Eventually he crossed the track to Ivanhoe not far from the she-oaks where Yoti had dropped him, proceeding then to the cover of an old-man saltbush. If the aborigines on reaching that track drove towards Ivanhoe, their destination would be those Devil’s Marbles recently visited by Alice McGorr and himself. Should they continue across the track, then their journey’s end would be the Ancient Tree dead centre of the wide depression.
The Wilmots were not interested in the Ivanhoe Track.
Now assured, Bony sped westward, in an hour coming to the rim of what in the long ago had been a large lake, roughly circular and two miles across. For a minute he scanned the entire rim, and for another made certain that no one was camped under or in the vicinity of the Tree. Between it and the rim there wasn’t cover enough for a cow to hide her calf. When the Wilmots reached the rim, Bony was concealed in the Tree and so watched the vehicle advancing across the depression, the dust from wheels and hooves rising to float above it like a veil of spun gold.
The sun was setting when Chief Wilmot shouted at the horses to stop, when they would have stopped anyway at the merest pressure on the reins. They parked a hundred yards south of the Tree, the men jumping to the ground, stretching bodies and kicking dust with their boots as though they had been on their way for twenty-four hours.
Action normal. No unusual excitement. No hint of urgency. Obviously plenty of time in hand.
The lubra handed the baby down to her husband of one month. She passed to Chief Wilmot a large tucker box, a four-gallon tin of water, the suitcase, the blanket, and finally tossed off the load of firewood. On gaining ground, she demanded the baby and young Wilmot laughingly refused, turning his back to her and telling her to make a fire. She pleaded but failed, and in good humour gathered brushwood and started the camp fire.
Meanwhile, Chief Wilmot drove on for a further fifty yards, where he unharnessed the horses and freed them in hobbles to find sustenance on the herbal rubbish.
There were thus several abnormalities, for Bony all establishing the importance of the great tree in which he lay hidden. It was unusual for the camp fire to be lit so far from the tree which offered companionable shelter. It was unusual to park the vehicle so far from the fire. And the manner in which the baby was fussed over by both the lubra and her husband would have been abnormal even had the baby been their own.
The heated Earth took the Sun. The wind dropped to a faintly cooling southerly, and the smoke of the fire was barely visible. Silence came to the aborigines, and over them and Bony flowed music made by the bells suspended from the necks of the horses.
Young Wilmot crossed to the buckboard and returned with a filled sugar bag, the contents obviously not sugar. And Chief Wilmot removed his shirt and boots, revealing the cicatrices on chest and back, cut with flint and kept open to heal with mud, done to him at his initiation.
The years had neither bent his back nor drained his strength, and the shirt was a tragic disguise, the uniform of a tragic civilisation. Head up, shoulders squared, he came to the Tree, his eyes unmasked, clear beneath the beetling brows lined white. Bony beheld the veneration for the Tree on the calm face as Chief Wilmot paused to regard a living monument to which he was linked in defiance of Time and Death. To the Tree Chief Wilmot revealed himself as never in his life had he done to a white man, and rarely to one of his own race.
Unlike his son, and his son’s generation, Chief Wilmot had known the days when the aborigine possessed the remnant of tribal independence. He could recall when, as a small naked boy, he had watched his father and elders fight with spears and waddies the warriors of invading tribes, forced by drought from their rightful country. He could remember his father being speared to death in one such battle.
His father had died like a man; he had lived on to be robbed of his birthright by the white man, and shackled by the white man’s laws and taboos. His own son and his son’s generation felt not the shackles, cared little for the lost birthright, and even less for the tales of history handed down by generation to generation for five thousand years.
This lonely representative of a race remarkable for its morality, its justice, its freedom from greed was now gazing upon the repository of the faith and the beliefs of the generations who had sunk into the graveyards of Time. It was not just another tree, an oddity because of its age. It was The Tree smitten by a Devil that had jumped from a cloud, burned by another Devil who had come running across the world to gouge a cave in its belly, and yet preserved by Altjerra to go on living for ever and ever. Altjerra himself had once slept at the foot of the Tree. For centuries The Tree had been the Sacred Storehouse of the people living in this country. It was here that famed Orinana had come to meet her lover of a forbidden totem, here that her brothers had caught her and slain both her and her lover.
As Bony expected, Chief Wilmot espied the tracks left by Alice and himself, and instantly became alert and shouted in his own tongue, so long in disuse that his son failed to understand and shouted in reply:
“What’s up?”
The old man’s urgency, however, brought Tracker Wilmot at the run, and together they examined the tracks, agreeing on when they were made, that a white man and a white woman had come from the road to the tree and had returned. They were wrong, of course, in one detail. Bony had walked like a white man, angling his feet at twenty-five minutes to five, and he had been careful to leave no evidence of having climbed the tree.
“Came here yesterday?” Chief Wilmot said.
“Yair,” agreed the son, who now had springs in his feet. “White people all right. Could be old man Jenks from Wayering Station. He brought a white woman here to see the tree. I better look-see, though. Be dark soon.”
The Police Tracker faultlessly followed the tracks to the distant road where Bony had stopped the borrowed car. Watching, Bony could see by his actions that he was satisfied.
The Chief returned to the camp fire and stood with his back to the blaze as Man has always done. Dusk was sweeping in from the east, impatient because the day wasn’t dying fast enough, and the furnace glare of the sun’s couch stained red the returning young man, the lubra nursing the baby, the aloof man at the fire. And upon the warmth of the colourful sky reclined the slender maiden moon.
Chief Wilmot spoke to the lubra and she put the infant down into a nest she made of the blanket and strode gracefully to the buckboard. Taking a large hessian sack she gathered dead roly-poly, light as air, which quickly filled the sack and puffed it to its fullest. Having returned the filled sack to the buckboard, she was given the task of gathering brushwood on a site selected twenty feet beyond the tree cavern. Her husband set wood upon the kindling, and the old man brought a bottle and liberally splashed the heap with kerosene.
The kerosene intrigued Bony, for the brushwood was tinder-dry. Still carrying the bottle, the old man took a stand ten feet from the tree cavern and marked the place with a bootheel.
“You lie there,” he said to the lubra.
“All right,” she assented, adding: “But not on the three-cornered-jacks.”
“I’ll fix it good,” her husband volunteered, and with a branch-tip swept the place clean of the skin-piercing burrs.
They returned to the camp fire without igniting the one just prepared, and there they squatted to eat. Laughter had sped away from them, the fire-flames moulded to a tall candle vying with the purple dusk.
Bony ate and drank prudently, and afterwards managed to get a cigarette going by thrusting his head and shoulders into the hole excavated by the lightning bolt. He marked the change in himself brought about by the events since he had jumped from Yoti’s car, analysed it and was not ashamed that the subtle spirit of this vast land could sway him through his maternal ancestry.
The maiden moon rested herself languorously on the tree-spiked horizon. The spikes cruelly took and devoured her, and cold rage took possession of the sky. The Southern Cross was low to the south-east and not worth looking at, but the Three Sisters, perfectly spaced
and aligned, each the exact counterpart of the others, were faithfully following the path of the Sun and able to tell Bony it was eleven o’clock. It was then that the lubra built a little fire near the buckboard and there squatted, rocking the child.
She kept her back to the main fire, for it is not lawful for a woman to witness what followed.
Tracker Wilmot slipped off his clothes and donned the pubic tassel fashioned from the dove-grey skin of the Queensland duck. From his neck he suspended with string of human hair the dilly-bag of the initiated man, made of kangaroo hide and containing his personal treasures. With white ochre the old man painted wide lines longitudinally round his body, and horizontally up his legs and down his arms. The effect was to give likeness to the week-old emu chick, and the final touch was the band of woven human hair about his head which bunched his sleek black hair to a solid plume.
The old man stepped away to view his ‘creation’ with some satisfaction ... and stepped from his trousers.
Standing on the tucker box, he was taller than his son, and the firelight glistened on his skin and banished the tiny hollows pitted by the years. He found ecstasy in the caress of the light wind, and raising his arms he exulted: “Orri ock gorro!” meaning: “I am a man!”, and Bony in the Ancient Tree was tempted to strip and himself experience that primitive pride in his body.
Chief Wilmot was like the snake that had sloughed its old and tattered skin. He was now smooth and hard and straight, hair and beard and brows white and fiercely virile with an aura of authority bequeathed him by five hundred generations of forebears.
For the first time Bony saw deference in the son’s attitude. He handed to his father and Chief the pubic tassel of emu skin, and the dilly-bag of kangaroo hide containing the precious churingas, into which so much magic from afar had been rubbed. With white ochre he striped the Chief’s legs from waist to ankles. That done, both arms were completely painted in white, and the Chief sat on the box. The son opened the sugar bag, and taking from it a pinch of kapok dipped it into a solution of tree gum and stuck it on his father’s chest.
As this ceremonial task proceeded, white bands became a pattern, and the pattern grew on chest and back and shoulders till Bony recognised the Mantle of the Medicine Man. White ochre marked the cheeks and mouth and nostrils, and on the forehead kapok again formed the letter U, representing The Devil’s Hand. Again, the final touch was the headband mounting the white hair to foam. And tiny claw-like hands clutched at Bony’s heart at sight of this Being of Magic Who Knows All, Who Can Kill with Pointed Bones, and Who Can Heal by removing the Stones of Pain.
Not once had the lubra dared turn and look, continuing to squat over her fire not for warmth but spiritual comfort, and as still as her sleeping babe. The Medicine Man slowly pivoted, that the gum adhering to the kapok might the sooner dry. Presently young Wilmot announced that the drying was complete, and he draped a blanket about his father to hide from unauthorised eyes that dreaded Mantle. He himself donned his military greatcoat, and then called the lubra, who, being freed from her invisible bonds, returned to the main camp fire.
The fire was permitted to dwindle, to become one large bright ruby on the black velvet world. The Three Sisters marked off two hours. A newly-risen star was so bright it could be mistaken for a lamp in a stockman’s hut. There appeared another star, low to earth, far to the south, and this star seemed to dance and then slide down into a pit and there tremble like a lost glow-worm.
Brushwood was thrown upon the camp fire, and minutes later Bony heard the singing of the car engine coming from Mitford, and knew that the driver was being aided only by a parking light. His headlights would have flooded the sky to be seen a dozen or more miles away. The car was driven off the track and stopped near the buckboard.
Car doors were slammed shut, and two figures emerged from the dark background to advance into the firelight. One was tall, the other was short. The waiting aborigines gave greeting to Professor and Mrs Marlo-Jones.
The Professor spoke with grave mien, and Chief Wilmot replied. Mrs Marlo-Jones talked with the lubra, who uncovered the infant’s face and laughed her pleasure at the compliment given by the white woman. Together they removed the infant’s white shawl and placed about it one of black.
Minutes passed, for Bony slowly. Then two ‘stars’ appeared and behaved as had the first. Each driven by a single parking light, two cars arrived to park near the Professor’s car, and by that time the Professor and his wife and the aborigines were hidden by the night, and the camp fire was dwindling again to a bright ruby.
For Bony the World spun in reverse back and back into the Days of the Alchuringa, and his pulses leaped and his mind reached with mythical arms to encompass All Knowledge.
The ruby gave birth to a spark of light which whirled and circled as Tracker Wilmot handled the fire-stick, ringing himself with bands of light. He sped out upon the plain to come in behind the Tree, to round the Tree and race by the prepared fire into which he flung the fire-stick. Flame leaped high, its light pursuing him into the darkness. And a brolga far away vented its fearsome cry.
Something was coming from the direction of the road, something without shape in likeness to any thing created. It stood ten or eleven feet high, and it walked stiltedly like a bird unused to walking upon land. The red glow from the camp fire made it appear to shrink back upon itself, and then the light of the leaping fire near the Ancient Tree found it and clung.
It had the head and the graceful feathered neck of the emu, and the long and ruffled tail of that bird. It had the body and legs of a man, and on one shoulder rested a great sack. The man-bird advanced, becoming clearer in the firelight to those about the cars, and to Bony thrilling high above.
The bird-man wore the Mantle of the Medicine Man, and he circled the Ancient Tree. Coming again to the cavern in the great trunk, he withdrew from the sack what might have been white bird’s down, and the fluffy things fluttered to the ground, where Whispering Wind urged them to hide in the cavern.
For a little while the man-bird lingered, gazing upwards at the treetop, and Bony could hear him speaking in gentle tones. Then he passed into the Wing of Night, and the foot-lighted stage was empty save for the majestic backdrop.
But not for long. A tall and graceful figure rose from near the ruby and walked hesitantly toward the lighted stage. The footlight accepted her, illumined her nude body, revealed a young and ripe lubra.
Her hair was plumed in glossy black, fine and straight and living. Against her breast she hugged the baby in his shawl the colour of her skin, and all the while keeping the infant from being seen by the audience.
Before the Tree she stood as though humbled in prayer, and then gracefully she sank to the ground, arranged herself that the child should still be hidden, and composed herself to sleep. Time passed. The brolga flew over the treetop, and Bony shrank beneath its haunting scream.
Two figures advanced from the dark wing concealing the cars. One was a tall and lean man wearing a beret, and this man had his arm about the waist of a woman wearing a duster coat whose head was enveloped in a gauzy scarf. She might have been conscious of her surroundings, but she was unable to walk without the man’s support. Her hands, finely shaped, were bare and white of skin.
They came to the ‘sleeping’ lubra. They moved round her and came to the tree cavern, and there the man eased the woman into the cradle of his arms and carried her into the Tree of Trees.
Young Wilmot came silently to bring a blanket to clothe his wife, and she took the baby to the man within the Tree. With her husband she stood away, and a moment later the white man appeared and returned to the camp.
The lubra sped away to the buckboard, and Tracker Wilmot scooped sand with his hands to douse the ‘footlight’ as the play was ended. Brushwood was tossed upon the camp fire and gave light to those standing about it—Professor Marlo-Jones and his wife, the tall man who had carried the woman into the Tree, a short, stout man, and yet another whom Alice could have identified
as Dr Delph.
The firelight illumined their faces. The Professor was in jovial mood, his wife vivacious. The tall man shook hands with the stout man as though heartily congratulating him. Dr Delph looked tired and alone.
Presently they left the fire for the cars. Two cars were driven away, the drivers again aided only by parking lights. The short man reappeared at the camp fire, and lit a cigar. Then Tracker Wilmot appeared and was given a cigar. A moment later, again in coat and trousers, Chief Wilmot joined them and openly demanded a cigar. And finally the lubra came into the firelight, dressed and excited.
They were there an hour later, obviously waiting for the dawn, and Bony silently climbed down the tree, knowing himself free from observation by those blinded by the fire, and himself energised by memory of a woman’s hands.
Within the tree cavern it was totally dark, and he knelt and found the woman lying on her side, the infant resting in the cradle of her arm. Bony found her hand, traced it lightly with his fingertips. His fingers, now impatient, found the woman’s face. The scarf had been removed. She was Alice McGorr.
Chapter Twenty-six
Alice McGorr’s Story
BONY SAT at the feet of Alice McGorr. Within the frame of the arched entrance Night portrayed the distant camp fire and about it the stilled figures seemed to be waiting for the Dawn to free them. Within the heart of the Ancient Tree it was so dark that Bony could see nothing of the recumbent form of the woman and the child nestling against her. The child continued to sleep, but Alice, Bony suspected, was drugged.
Within himself, the tension which had been steadily mounting for several days was now being submerged in the warm glow of satisfaction that yet another assignment was about to be completed, that once again the ever-present menace of failure had been subdued by triumph.
Murder Must Wait Page 20
