tip it onto kindling at night when you want a fire.’

  ‘Matches are easier,’ said Martin.

  ‘You’ve got to have money to buy matches,’ said Meg. ‘Maybe one day, when I start to sell my wool . . .’ Her voice broke off. She gazed around the tall still trees. ‘You really mean that it was sheep that took away the bush?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Martin slowly. ‘Maybe you could have a few sheep and still have the bush. Not many though. Old Ted told me they pull up the young plants by the roots. Their feet are wrong for the soil, too.’

  Meg was silent, chewing at her plait. Suddenly she snapped into action and threw more wood on the fire. She got to her feet and began to examine the trees around them, gazing up their trunks as though she was searching for something.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Martin.

  Meg grinned. ‘Dinner,’ she said. ‘I think I’ve found it. There’s not enough pasties in the swag for two.’ She pointed at the rough scratched bark. ‘And if we have a bit of luck our dinner hasn’t woken up yet.’

  ‘What do you mean, it hasn’t woken up? You don’t mean it’s alive . . .’ He broke off as Meg tied her skirt around her waist. Her legs were bare and scratched. ‘Keep talking,’ she said. ‘It’ll cover any noise I make.’

  ‘What do
you want me to say?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just make a noise. Sing or something.’

  ‘Sing what?’

  ‘You must know some songs,’ said Meg. ‘You’ve a voice for singing with, haven’t you? Or does it just ask silly questions?’ She grabbed the lowest branch and hauled herself up. The trunk was narrower now. She wrapped her legs around it and began to slowly creep up the tree.

  Martin watched her, fascinated. He’d never seen anyone climb like this before.

  ‘Sing!’ whispered Meg fiercely. ‘Come on, you blue-nosed fool. Or it’ll hear me and wake up.’

  Martin tried to think of a song. All he could think of was ‘Waltzing Matilda’. He opened his mouth.

  ‘Once a jolly swagman . . .’

  His voice sounded like a frog in the still night air. He stopped, then saw Meg’s frown, and kept on going.

  ‘You’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me . . .’

  Meg had stopped now, just below a fork in the tree. She gripped the tree more tightly with her knees, then plunged her hands into a crack between the branches. They disappeared. There was a scream, then silence. Meg’s hands came out again, holding a limp brown body. She threw it down towards him. It thudded at his feet. Martin jumped back.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just an opossum. What did you think it was? A pair of horses and a silver coach?’ Meg was inching slowly back down the trunk. Finally she found the branch again, stood up, and leapt for the ground. Her legs were pale in the darkness.

  ‘Come on. There’s water down in the gully. I saw it as we came up.’ She threw more wood on the fire, then picked up the possum and felt its thighs. ‘And a good fat one you are too,’ she said approvingly. She noticed Martin’s expression. ‘Haven’t you ever seen an opossum before?’