by John Marsden
I heard yells from behind, and I didn’t need an interpreter to know what they meant. ‘There she is!’ was the general drift. The bush was straight ahead and I’d never been more glad to see it. I bolted into the treeline like a rosella in a wheat crop. I felt a big attraction to the smell of eucalyptus at that moment.
As I started down a slope which I knew would take me out of sight of the train I risked one glance behind. I got the shock of my life. What looked like a squad of soldiers had fanned out across the top of the hill, and in the light of the burning trucks I could see that they were armed to the teeth. A couple of them were in the act of kneeling. They obviously thought they could get a good shot at me before I scurried into the deeper bush.
Unfortunately by looking back I’d lost my momentum. I’d like to have accelerated down the slope, maybe diving through the bracken to throw them off their aim. But I wasn’t going fast enough. All I could do was swerve, and try to get up more speed at the same time. So I swerved to the left, and came almost immediately to a bank I hadn’t seen in the darkness.
I plunged down, thinking, ‘Well, at least I’ll be out of their sight for a little bit now’.
I was overconfident about that.
I ran another six paces before I was shot.
It was a feeling I’ll never forget. If it was some other pain, I guess I would have got over it. At first it wasn’t even the worst pain I’ve had in my life. In some ways being winded was worse. But one difference was that you soon start getting better when you’re winded. With this I soon started getting worse.
Another difference was the psychological one. When you know you’ve been shot, it hurts all over.
For a moment I actually thought it was a snakebite. I know you don’t expect to be bitten by a snake at night, although I’m sure it’s very possible. I’ve seen quite a few snakes out at night when it’s hot enough, once even on our verandah at home.
This wasn’t such a hot night. But I still thought it was a snakebite. There was a terrible stabbing pain in my left calf, like a red-hot three-inch nail had been driven in there. Right away a burning feeling spread up my leg, like a hot coal was lodged inside.
I looked around frantically, expecting for a moment to see a quick swerve through the grass as a tiger or a brownie took off in a hurry. But it was too dark and I didn’t see anything.
I hopped along on one leg for about six paces, then the pain virtually went again. I mean, sure, there was still an ache, but nothing worth writing home about. I put my foot back down, ran three or four more steps, then, bang, the leg went from under me.
This time it really hurt. Jeez did it hurt. I knew then that it was no snakebite; that I had been shot. The whole leg was screaming at me. It had no strength at all. It was a mass of pain from the toes to way up my thigh. Virtually to my waist.
It didn’t strike me at the time but I’d been shot in pretty much the same place as Lee; my left calf.
I opened my mouth to scream, then realised I couldn’t do that, and it was a waste of time anyway. Not only was there no-one to come to my rescue, to offer sympathy and Bandaids and Panadeine, but a few dozen soldiers were chasing me at full speed with rifles blazing. If there’d been time to think I’d have had to acknowledge that they were good shots, too. One of them was, anyway. Or incredibly lucky.
I put my hand to my leg, as if holding it would ease the pain, but it didn’t help at all, and when I took my hand away again I realised it was sticky with blood. My blood. I started to feel funny all over. Shock, I guess. I was dragging myself along, not at much speed, but trembling and shaking, and just feeling totally weird. Like I wanted to faint and throw up and go to sleep, all at the same time.
What I did instead was crawl another twenty metres towards a big patch of bracken. Twenty metres. That was the longest journey of my life. I knew I was making little whimpering noises, like a tired baby, and it’s funny but I distinctly remember having a vision of my mother at that moment. I felt a sudden intense desire to be a baby again: to be held safe against her, to rest in her arms, to feel the heat of her body and to breathe in her warm smell.
The last six or eight metres I did a centimetre at a time. I heard, or thought I heard, the voices of the soldiers following me, looking for me. I heard both men and women, but I don’t know if I really heard them or if I imagined it. There was another volley of shots, and I know I didn’t imagine that. Bullets ripped through some leaves quite near me. Branches snapped and fell slowly, from limb to limb of the trees, until they thumped to the ground. The bush was taking a pounding tonight. I thought, ‘One of those bullets hit me, one of those bullets that are so powerful they can break big branches. What has it done to my leg?’ I started shaking again and was afraid to look down at the wound, afraid of the damage I might see.
Gradually though I felt calmer. I seemed to stop shaking and drift away. Like a dream where I was awake and could see myself having the dream. Almost like there were two of me. Then it got weirder and I saw myself lying in the bracken, as though I was in the high branches of a tree and looking down. I saw the top of my own head.
Although it was a cold night I felt surprisingly warm. I prickled all over, like I’d been injected with something radioactive. I had pins and needles, but they were hot needles. I couldn’t hear anything. Maybe I’d been identifying too closely with Gavin, but a huge cotton wool muffler had been placed over the world and there were no sounds any more. I don’t know how long that lasted. But as I lay in the bracken, buried under its fronds, a strong voice from somewhere inside started making itself heard, and it said, ‘Come on, fight back, be strong’.
‘Don’t disturb me,’ I begged it. ‘Don’t wake me. I’m feeling quite nice now, quite comfortable. Let me stay like this.’
But it wouldn’t be silenced. It got louder and louder, and more demanding, and even though I got cross with it, suddenly the fog in my mind cleared and I could see and hear everything clearly again.
And I could feel everything again. That was the bad news. My leg was agony from top to bottom. If I could have torn it off and thrown it away I would have done it. Burns of pain ripped through it, wave after wave after wave, with almost no pauses, no relief, no chance to draw another breath and get my mind ready for the next hit. Such a tiny thing, a little lead bullet, to do so much damage. Just a couple of centimetres long. I vowed I’d never shoot another living creature again. I was shocked to think I’d put animals through this torture. Then my mind cleared even further and I remembered all the people I’d shot during this war. I decided not to think about that any more.
Even through the pain, even as I clasped my leg and sweated and sobbed, I could hear the soldiers. The voices were getting closer all the time. They were calling to each other continuously, I think so they didn’t get out of line, keeping themselves organised, but maybe also to intimidate their target. Me.
Well, that worked all right. I was intimidated. They sounded so professional, so disciplined, that I couldn’t think of anything to do against them. They sounded so strong that they made me feel weak.
About the only thing I could do was stop myself groaning. That was quite an achievement. I bit my bottom lip, so hard my teeth nearly went through it. I pushed the heel of my right leg deep into the soft earth. I arched my back and twisted my head from side to side, all the time keeping the tight grip on my left leg.
The only distraction I had from the pain was when a pair of boots crunched past my face. He or she, whoever it was, had a torch, so I was at risk of being trodden on or seen or both. But neither happened. The boots strode on, less than a metre from me, but for that couple of seconds I stopped thinking so much about my leg. As soon as the soldier disappeared down into the gully a new blaze of pain ran through me, going higher now, up my side into my armpit.
The next time the pain ebbed it was such a relief that I lay back gasping. I dared to hope that it might stay like that. Oh, if only it would. I didn’t make the slightest move, in case I set it off a
gain. But I did start to think: ‘How am I going to get out of this?’ I wanted to respond to the voice in my head I’d heard—or imagined I’d heard—earlier, but the way I was going, just staying alive might be more than I could manage. I might bleed to death here, in among the bracken. I knew I was bleeding but I didn’t know how much. Finally, reluctantly, I ran my hand down my leg and patted around on the ground. It felt pretty dry. That was lucky. But it didn’t mean I wouldn’t die. I remembered the feeling of calm and peace that had stolen over me just a few minutes before. I shuddered. Suddenly that feeling didn’t seem so peaceful after all. I realised it might have been death, stealing around me with its peaceful fingers. I didn’t want that kind of peace, thank you very much. I wasn’t ready for it.
Judging from the noise there were soldiers everywhere. If they stayed around I had no chance. With a bullet in my leg, and the sun coming up, I’d be as easy a target as a scarecrow in a paddock.
Experimentally I slid a metre to my right, towards the edge of the bracken patch. Right away the pain came back, so violently that this time I did cry out. I could still hear the soldiers. Funny, considering how long it had been since the boots trampled past. I thought they might have been well gone by now.
As I lay listening, it struck me that they weren’t getting any further away. In fact they seemed to have stopped. I didn’t know what that meant, but there was every chance it was bad news for me.
Then things did get worse. The search party started coming back up the slope.
My leg now felt like someone was cutting it open with a blunt chisel heated red-hot. I hated being so helpless. I knew I had to move but I didn’t know if I could. I tried another experiment, going in the opposite direction, but that was even worse, as it meant I was trying to roll over on the wounded leg. I thought, grimly, ‘Well, at least it’s the same leg as my bad knee. If they cut it off I’ll have solved two problems at once.’
The way the soldiers were now casting around, not far from me, I was pretty sure they knew I was close by. I wished so much that I still had my pack, and that it was full of Ryan’s explosives. Or that I had a weapon of any kind. I bet they knew I wasn’t armed. They’d had too good a view of me, even in the dark, as I raced away down the slope. If I’d had a weapon they wouldn’t be this confident, searching the bush at night.
I began to realise that this time I really had no chance. Daylight couldn’t be far away, and if they hadn’t found me by then, it wouldn’t take them long once the sun came up. The drops of blood would be a dead give-away. ‘Dead’ in every sense of the word.
For a while the soldiers were fairly quiet again. I’m not sure how much time passed. I think I might have drifted into a bit of a blear. The next time I registered anything was when I heard the bark of a dog.
It gave me such a shock. Not at first though. At first I heard it while I was in a dream. Somehow I was back home, before the war, with Dad giving me a lecture. Again. One of his favourite sayings was: ‘The gate’s always open, the bull’s always angry, and the rifle’s always loaded.’ He was telling me that again, because I hadn’t checked the cows every day, assuming that because they’d been all right on the days I did check, they’d be all right on the days I didn’t. Mum had actually told me she thought this cow might be calving—I can even remember her number, 132—but I never noticed her in a dip in the long grass of One Tree Paddock. And we’d had such a good run with calving that I’d become overconfident.
When we did find her we were about a week too late. The calf had been dead a long time. I’d say the cow had been in labour a full week. We started pulling the calf out from the cow, but it was rotten and it disintegrated. Meanwhile the cow was burping and farting totally noxious gasses. Dad and I were both dry-retching. The smells were overpowering, as if the sight wasn’t bad enough. We got the legs of the calf out, one by one, then Dad got a chain around its head, but when we started pulling on the chain we pulled its head off. We got most of the bits out eventually but, surprise surprise, the cow died of shock, about a minute after we’d finished.
That’s when Dad gave me the lecture, as if I didn’t feel guilty enough. I mean it wasn’t really because I hadn’t checked the cows every day. She was in such a deep hole in a corner of the paddock that I must have missed her at least three times. But I guess I could have checked more carefully.
Maybe it wasn’t so surprising that I’d dream about that, as I lay there with my leg feeling it had been shattered and shredded by the bullet, and me knowing that it was because I hadn’t kept a good enough lookout. ‘The gate’s always open, the bull’s always angry, and the rifle’s always loaded.’ Yeah, and I could add to that. The train’s always loaded with soldiers. And they’re always armed and dangerous.
And if you hang around for long enough they bring dogs.
I heard the first few barks while I was still in my little dream and thought it was Millie, our old dog. Then suddenly I was wide awake. The sun was shining hard into my eyes and the barking was very close. It was sharp, aggressive, and loud. A few moments later there was a volley of shots, smashing into the earth and vegetation three or four metres from me.
They started there anyway; then they moved away. I saw the grass and bracken being blown backwards and forwards as though a great wind was rushing through the undergrowth.
I could see what was happening, and what I couldn’t see I worked out. When the dogs got excited the soldiers started firing. Why not? Saved a lot of mucking around. Less time and less danger. Let the rifle do the work for you, instead of having to rake through the bush looking for a dangerous terrorist with your bare hands. The taxpayers paid for the ammo anyway.
The firing stopped and there was a bit of silence. Then I heard voices again, men calling to each other, and then, unmistakably, encouraging to the dogs to have another go. The barking started, only it quickly became an excited yapping. I could hear them coming straight towards me. It was time for me to give up. I might only extend my life by a few moments, but when it comes to the end, even a few moments seem precious.
‘All right, keep your shirts on,’ I called.
I tried to get up, but it was hard, with my leg in raw pain. I couldn’t put any weight on it; not when the slightest movement had me gasping with shock.
But I levered myself up on my right knee, enough for them to see me.
And for me to see them. There were half-a-dozen lounging around in the background, leaning against trees, smoking, just hanging out. They sure were confident. Then there were four doing the actual business of searching. Two had dogs on leashes; and each had a soldier with him. These soldiers seemed like the hatchet men, because they had automatic rifles at the ready, and they looked ready themselves. I got very cautious when I saw them, raising my hands slowly and deliberately, staring them down in case they felt like testing their aim on me.
The dogs were cute. I wished I could have patted them and played with them and scratched their stomachs, like in the old days. They were beagles, both quite young, and very pretty. Lovely alert heads and shining eyes. They looked pleased with themselves, and of course they had every right. They’d caught the vicious enemy guerilla. Caught her without a fight.
It wasn’t a very dignified surrender. I tried to stand on my one good leg but I lost my balance. I guess being so tired didn’t help. I fell in the bracken and just lay there, not caring very much whether they killed me on the spot. It seemed like ages before they came to get me, but it probably wasn’t. A whole lot of boots suddenly surrounded me. I looked up and there they all were, staring down at me. For the first time I noticed that the grass was quite badly bloodstained, smears of it everywhere, so I guess I’d bled more than I realised. I wasn’t sure what I was expected to do. I’d only been caught once before, and the circumstances had been different. Now four rifles were pointed at me, so I lay waiting for them to do whatever they wanted. I felt a strange kind of peace, not the same as a few hours earlier, just an acceptance that this was the end of the roa
d; I’d done everything possible; I couldn’t carry out any more of Colonel Finley and Ryan’s programme of sabotage. The soldiers would take their revenge. I would pay the same price I had made their friends pay.
It didn’t quite work out like that. They prodded me with the barrels of the rifles to make me stand. I got up slowly, awkwardly, this time being more careful not to fall over. It went OK, until I was nearly upright, then they seemed to lose patience. Maybe they thought I was being deliberately slow. One of them shouted and swung his rifle so that it hit me across the back. I kept my balance, but only just. Another one pushed at me to get me moving, then the first one swung with his rifle again. I put up a hand to block him but as I did someone from behind kicked me in the left leg, on the exact place where I’d been wounded.
I went down like a beast with a bullet between the eyes. The only satisfaction I can claim is that I didn’t make any noise. I don’t know whether that was self-control or unconsciousness, because I sure saw stars. I had a blurred view of the bracken as though someone had put heavy black glass in front of my eyes.
I copped a few more boots. At first the pain was crippling: beyond anything I’d experienced, anything I could possibly bear. I curled into a ball and protected my leg as much as I could. The blows rained down. I couldn’t stay silent any more; I cried out, then I screamed, but it didn’t lessen the pain by the slightest degree.
After quite a while the pain seemed to go away, and although I felt the thuds of their boots it was like they were doing it to something else, to a block of wood perhaps. I heard them, and felt the impact, but the pain had faded into a blur of darkness. It was weird.
At some stage it stopped but I think it was a long time before I realised why. Someone was grabbing me and lifting me by the armpits. ‘Don’t,’ I cried out, like a baby. They didn’t take any notice. Instead they dragged me, heels bumping over the ground, for quite a distance. The pain came back, ten times worse. Every bump to my left leg sent agony racing up my side, like someone had ripped my leg open with his bare hands and was now pouring kerosene into the wound. I started screaming. I wanted it to stop, and I didn’t care what price I had to pay. If someone had offered me death at that moment, with a promise of no more pain, I’d have taken it, no problems, no complaints.
