Tomorrow 3 - The Third Day, The Frost

by John Marsden

  Then came a big distraction, a sound I’d become familiar with over the months. It was a throbbing roar like a giant lawn mower or food processor. It was the clatter of another helicopter, another ugly bird of prey searching for a meal. I was like a rabbit beneath its vicious rotor and if it caught me I would die like a rabbit. I was in quite open country when I heard it and I ran crazily for a tree, pounding along on my bruised knee, my sore ankle, my aching feet. I dived under the tree at the exact second that the huge chopper appeared above the clearing. Its glass front seemed like a giant eye; the whole machine seemed like an eye, peering in every direction, seeing every­thing. I lay among the leaves and mud, begging it to go away, praying that it wouldn’t see me. I remem­bered how they’d hung around Corrie’s house and how they’d later destroyed it with a single missile. I realised how easily they could kill me, just by drop­ping a bomb in the clearing. I closed my eyes and clenched every muscle in my body, gripping two tufts of grass with my fists, my heart thumping like unbal­anced windmill sails. A blizzard of leaves and dust from the downdraft stung my bare legs and arms as it blew over me. I was more helpless than I’d ever been. If I moved I was dead; if I didn’t move I might be shot from the air without even putting up a fight. I was especially disgusted by the thought of dying like that.

  I was hoping that the leaves blowing across the clearing would cover me, hide me from the great goggle eye. I heard the thing move a little, then it abruptly shifted sideways, across a line of trees to my left. The trees changed the sound of the engine, mak­ing it less loud, less threatening. But the engine note kept on changing. I lay there trying to work out what was happening, trying to second guess the flying monster. The rough rasping noise was quietening now, but I still didn’t know what it meant till another gale of leaves came blowing dustily through the trees. The helicopter was landing; that’s what was happen­ing! Only a thin row of trees separated me from it, a row of trees and maybe fifty metres.

  I had to assume that they’d seen me and that’s why they were landing. Maybe they thought I was a dead body, lying there face down. The time had come to stop planning every move; instead I ran. I kept low but I went fast. I was aiming for a patch of scrub that wasn’t far away, thirty metres, but it seemed a kilo­metre. Even when I had just one step to go I still never believed I’d reach it. I crashed through, tripped over a log, rolled sideways down a long slope and twisted into another patch of scrub, thinking now that I had a chance. I knew they couldn’t see me here; I also knew I was more at home in this environment than they’d ever be.

  Behind me I heard a shout and some running feet, but no shots. I swerved again and jumped a small creek, starting to feel renewed pains and aches in my body. There was a short slope ahead; I pounded up that, feeling very exposed again, struggling for a good clean lungful of air. As I reached the top they had a good view of me for a moment. I knew they would, but there was nothing I could do about it. Speed seemed more important than anything. I had a stupid faith in my sore legs, my wrecked body, to get me away from this. I crouched as I went over the little hill, hearing more shouts, but looking at the same time for a good route to follow. The best way seemed to be between some trees to my right, so I swung to the left, figuring again that I had to do the unex­pected. There were rocks and rabbit holes; somehow I managed to miss them. Across another ridge and I came to an old fence, rickety and rusty but all barbed wire. Sobbing and gasping I tried to get over it but the fence posts were too old and wouldn’t stay still. My right hand tore on a barb; finally I decided I had to get over no matter what it cost me, so I did a sort of roll across the top strand. I landed awkwardly on the other side. My shirt caught in the wire. I ripped at it madly and it came away with a sound like a velcro fastener.

  As I got up I saw for the first time the soldiers chasing me. A woman appeared on the skyline. She was in uniform, carrying an automatic rifle of some kind and looking around anxiously. Even from my distance I could see the sweat on her. Another soldier came up behind her – man or woman, I couldn’t be sure – and at that moment they both saw me. They called behind them as I took off again. I hoped the fence would hold them up and I bolted down an eroded gully, praying I wouldn’t trip in one of the holes. It was the end of me if I did. There was a small dam blocking the gully. I skirted round that and went through a thick stand of eucalyptus, thinking that might give me a bit of cover. Beyond it was a patch of long grass. I was only a few metres into it when I nearly died of shock. Wherever I looked I saw large figures rising from the grass, jumping to their feet. Tall grey figures starting up in panic. I thought, ‘It finishes here.’ Then I realised they were kangaroos who’d been having a morning nap. Now, as startled by me as I had been by them, they were splitting in all directions, bounding away into the trees, leaving behind the flattened grass where they’d been sleep­ing. I almost laughed; it was such a relief.

  It gave me more energy somehow. I ran on faster. I had a bit of a breeze behind and that helped too. I was thinking of the cross-countries at school, and how I’d never done very well in them. If they were holding one now, I would have won it. I got to another fence and took the wimp’s way, going under it. I heard a few more human cries behind me, which probably meant that they’d seen the roos, then I went through another stand of trees. To my surprise I then saw a hut, a half-built cabin that was open to the weather, with a gal­vanised-iron roof. Next to it was a caravan, old and patched, badly needing a coat of paint. I ignored that and rushed on, looking for a way out, a safe route that would get me away from the human dog pack. I just couldn’t see any possibilities. A track led away from the hut to a gate. I ran along it but I knew I couldn’t stay on it for long; it was a death trap. At least the gate was new and strong and I could climb over it easily. I did that, hesitated, then, hearing the soldiers again, chose to go to the right. They sounded close, probably at the hut already. I heard another aircraft, very low, and started sweating even more heavily, feeling that a net was closing in fast. Seemed like they were sparing no effort to get me. As I ran, the noise of the plane grew louder and louder: it sounded like it was coming straight at me. Sure enough it suddenly did appear right in front, a silver-grey jet flying very low. I swore and almost ran off to the side to get away from it, but realised at the same moment that I was being stupid, that they wouldn’t have time to shoot at me when they were travelling at that speed. The plane, ignoring me, swept straight over my head with a scream. As it passed, I glanced up and saw an unmistakeable red kiwi on a white background, with a blue circle around it. I almost shouted out loud with joy. There was still hope! Friends were out there! We hadn’t lost! We hadn’t lost yet!

  Just a moment later I heard a tremendously loud whoosh, then a dull thud. I took a moment to glance crazily over my shoulder, having no idea what I would see. Somewhere, way back in the bush, some­thing was burning. A huge cloud of black smoke, bending a little towards me because of the breeze, was rising quickly in the sky. The plane was behind it, banking sharply and climbing, looking perfectly intact. With a bound of excitement I realised what had happened. The plane had caught the helicopter on the ground, a true sitting duck. The chopper wouldn’t have had a chance. It was a wonderful unex­pected score.

  I ran and ran as the plane banked away and dis­appeared into the distance. I ran for another ten min­utes. In all that time I heard no more human sounds. I thought I was safe, that the attack on the helicopter had stopped my pursuers. Finally the point came where I had to stop, no matter who might be follow­ing. My lungs had taken on their own life and were rasping and groaning, desperate for air. My legs were cramping up and my knee felt like it was full of frag­ments of bone. Looking down I was shocked to see how swollen it was. I slowed to a walk, staggered over to a tree and fell on the ground behind it, hoping it would hide me. I lay there grunting. My stomach was cramping up again and I couldn’t get enough breath. I really thought this time I was going to die, and die in agony.

  But as the minutes passed and no sol
diers came I started to recover a little. It was a sweet feeling. I had survived. I had no food or drink, my body was wrecked, I’d lost my friends but, for the moment, I had survived.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hunger’s a funny thing. It goes in stages. First you’re so hungry you think you’ll faint. Your stomach is one huge empty refrigerator: the light’s on, the door’s open, but there’s nothing in it. Then that stage passes and it gets better. You don’t think about food nearly as much, and the idea of food actually makes you a bit sick. You can go on for quite a while when you’re in that stage.

  I kept walking for a long time, avoiding any clear spaces, any roads or fire trails. I stuck to the thickest bush, trying to stay invisible, not just to anyone on the ground but to people in the sky too. It was extra tiring, having to concentrate so hard all the time.

  When you’re lost in the bush you’re meant to go back to your last-known point and start again. I’d had that drummed into me often enough. I couldn’t do it though, because I didn’t really have a last-known point. Or if I did, it was the wharf at Cobbler’s Bay. I could have gone back there, but would they have lent me a map and a compass? I didn’t think so.

  I just kept walking, though my walk soon became a limp – eventually a very slow one indeed. I was looking for any place I could recognise. I’d arranged to meet the others at a river crossing on Baloney Creek, on a logging track that came off the main Cob­bler’s Bay road. It was a good fishing spot that a lot of Wirrawee people knew about, but now I didn’t have a clue where either the creek or the road might be. I crossed so many creeks as the day went on, some of them quite large, but they didn’t have little signs telling me their names.

  When the sun got higher I crept into a spot under a bank, shaded by a creeper, and had a sleep. It was a warm sun for winter; seemed like we’d had a lot of warm winters the last few years. The hard walking had made me uncomfortably hot and sticky, but I’d rather have had that than rain and cold winds.

  I slept only half an hour but I lay there a lot longer, too tired to move. When I did move it was only to slide back into the sun, as it got cold too quickly in the shade. I propped myself against a tree and sat, looking in frustration at my swollen knee. Apart from soaking my hanky in cold water and tying it on, there wasn’t much I could do. I wished I had some Aboriginal friends: they would have found a bush remedy in the nearest tree and fixed me up in no time. Or they might have had a packet of Panadol in their pocket. I would have settled for either.

  I tried to walk on but letting my knee get cold had been its kiss of death: it just wouldn’t function at all. I started to realise that it might be better to spend the night there. It wasn’t a very interesting place, or an attractive one, but it would do. I put my little remain­ing energy into making myself comfortable. I used a sharp rock to gouge out a hollow that I could lie in, and collected a heap of creeper that I could crawl under for a bit of warmth. I don’t know what kind of creeper it was, but there was plenty of it around, and I could pull it down from the trees fairly easily. The trees were probably grateful – a lot of them looked like they were close to choking with the stuff. I just hoped I wasn’t allergic to it.

  There was a creek flowing fast about a hundred metres away, so I waddled over there and had a drink. Growing in it was some green stuff that we’d always called water lettuce at home. It looked harm­less so I ate a few leaves, deciding that if I didn’t die of it during the night I’d try a bit more in the morn­ing. It didn’t have much flavour: it tasted like lettuce that had been soaked in water so long the flavour had been leeched out of it, which is probably exactly what it was.

  Already it was getting dark; no daylight saving here. I went back to my bush bed and sat on the pile of creeper, thinking deep thoughts about life, and try­ing not to get depressed. ‘You have so much to be proud of,’ I lectured myself. ‘You’ve destroyed a huge container ship, and probably the jetty as well, judg­ing by the size of the explosion. You wiped out one helicopter and indirectly accounted for another. I’ll bet the plane was sent to check out the blast at Cob­bler’s, and it was because of you the chopper was sit­ting on the ground. So that was a bonus. You’ve done more fighting than anyone could have thought or hoped or expected. You shouldn’t feel so bad.’

  But none of that stopped me sinking slowly but surely into depression. I missed everyone so much. Homer, with his strength and leadership and plan­ning; Fi, with her courage and grace; Kevin, with the new energy he’d brought to our little group; Robyn with her wisdom and goodness; Lee with his sexy body ... ‘Whoops, where did that come from?’ I won­dered. I thought I was off Lee for life. Still, he was a good looking guy ...

  Most of all, though, I missed my mum and dad. Deep down inside, Ellie, the tough jungle fighter, was a baby, a five-year-old wanting to be tucked into bed, read a story, kissed good night. The nicest times I’d had with Dad when I was little was when he read me bedtime stories. He’d lie on the bed and start a book, then fall asleep beside me, more often than not. Of course, we worked together on the farm a lot, but he always seemed stressed then. If a calf got out of the cattle yards or a dog scattered a mob of sheep or it rained during shearing he’d get so mad. There’d be a flood of swear words; he’d be red in the face and cursing the stock and the dog and the government and the whole farming industry and the heavens above, and me too if I was stupid enough to get in the way. Then Mum would upset me sometimes by telling me how worried she was about his blood pres­sure and how his father had dropped dead in the middle of changing a tyre on a tractor, at the age of forty-five, and she was scared Dad would go the same way. I never really wanted her to talk to me about things like that – and yet I sort of liked it in a way. I felt like an adult, like we were talking on equal terms.

  It’s one good thing about being an only child, I guess. Your parents do treat you like you’re on the same level. Sometimes, anyway. Sometimes Dad treated me like I really was five years old. Once I left the gate on Cooper’s (that’s our biggest paddock) open, and the joined ewes that were in there wandered into One Tree (another paddock) and got mixed up with the unjoined ewes. Dad went birko that time. I thought he was going to hit me. Mum had to get between us, to save me. I don’t blame him; it was an extremely dumb thing to do, but he always acted like he’d never made a mistake in his life. After all, it wasn’t me who sprayed Round-up on Mum’s rasp­berries when she wanted them given some fertiliser.

  Sometime in their marriage, Mum decided that she would stay sane by not getting caught up in Dad’s moods. She did all the things that farmers’ wives do in our part of the world – in fact she did them better than most – but she didn’t give the impression that there was nothing else in her life, the way Mrs Mackenzie and Mrs Brogan did. Mum seemed able to step away from it all. She often looked a bit amused by the things she found herself doing. When Mrs Mackenzie won the jam section at the Show for instance, she’d get very excited and talk about it for weeks. When Mum won the Best Sponge Cake she just gave a little sly smile and didn’t say anything in public. But when we got home she’d laugh and cele­brate. One year she even danced me around the kitchen.

  She had mixed feelings about it all; I guess that’s what it boils down to. Maybe it was to do with her being a city girl originally. Her father was an accoun­tant and she’d never been out of the city in her life, until a friend talked her into going to the Motteram B & S. The friend had a ute, and they took that because they thought it would look more rural. Some time during the B & S, Dad, who must have been legless, staggered out of the hall looking for a place to sleep. Of course he never admitted to being legless; he said he’d had a long hard day marking lambs. Anyway, he curled up in the back of Mum’s friend’s ute, under the tarp, and had a good nap. When he woke up it was ten o’clock in the morning and he was still in the ute, 300 k’s from Motteram and doing 100 k’s an hour. He had to bang on the back of the window to get the girls’ attention – it was the first they knew that they had a passenger. I can
imagine the shock when they heard the banging and turned around to see a pair of blood­shot eyes staring at them through the glass.

  Four months later they were married. Dad was twenty-three; Mum was three weeks away from her nineteenth birthday.

  I didn’t arrive till eight years later. I think they had a bit of trouble having me, but I never asked them about that. There are some things about your parents you really don’t want to know.

  From the first I loved the land. I don’t know whether Dad wanted a son – most places around Wirrawee are run by men, and handed on from father to son – but he never gave me any sign of that. One time when a bloke at the Wirrawee Saleyards was talking to us he said to Dad, right in front of me, ‘If I had daughters I wouldn’t let them do stockwork.’ Dad just looked at me for a minute while I waited to see what he would say. Finally he said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without her.’ I went red with pleasure. It was the best compliment he ever paid me. I was nine years old.

  I’m not saying I enjoyed everything about my life. When Dad was in one of his moods it was no fun being at home. I didn’t like some of the jobs, like mulesing – well, you’d have to be sick to like that. But I also didn’t like feeding poddies on cold mornings, chopping kindling and lighting the Aga, putting the dogs back on their chains after they’d been for a run, finding mice in my bed during mouse plagues, and finding spiders in my gum boots a few minutes after I’d put them on.

  The best time of the year was definitely shearing. We only had a small shed, two stands, and as the economy got worse Dad did a lot of the shearing him­self. It was more fun when contractors came in, but I didn’t mind either way. As soon as I was old enough I became the roustabout. That was a big moment in my life, being able to do that. Another big moment was being strong enough to throw a fleece onto the table for the classer. Again, Dad had been doing his own classing lately. It was something I wanted to learn; I’d been planning to do a course when I finished school.