The Will of the Tribe

by Arthur W. Upfield

  It appeared drab and featureless but, had he looked the other way, he would have seen the Ranges being drawn from grey obscurity to become rosy turrets and battlements of elfin green. His attention, however, was concentrated on Lucifer’s Couch and on the tiny horse tethered to that same scrub tree he had used the previous day. He saw the man appear round the southern curve of the wall and watched him free the horse and ride it at a hard gallop back to the homestead.

  It was information needed and expected. Before daybreak the man had ridden to the Crater and then, as soon as light permitted, he had tracked Bony’s horse to the jamwood to which he had tethered his horse and then had tracked Bony to the wall and seen where he had climbed it and gone down the far side. Doubtless he, too, had descended to the floor and found what Bony had done there. He now knew of Bony’s movements the previous afternoon, but would be ignorant of the major discovery of the hessian fibres.

  Returning to the Creek, Bony changed his wool shoes for his boots and proceeded to the homestead, the wool shoes compressed against his side under the coat. Were interest maintained in his movements, he would be tracked to the tree above the ford, where he had made the change, and no farther.

  The horse-yards were empty, and the horse he had seen ridden must have been taken from the open paddock and returned there. When sauntering across the compound to the house he noted several lubras about the laundry. Captain was coming from his room. An Aborigine riding bareback was driving the working horses to the yard, and Bony thought it likely this was the man who visited the Crater. One of the lubras wore a blue ribbon in her hair, and later he watched this young woman walking up the Creek, obviously following his tracks.

  Chapter Five

  Messrs Gup-Gup and Poppa

  PRIOR TO the establishment of the Deep Creek Cattle Station, the Aborigines whose tribal grounds enclosed this section of country had their main camp at a permanent water-hole seventy miles to the west. When the homestead was built at Deep Creek, and the dam constructed to maintain a permanent supply of water, water was piped to an elbow of the Creek to encourage the Aborigines to settle there. For them the advantages were proximity to a homestead and tucker, as well as stock work offered to the young men. Further, according to Mrs Leroy, who was closer to them than the Brentners, the move was approved by Gup-Gup because the original camp site was too close to a white settlement with its destructive influence on his people.

  They were a western off-shoot of the Bingongina Nation, and were loosely affiliated with the Musgrave tribe who belong to this same nation. At the time of the Crater mystery, their ancient chief was called Gup-Gup, so spelt as coming closest to the Aboriginal pronunciation.

  Chief Gup-Gup ruled his people for many years prior to transferring to Deep Creek, the transfer being two decades after the falling of the meteor. Like the people of Hall’s Creek, he saw it fall.

  No one knew how old he was when Bony decided to visit him. His ragged white hair seemed to peep at one above the snakeskin band encircling his head. His shrunken chest was scarred with old cicatrices, as was his back with the totem of the frogmen. His arms and legs were merely skin-covered bones. He had borrowed much time, but his black eyes were the eyes of a young man.

  This morning, as was customary, he sat before a small fire, tending it by adding sticks gathered and piled beside him by the lubras. At his back was his wurley built of bark laid against a stick framework, for he scorned the white man’s cast-off corrugated iron and bags. He scorned, too, the white man’s clothing, being naked save for the pubic tassel and the dilly bag suspended from the neck by human hair string. He sat because unable to crouch upon his heels. As he owned no teeth, his nose almost contacted his chin.

  It was a warm day after the cool night, and the camp comprising humpies of old iron and bags about the central point of the communal fire, was alive with the cries of happy children and the shouts of the women busy doing little of anything important. Men gossiped over smaller fires, proving that a camp isn’t a camp without a fire. It was when the camp noises abruptly ceased that old Gup-Gup raised his head and saw, some fifty yards away, the squatting figure of Inspector Bonaparte.

  There came to the Chief the Medicine Man called Poppa. He was under fifty, of powerful build, rugged of feature and by no means without character when minus the septal-bone of his profession and the girdle about his head to raise the mop of greying hair. Wearing only a pair of drill slacks with a ragged hole at the right knee, Poppa was not a striking figure of mystery and authority this morning.

  “He is not, and there he is, the policeman at the homestead,” he said loudly, anger flaming his eyes and making his breathing fast. “He is the first to draw close without us knowing. It must be his lubra mother alive inside him.”

  “It could be so,” Gup-Gup placidly agreed, and rearranged the glowing ends of five sticks to brighten his fire, as though to give welcome to the visitor. “A white policeman would ride his horse among us and ask his questions and shout his orders. This one comes with knowledge. This one asks permission to enter the camp of strangers. Have him brought in.” Poppa shouted and two young men went forth to greet the visitor. Gup-Gup said, “He is the one who brought the white-feller law to the killers of Constable Stenhouse,2 cunning feller, this one.”

  Bony advanced with the two men trailing behind. At the front of his wide-brimmed slouch hat was the badge of the Western Australian Police Force. He was wearing a drill tunic. On the epaulets were three wide black bars, but what these represented only Bony himself knew. Gup-Gup and Poppa accepted them as the insignia of high rank. When he reached them Bony stared at the camp and the stilled inhabitants, who faded into the background like gulls into the fog. He chose to squat on his heels, facing the two Aborigines from the far side of the fire.

  “My father and my mother and my uncle and my son, a long time back spoke to me of you, Gup-Gup. Illawalli was the Chief of my mother’s tribe.”

  “I have heard of Illawalli, of the Cassowary tribe,” admitted Gup-Gup without expression. “He lived and died far away.” Approbation crept into his voice. “He left with you the customs of our people. Of you I have heard much. You witnessed the killing of Jacky Musgrave’s killer: black-feller law. You found the killer of Constable Stenhouse: white-feller law. I know you were sealed by Illawalli.” The ancient man again re-arranged his firesticks, gazing moodily at them. Neither Bony nor Poppa spoke, and presently the Chief looked up to encounter the blue eyes of such power that, although they were not defeated, they did not conquer.

  “You know much,” conceded Bony. He completed the making of a cigarette, and avoided the mistake of taking up one of Gup-Gup’s fire-sticks for a light. “I know much, too. I know why you brought your people to camp here. That was good. I know you see many things of the future in your fire. You know I am a big-feller white policeman, not a black tracker. You know I can see to the back of your head and that in me is no fear of Medicine Men.”

  “I know that once long ago you were near boned to death by the Medicine Man of the Kalshut tribe,” Gup-Gup said.

  This ‘rocked’ Bony as the Kalshut tribe were sixteen hundred miles from the Kimberleys and the boning was done fifteen years before this day. No sign of the thrust betrayed its effect. He was about to counter it when the less subtle and experienced Poppa had to assert himself.

  “In the Alchuringa time there was a young man who tongued his Medicine Man,” interposed this modern specimen. “The Medicine Man took the young man’s tongue in his fingers and told him to run away and grow feathers on it. The feathers became wings which lifted him up to the branch of a tall tree. Then the tongue said, ‘I’m tired of all this flying about.’ And the feathers all said, ‘So are we.’ They all dropped out from the tongue, and the young man fell to the ground and was killed.”

  “In the time of last summer,” Bony related in turn, “there was a Medicine Man who poked out his tongue at a white policeman. The white policeman took the hands of the Medicine Man and put on the
m the manacles of steel. Then he put the Medicine Man inside a baobab tree, shut the door, and told him to break out if he could. Now the Medicine Man, who had manacles on his wrists, and his ankles as well, was in a sore fix. He began to cry out the boning curses upon the white policeman and, while he was doing this, the manacles got hotter and hotter and then turned to snakes that bit him into small pieces. And the small pieces escaped through a crack in the tree and went away dancing over the sandhills, and never more came together to make a Medicine Man.”

  From Gup-Gup issued a low chuckle.

  “Poppa, you keep your tongue behind your teeth. The old men need your medicine. The young men need your fear. The lubras need your discipline. You couldn’t tend to them from inside a gaol. I know. Long time ago I was in one.”

  Again he chuckled. “The white policeman and his three trackers were very tired time they put me into the gaol. But they put me there.” His voice became a whip. “Stop this lubra’s cackling, Poppa. Big-feller policeman tell why he came here, eh?”

  “As though you didn’t know, Gup-Gup,” Bony reproved. “I came for you to tell me about the man found dead in the Crater.”

  “That we don’t know. He was a white feller. Could be white-feller killing,” calmly responded Gup-Gup, and, as calmly, withdrew one of his fire-sticks and, with the red end, prodded a six-inch centipede that had crawled from his wood heap.

  “You don’t know!” Bony echoed. “You can tell me who boned me fifteen years ago and on the other side of the world, and you can’t tell me who killed the white feller in the Crater. Seems this tribe should get another Chief and another Medicine Man. Could be you two should be flung into gaol for a spell. You wouldn’t escape in small pieces, and it wouldn’t matter if you did because never would the pieces come together again to make Gup-Gup and Poppa.”

  The Medicine Man became absorbed in Gup-Gup’s idle arrangement of his fire-sticks, and the Chief’s hands betrayed the fact that fire-sticks were not at the moment of interest to him. He looked like an animated unwrapped mummy. He looked like a dirty bag of bones put together with wire and covered with dark-grey tights.

  “You very cunning fellers, I know,” Bony continued. “I’m a cunning feller, too. White-feller law says no killing. You know that. I know, and you know I know, that the white feller couldn’t have been put into the Crater without you knowing about it. So don’t talk like lubras and say you didn’t know he was put there days before the plane people saw him. It’s why you all went on walkabout that day the plane flew over.”

  “We went walkabout to initiation of our young men and lubras,” stated Poppa.

  “I was told that the tribe didn’t have young men and women ready for initiation,” argued Bony, knowing quite well that long preparation precedes actual initiation. “All right, you prove it, eh? You call the young men and the lubras here to prove it. Go on, bring them here for me to see. Their cuts wouldn’t be old yet. Come on, Gup-Gup, stir yourself and order them to come here.”

  “It was not the time,” answered Gup-Gup. “Our young men and women were not ripe. The initiation of the young men of Beaudesert was what we went walkabout for. Beaudesert fellers same as Deep Creek. They go walkabout, we go walkabout. White-feller law not against it. Constable Howard never told us stop always in camp.”

  “So it wasn’t true about you going walkabout to initiate your boys and lubras. I say bring them here: you wriggle out like that centipede you killed.” About Bony’s face played a softly deceitful smile, and the two men saw it and ceased chewing their tobacco. “Of course it wasn’t the right time. No faraway Abo looking into his fire could have told you the plane would fly over the Crater. You didn’t have time then to have your young people prepared. You knew when Constable Howard and I left Beaudesert to come to Deep Creek, for a black feller looking into a fire told you, but there was no black feller looking into a fire on that plane. So you didn’t know it would fly over the Crater. Easy, isn’t it?”

  They were looking at his mouth rather than his eyes, and in their eyes was no expression. It was as though shutters had fallen before the glowing pupils, far more impenetrable than the so-called Iron Curtain. The effect was not to shut Bonaparte out, but to close themselves in, bar themselves against the intrusion of a foreign force threatening the citadel of a hoary culture. The Great Wall of China, the electrified barriers along the frontiers of Communist countries are merely childish exercises by comparison. Bony had come against it so often he had long since recognized the futility of beating upon those mental shutters. He made another cigarette and smoked to the butt before saying, “You fellers could be pretty damn fools, not cunning fellers like you think. You are Chief Gup-Gup and you are Medicine Man Poppa, and between you you rule your people. You and your people live here with plenty of tucker. You live in peace for there is the white-feller law to say no one fight you and you must not fight anyone. You, Gup-Gup, can remember when there was always war and when your people fed well for short times and starved hard for longer times. You sit there in the warm and you remember how you have kept your people together black-feller fashion, and how you have kept the black-feller law so that your people are ever happy.

  “Why for all this? I’ll tell you. Deep Creek say for you all to shift camp to this place, plenty of water, plenty of tucker. Your young men stockride for the station and you all get plenty of tobacco. Hall’s Creek a long way away. Fitzroy Crossing a long way away. Here at Deep Creek you can rule your people and Poppa can keep them obedient to the black-feller laws and customs.

  “Not so the black fellers at Broome, the black fellers at Darwin. In those places the black fellers have become black-white-fellers. They’re finished. You know that. You saw how that could be with your people if you hadn’t come to Deep Creek. You know that in those places the black feller puts out his tongue at his Chief, and he doesn’t care a plug of tobacco for his Medicine Man. He goes from camp to camp, sleeping with this lubra and that one; he earns white-feller money, which he spends for dirty firewater. You know all that, the two of you.”

  Bony sighed and employed his fingers rolling another cigarette. They watched his fingers and met his eyes with their own shuttered against him.

  “That dead white feller gets himself killed,” he went on, quietly. “He gets himself planted in the Crater. Someone put him in there, because he didn’t have wings to him. Now that hole in the ground belongs to you. It’s on your country, not Beaudesert country. You tell me you are the Chief and you the Medicine Man, and then you tell me you don’t know who killed that feller and who put him in the Crater. Why, you know how many eagles are flying over your country and who comes into and who goes from it. And you know who killed that white feller and who planted him.

  “As I said, Gup-Gup, you could be pretty damn fools. White-feller law could say that you are too big damn fools to run around here. Not me, but white-feller law could put you both in gaol, and put your people some other place and, when you come out of gaol, you would see your young men and the lubras poking their tongues out at you and telling your Medicine Man to go jump over a fence. That is if ... I say if ... Gup-Gup, and you, Poppa, were flung into gaol.”

  The ensuing silence was prolonged until the Medicine Man vented held breath and said, “White fellow nothing to do with us Aborigines. Us Aborigines nothing to do with him.”

  Silence took them again, strengthening still more the barriers separating this ancient people and the modern representative of an alien race. Bony smoked two more cigarettes before rising and walking back to the homestead.

  2 Cake in the Hat Box. Back

  Chapter Six

  The Little Pets

  BONY WAS unperturbed by the apparently negative result of his call on Gup-Gup and his Medicine Man. Individually they ran true to type and, together, had behaved normally.

  Coincidently, the power vested in a commanding officer and his adjutant over a battalion is roughly analogous to the government of an Australian tribe, and, as the battalion is the
unit of an army division, so is the tribe the unit of a nation. A soldier will agree that a well-run battalion is one governed by a martinet of a commanding officer, sugared by an adjutant who is popular with the men: or vice versa: a splendid balance being thus achieved.

  Gup-Gup was the sugar and Poppa the vinegar in the diet of this Deep Creek tribe of the Bingongina Nation. In another tribe of this same nation the balance in command might well be reversed. More often than not, tribal rebellion is due to too much sugar or too much vinegar.

  It was probable that Gup-Gup had been elected chief by the Old Men of his tribe on the demise of the previous officeholder, and it was not unreasonable for Bony to put his term at seventy years, a period covering the change from the completely wild state to that of peaceful co-existence with the white race. The chief would not be ignorant of the process of disintegration already beginning to threaten his people by the steady encroachment of civilization: in fact Mrs Leroy, who enjoyed his confidence, had been so informed.

  As for Poppa, it was most likely he had been appointed to his office by his predecessor, having been especially trained because of his singular attributes, revealed in early manhood, and, also, having survived the severe physical trials set out by centuries-old custom. Your white doctor cures with drugs and sympathy. Poppa would cure with herbs and fear. Your white priest prevents much sin with the threat of hell fire: Poppa would curtail much back-sliding with the fear of the Kurdaticha Man and the Great Snake. What Freud revealed by his writings, Poppa would have learned very early in his training.

  Neither of these unwashed aristocrats was a fool: both would have been stoutly admired by Machiavelli. They would not incur the hostility of the law by trying to evade responsibility for a minor crime committed by one of their people, such as stealing from a homestead store or killing a white man for interfering with a lubra. Bony was considering with growing confidence that the cause of the shuttered eyes was an abstract one such as loyalty to a white man or men, or fear of a neighbouring tribe more powerful than they, and less influenced by white-fellow law.