by Justin D'Ath
We continued that way for several minutes, until we came to a steep rise. Then I had to change down to first gear and pour on the juice. The Kawasaki roared. It gave the game away. Finally realising there was an impostor in their midst, the camels scattered left and right.
But they had served their purpose. For two or three kilometres, my unwitting escorts had obliterated the Kawasaki’s tyre marks with their hoof prints. Back in the valley where I had disturbed the sleeping herd, the terrorists would find nothing but camel tracks leading off in all directions. They wouldn’t know which trail to follow.
I had outwitted them. But only temporarily. They were terrorists, they wouldn’t give up. As soon as it got light, they would find my trail again. They would come after me in their helicopter.
I rode for another hour. Several times I stopped and checked to see if I was being followed. Except for the ticking sound of the Kawasaki’s cooling engine, the desert night was silent. There were no lights in any direction. I looked up at the moon. It was behind me now. I wondered which way I was going. As long as it was away from the terrorists, I didn’t care. My first priority was to avoid being caught. I would worry about finding help tomorrow.
I tried not to think about Nathan back at the cave. As far as he knew, I was at Gibson Station by now, organising a rescue party. He probably expected help to arrive first thing in the morning. I had let him down.
As I rode on, Joey became increasingly restless, shifting about inside my shirt and making the spinifex tips under my skin itch. I had to stop and settle him down. I knew he was getting thirsty. I was thirsty, too, but we didn’t have any water. There was nothing to do but continue riding.
The desert began to change. Towards midnight I felt safe enough to switch the Kawasaki’s headlight back on. It lit up a wide red plain scattered with saltbush. The ghostly white shrubs looked like sheep. Here and there I passed low, scrawny trees. There were no more sand dunes. No more sand. The ground was flat and hard, easier to ride on. I was able to speed up.
But not for long. Without warning, the Kawasaki slowed down. I gave it more throttle. Instead of accelerating, the bike spluttered a couple of times, then its engine cut out altogether. I pulled in the clutch and wobbled to a dusty standstill. The headlight was still shining and so were the instrument lights – that meant the battery wasn’t dead. I found neutral and pressed the starter button. The engine turned over with a loud whirring noise, but didn’t start. I tried again. Same result. With a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach, I opened the fuel tank. It was too dark to see in, so I rocked the bike from side to side and listened for the slosh of liquid.
Silence.
I was out of petrol.
A motorbike without petrol is about as useless in the middle of a desert as a boat. I wheeled it over to a small desert oak and lay it on the ground under the spindly branches. Ripping up a few clumps of saltbush, I arranged them on top of the Kawasaki so it wouldn’t be seen from a helicopter. Then I set off on foot.
I walked for several hours beneath the wide starry sky. I kept the moon behind me. It had been behind me when I escaped the terrorists, so I figured the safest thing to do was keep going in the same direction. I had to get as far away from the terrorists as possible before daylight. Come dawn, they would be out in force, combing the desert for my tracks. I couldn’t let them find me. I had to alert the authorities. But how? I was in the middle of the desert. On foot. With no food, no water, and no idea where I was.
‘Face it, Fox,’ I said to myself. ‘You don’t have a chance.’
But I wasn’t going to give up without a fight. I kept walking.
Finally, at 4.30 a.m., I could go no further. I was exhausted.
I crept under a low tree and dragged some saltbush branches around my tired, aching body. For the first time, I realised how cold it could get in the desert at night. But I was too tired to care. At least Joey seemed warm and snug inside my shirt. Re-positioning the baby kangaroo so I wouldn’t crush him in my sleep, I curled up in my hiding place like a hunted animal and closed my eyes.
15
NORTH
A dazzling flare exploded in the sky.
They’ve found me! I thought, recoiling from the blinding red light.
Then I came fully awake and realised it was just the sun shining through my closed eyelids. I opened them and squinted at my watch. 10.15 a.m. I sat up, annoyed with myself for sleeping so long. I had wasted half the morning. Nathan needed help. And the terrorists’ secret training camp had to be reported to the authorities and closed down.
I struggled out of my hiding place and stood up. I was still half asleep, damp with perspiration and itchy all over. My shoulder felt sore where the dingo had nipped me. Joey made things worse by scratching about inside my shirt. I undid a couple of buttons and lifted him out. Blinking in the bright sunlight, the tiny kangaroo licked one of my fingertips. He wanted a drink.
‘Sorry Joey,’ I croaked – it was hard to talk because my mouth was so dry. ‘I don’t have anything for you.’ Or for me, I thought as I remembered the grim truth.
I was lost in the desert. I had no transport, no water, no food. I was going to die!
Keep a cool head, bro. Nathan’s voice seemed to come out of nowhere.
It calmed me. I put Joey back inside my shirt and surveyed the horizon. There wasn’t much to see. Everything was red and flat, broken only by a sprinkling of saltbush and the occasional wispy desert oak. The sky was a vast blue dome. There was no sign of the moon, so I didn’t know which way I had come last night. If I knew which way I’d come, I would know which way to go. I looked for my footprints, but the baked red clay offered no clues either.
Removing my watch, I held it level with the ground and pointed the twelve in the direction of the sun, then I traced an imaginary line halfway between the twelve and the hour hand. It was a trick Nathan had taught me to find north. Help lay to the north. If I walked in that direction, sooner or later I would reach a road or a cattle station. Provided I didn’t die of dehydration first. Or blunder back into the terrorists’ camp.
Nathan’s map was still in my back pocket. I unfolded it and lay it on the ground, with north on the map lined up with north according to my makeshift compass. But the map didn’t help because I had no idea of my own position.
Drawn on the map in blue ink was a small ‘X’, with the coordinates of the cave scribbled beside it. At least I knew where Nathan was.
And I knew where north was.
I put the map away and set off to the north. It was my only chance. If I ran into the terrorists along the way, I would work out how to deal with them. After all, I told myself, I had come up against worse dangers and lived to tell the tale.
But I had never been lost in a desert before. In the blast-furnace heat of midsummer. Without transport. Without water.
Without a hope.
16
OFF THE MAP
By early afternoon I was a zombie. My head spun, my tongue felt dry and swollen, my skin was tight with sunburn. I was staggering and reeling; I could hardly walk in a straight line. I felt light-headed, weak, dizzy and disoriented. Spots danced before my eyes. The horizon tipped and swayed before me like a stormy ocean. I couldn’t think clearly. Even though I kept turning my watch face towards the sun, I could no longer remember how to work out where north was.
I began to hallucinate. I saw bushflies as big as terrorist helicopters. I saw clumps of spinifex that became kangaroos and bounced off into the distance. I saw a car that morphed into a boulder, a stick that became a lizard, a sun umbrella that was really a bush. I saw a rippling blue lake that flowed away from me as I staggered towards it, then turned into an upside-down waterfall and streamed up into the sky.
I nearly ran into a tree trunk that stepped in front of me and talked.
‘Take it easy, brother,’ it said.
I wasn’t fooled. Tree trunks don’t walk and they certainly don’t talk. This one had called me brother. It was Nat
han!
‘How did you get here?’ I whispered in a voice that felt like steel wool in my throat and sounded like paper rustling.
‘On Powderfinger.’
That made about as much sense as a walking, talking tree trunk. I was hallucinating. I swiped at the hallucination to make it go away, but knocked its hat off instead.
Hallucinations don’t wear hats, I realised. It must be real. A real person. I rubbed the sweat from my eyes and looked again. The person standing before me wasn’t Nathan. Whoever it was had curly black hair and skin the colour of dark chocolate. He was an Aborigine stockman.
The stockman picked up his hat, turned it around in his long brown fingers and placed it carefully on my head.
‘Reckon you need it more than I do,’ he said.
Then he took me by the elbow and led me over to a tree. At least, that’s what I thought it was until we got closer and it morphed slowly into a camel with a rope around its neck and a saddle on its hump. A water bottle hung from the saddle.
The stockman sat me on the ground in the camel’s shadow and helped me take a drink. I drank and drank till I ran out of breath.
‘Take it easy,’ he said, laughing. ‘You’ll make yourself crook.’
I lowered the big, damp water bottle and savoured what remained in my mouth, swirling it around with my tongue. Already my whole body was responding to the life-giving water. My head stopped spinning and my vision slowly cleared.
The stockman looked about my age, or maybe a year older. He wore a red-chequered shirt, dusty brown jeans and tall leather cowboy boots.
‘Name’s Garry,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘But most people call me Emu.’
I told him my name and we shook hands like adults.
‘Where did you come from?’ I asked, looking round and seeing nothing but a hazy sea of silver heat in every direction.
‘Over there.’ Emu pointed vaguely over his shoulder. ‘Been following your tracks all morning. You’re lost, I reckon.’
I told him about Nathan’s accident and everything that had happened since. Emu listened intently, then asked to see the map. I spread it on the ground and showed him where the cave was. Emu studied it for a moment, then scratched a mark in the clay about five centimetres below the map’s bottom right-hand corner.
‘We’re here,’ he said.
My heart fell. It was worse than I’d thought. I had travelled right off the map, ending up roughly four hundred kilometres south-east of where I was supposed to be.
‘What are you doing way out here?’ I asked Emu.
‘Catching camels.’
I told him about the camels I had seen the previous night.
‘Probably the same mob we’ve been chasing,’ Emu said.
My ears pricked up when he said ‘we’. ‘Are there others with you?’
‘Course. There’s four of us and Mr Woods.’
‘Where are they?’ I asked.
Emu waved a hand at the swimming horizon. ‘Back at Tilden Bore.’
‘Is it far?’
He tapped his finger in the dirt roughly halfway between our position and the edge of the map. ‘Bout here,’ he said. ‘Mr Woods has a mobile phone. Reckon you can ride Powderfinger?’
Powderfinger, I realised, was the name of his camel. ‘Sure,’ I said, climbing slowly to my feet. I still felt a bit wobbly. ‘How long will it take us to get there?’
‘Bout three hours.’ Emu glanced up at the sun and frowned. ‘Maybe a bit longer with two people. Powderfinger gotta have a drink first. Can I have my hat back for a minute?’
He placed it upside down on the ground and half filled the crown with water. Then he held it up so Powderfinger could drink from it. Watching them, I suddenly remembered something. Fumbling my shirt buttons undone, I lifted Joey out. The baby kangaroo was limp in my hands. Its eyes were closed and the tip of its tiny pink tongue protruded from its half-open mouth.
‘Give me some water, quick!’
Emu came over. ‘Poor little fella.’
‘He got a bit hot inside my shirt,’ I said. ‘I think he’s in a coma.’
Emu replaced the dripping hat on my head. ‘Too late for him, Sam,’ he said softly. ‘He’s dead. Want me to bury him?’
I shook my head. I could hardly trust myself to speak. ‘I’ll do it,’ I murmured.
The ground was too hard to dig a hole. I had to place Joey in the shade of a saltbush and cover him with a few handfuls of dust and pebbles. I laid some small sticks and shrivelled leaves on top.
‘Sorry Joey,’ I whispered, standing over the tiny grave. There was probably nothing I could have done differently that might have saved the baby kangaroo, but even so I felt like a murderer. I had killed his mother and now Joey was dead as well, both because of me.
It was my fault, too, that Nathan was lying badly injured at the bottom of a cave four hundred kilometres away. Could I get help to him in time? Or would he die like the baby kangaroo and its mother? Because of me.
I turned to Emu, waiting silently beside his camel.
‘Let’s get moving,’ I said.
17
CALL OF THE WILD
We rode right through the hottest part of the afternoon. It would have been about fifty degrees in the shade – if there was any shade. The sun felt like someone was holding a giant magnifying glass in front of it. I wore Emu’s hat to protect my already sunburnt face and neck, but Emu was bareheaded. He refused the hat when I offered it back to him. Instead, he removed his shirt and tied it around his head like a hood.
Powderfinger didn’t seem bothered by the heat. Nor by the fact that he had two riders. He just kept rocking along with his eyes half closed and his jaw working like a cricket outfielder chewing gum. (I found out later he was chewing cud. It’s stuff from an animal’s stomach that they regurgitate and eat for the second time. Gross.)
Some people call camels ‘ships of the desert’. I found out why. They move like ships seesawing over a stormy ocean. Riding one is the pits. You can’t get into a rhythm like you can on a horse. You jiggle and pitch and sway in every direction. All I could do was hang on, grit my teeth, and pray that the ride would be over soon.
It wasn’t.
Powderfinger’s saddle didn’t make things any better. It had a rickety wooden frame that dug into the small of my back and knocked painfully against my shins with every step the camel took. The seat was made of old sackcloth stuffed with straw. The straw poked through in about a hundred places and jabbed me through my jeans. It was a one-person saddle. The frame rose up in two tall A-shaped sections that fitted over the peak of Powderfinger’s hump, one in front, the other behind, with the padded bit in the middle. There was a forty-centimetre gap between the frame sections – enough room for one person, not enough for two. Emu and I were jammed in like sardines. It was murder.
We tried various solutions. Emu tried perching on the front A-frame, but he kept bouncing off and either landing on me, or sliding down Powderfinger’s neck. He tried standing up in the stirrups to give me more room, but every time we went over a bump (and there were lots) his backside whacked me in the face. I tried sitting behind the saddle and clinging onto the rear A-frame. No good. One bump and I went sliding down the camel’s steep, bony backside and dropped two metres to the ground. Luckily I landed feet first.
We stopped a few times to drink from the water bottle. Each time we stopped, Powderfinger had to kneel to let us off – front legs first, which nearly tipped us over his head, then back legs, like a seesaw going down. We didn’t drink much because we had to make the water last until we reached Tilden Bore. Powderfinger didn’t get any. That one drink he had before we set out had to last him the full journey. It didn’t seem to bother him. He was a camel; they store water in their humps.
‘Why’s he called Powderfinger?’ I asked Emu during one of our drink stops.
‘He belongs to my uncle, and Powderfinger is his favourite band.’ The stockman grinned. ‘Me, I like Hilltop Hoods.’
I grinned back. Emu was pretty cool.
I looked forward to our drink stops, not only for the mouthful of water, but because it was such a relief to climb down from Powderfinger’s back and stretch my legs. But all the time I stood on the ground enjoying the relief, in the back of my mind there was a niggling itch: Nathan was still lying in the cave, expecting help to arrive at any moment.
And the terrorists were still on the loose. I had to report them to the police.
‘Let’s get back in the saddle,’ I said, even though it was the last place in the world I wanted to be.
The terrain changed as we journeyed on. The featureless clay plain where I had first met Emu gradually gave way to low red sand dunes dotted with clumps of straw-coloured spinifex. It was much like the country I had come through the night before, only in the heat of daylight it shimmered like molten lava.
Halfway through the afternoon we came upon some camel tracks. There were about a dozen sets of prints and they crossed our path at right angles. They looked fresh. Powderfinger turned his head and sniffed the air. Then, with an ear-splitting bellow, he broke into a gallop. Emu shouted at him to stop and pulled desperately on the rope to get us back on course, but the camel took no notice. He was following the call of the wild.
Camels can really move when they want to. It was a mad, bumpy, roller-coaster ride. Emu’s hat flew off my head, but I couldn’t make a grab for it – my arms were wrapped around his middle in a sweaty bear hug, hanging on for my life. Both of us were tossed about like rag dolls. The wooden saddle frame jumped and twisted and creaked beneath us. The water bottle thumped painfully against my right leg. Emu was pulling on the rope and yelling at Powderfinger to stop, but the crazy camel just went faster.
The sun danced and jiggled in the sky. My teeth rattled. I was losing my balance, and began tipping sideways. I didn’t want to drag Emu with me, so I let go and tried to grab hold of the saddle frame behind me. Missed! My hands flailed in the empty air. Next moment, I was flying. Then I was falling. With a splash of red sand, I hit the ground and went somersaulting down the side of a dune.
