Girl in an Empty Cage

by Graham Wilson

  Chapter 28 – Climbing a small Mountain

  Vic looked at his walking stick. He had carved thirty notches into it. That meant 30 days had passed since the Crash Day. He had come perhaps five kilometres from that place, as the crow flies, but it felt like he had walked 100 miles and climbed Mount Everest.

  He could feel the long hair on his face, now past itchy. He looked at his one set of clothes – tee shirt and shorts ; they were falling apart, with several holes in the shirt and threadbare shorts, almost worn through in several places. He noticed his skinny arms and legs and wondered where the muscle had gone.

  That was the trouble with mostly eating things he could catch with his hands; lizards, frogs, an occasional bird and bush rat; plus he ate insects in any shape and size he could find except ants. He had tried a wide range of plants, seeds and fruits, tested slowly and carefully after early stomach cramps, but only a handful passed the real food test.

  He should feel depressed; it had been extraordinarily hard and his journey was barely begun. But he had made it to the top and he still had both legs and feet, and the second one was only a bit crooked. He still could not take weight on it, but at least it had mostly stopped hurting, except when he banged it.

  He looked out across the barren stony landscape in front of him. As best he could tell from his map it was something around 300 kilometres in a fairly straight line to either of the two main roads he could head for, either the Stuart Highway, somewhere around the Edith River Crossing 50 kilometres north of Katherine on the road to Darwin, or the Katherine-Timber Creek road, somewhere around the Flora River crossing a similar distance west of Katherine. The way he would have to go, up and down hills, following creeks and ridge lines, it was probably 400 kilometres.

  So if he could manage five kilometres a day that meant 80 days of walking and if he could up it to 10 kilometres per day then perhaps a bit over a month, as long as there were no major setbacks. He figured it was now about the end of January. So assuming sixty more days he may see civilisation about the end of March. Of course he could get lucky and strike someone out here, but his chances during this wet season were low; it was a big one with a lot of flooding and water to run away yet.

  He refused to countenance the fact that he may not make it, his survival thus far felt miraculous so this did not bear thinking about. Still, it seemed like a bloody long way to walk.

  What he wouldn’t give now for a cold beer, big steak and a plate of chips, was hard to imagine. That would be his motivation to keep driving on. That, plus surprised looks on the many faces which had given him up for dead, along with a big hug from his Mum and sister, that would be reward enough.

  But his first destination was to get to Darwin and talk some sense into that silly girl of Mark’s, stop her sacrificing herself to honour Mark’s imaginary memory. The real story must come out, whatever it was, that surely was the purpose of Marks message to him. A day after he got off the river he had realised he still had his wallet in a back pocket of his shorts, he thought he had lost it. There was not much in it, just a license ID, credit card and about $100. But the memory chip Susan gave him was still there, and even if he had yet to read it, soon enough he would and then the real story, the one he knew Mark wanted told, would be out there for all to know. He was past hiding secrets.

  He looked at his meagre possessions, a makeshift backpack made out of strips of vinyl and bark, padded with foam to make it soft to carry; a spear, with a harpoon like head, cut and ground out of a piece of aluminium frame from the helicopter; a knife made of similar material, with a wooden handle; his stone cooking bowl; his fire kit – some smouldering embers wrapped in damp bark; a timber water scoop; a fishnet on a pole; an instant paperbark humpy, really just sheets of paperbark to sleep under to keep the rain off him, with a couple sticks to support it,; and a few other odds and ends, penknife, cigarette lighter, bits of metal, twine and wire.

  He wrapped his paperbark shirt over his shoulders to minimise the sunburn and insects, he put on his bark and vinyl hat, he adjusted his makeshift pack, so it sat in balance on his good shoulder and took the weight off his gammy leg, he put his walking stick to the ground next to his bad leg, and stepped out.

  He had picked a ridge line on the horizon to head to, due east for now, though he would adjust between north east and south east depending on the lie of the land. He had decided to break his journey into manageable bits, like this one to that next ridge line. After each bit he would stop, rest and see what he could find to eat. Of course he would also stop whenever he came to something promising like a little swamp with frogs; several frogs on a stick made a tasty barbeque. But he could not just hang around in this empty place and catch food, he had a destination to reach, and sooner was better, that steak and chips beckoned loud!

  As he walked he relived the events of the last month. It had begun when he made it to that little ledge and said goodbye to the river with that strange crocodile in which Mark seemed to reside; ‘River God Baru’ he had named it then, based on a half memory of an Egyptian story of that name with big crocodiles in it. In his mind it almost seemed to have a human face, Mark’s face, it certainly conveyed a presence beyond a mindless predator. At other times he called it just Baru, the word Mark used for his East Arnhem crocodile totem, symbolised by the carved miniature version he often carried. Now in his mind this being was a fused version of the two identities, one a totem and one a real crocodile, which he mostly called River God Baru.

  Sometimes he wondered whether all that early part of the escape down the river was a hallucination, invented in his imagination in that time of pain and no food.

  He only half remembered how he crawled along that ledge, the weather steadily worsening as the early morning sunshine was covered over by ever thickening clouds and gusts of wind, blowing in from the north. They got ever stronger as the afternoon progressed. He had edged his way away from the river, above the gully, with its own thundering creek, weak with hunger. As the rain started to set in he knew he must find shelter, along with the hunger he was getting really chilled with the cold wet wind.

  So he scoured the hillside for openings. Finally he found a reasonable sized crack in the rock, dry with a sandy floor and sheltered from wind. He dragged himself into it and curled up, too exhausted to move, although hunger was eating into his belly.

  As best he could remember, he had mostly laid inside there for the next three days. The wind and rain surrounded him and water poured down the hillside. He came out just occasionally to drink water, pee and look at rain streaming down and wind lashing the trees.

  Finally, on the afternoon of the third day, it started to blow itself out. By this time he was almost delirious with hunger, the pains came and went but a constant belly ache remained. He knew he must eat soon to allow his body to repair. In the late afternoon the cloud broke into high streamers, with occasional light showers and patches of sunshine.

  He had started to survey his locale for food. It was not promising around the cave, but beyond it the ledge opened out onto a rocky slope, extending up into a barren hillside. So he found a stick for support and half crawled, half walked as he slowly worked his way around, looking for something edible, anything would do. He thought the best chance would be a reptile sunning itself. Finally he spotted a fat bluetongue sitting on a rock in the afternoon sun, ten yards away.

  With all the patience he could muster he slowly crawled towards it until it was in reach of his stick. A well-directed blow gave him his first meal. He was tempted to rip into it and eat it raw. But the grass and leaves on the rocks were drying and he thought he could light a fire. So he had gathered a few dry twigs and leaves from his cave, and from these he slowly built his fire, adding drier bits from nearby. After ten minutes it was burning steadily and large enough to dry out and burn bigger sticks which were scattered around the hillside.

  When he had a good bed of coals he had dropped his lizard on and let it cook. The taste of that meat, with the
juice and fat dribbling down his chin, was one of the most exquisite things he could ever remember. He finished it way too soon, but that was good with his stomach so shrunken.

  Since then he had shepherded his fire, bringing it to his cave that night and keeping it continuously burning now for thirty days. He had worked out a way to wrap embers in many sheets of damp paperbark and carry this in his helmet. In that way he could keep it alive for many hours, ready to spring back into life when he stopped and blew on it. He had his lighter but that was only a reserve, it would be gone in no time if he used it to make a fresh fire each day.

  The day after he caught the lizard he had set to work creating things he could use to aid his survival. He had used the mesh from the seat, with some wire and a pole to make a hand net. With that he had caught tadpoles and frogs in the streams, and sometimes little fish. He had found a flattish hollowed out piece of stone, and worked on it to grind it out further; until it held about a cup of liquid. If he slowly heated it in the fire he could make an acceptable tadpole soup. Various insects made tasty additions, grubs, termites, caterpillars, even the odd cockroach; he only drew the line at ants. He would have loved salt to flavour the soup, but it gave a nourishing feeling as he swallowed it. To this soup base he added various plant foods, like the starchy roots of water lilies, as he gradually determined what was edible and safe to eat. So his survival kit included a fire ember bundle, a fishing net and a cooking stone.

  He laughed thinking what his mother would say, “You become proper bushman, Vic, what happened to that takeaway hamburger?” But hell, while barbequed frogs on a stick did not quite equal a good chicken satay, beggars could not be choosers.

  For two days after the weather broke he had concentrated on feeding himself and rebuilding his strength. He had made a better splint for his leg, now starting to set at a slightly crooked angle. It was beyond him to fix properly, but he set it as straight as he could in the splint, using pressure on the bent side to pull it back. He would tighten the binding until it hurt a bit, then do something to block the hurt out and after an hour or two the pain would ease back. So over the last month, while he had not got it fully straight, it had improved with the bone ends pushed together and the pain was now mostly just a dull ache. He had also made a good walking stick with a shoulder support, padded with some seat foam, so that he could walk effectively just lightly tipping the foot on the ground as he swung along.

  He used his knife to cut strips of tree bark and pandanus leaves and twisted these together into heavy and light twine that he could use to tie things together. He made some simple spears out of lengths of wood some with fire hardened tips, others using jagged metal pieces from the floor of the helicopter wreck. When his leg and balance got better he tried to spear larger fish or small animals he got close to. A couple of times he succeeded, though nothing was big enough for a feast.

  So he made better weapons. He broke one of his metal poles into shorter lengths and used one piece to fashion a strong knife, better for cutting and digging. With the second piece he fashioned a harpoon like spear head with a tip that would not slip back out of a big fish or other animal. He tied light but strong twine to the back of the timber shaft and carried it with the end tied to his pack. His logic was if he hit something big that would stop it getting away, the creature could not run or swim fast or far dragging his pack. So far he had caught nothing other than a couple of good sized fish but he would keep trying for a big wallaby or kangaroo.

  The idea of a whole wallaby roasting in the fire grew large in his imagination, though as yet he had only glimpsed these in the distance. He also made a couple of shorter throwing sticks, slightly curved, that he could use to try and bring down a low flying bird.

  Now he wished he had paid more attention when his grandfather tried to teach him desert bush craft. He could surely use those skills now. They were foreign to a town camp boy, but he was learning, self taught.

  He had kept an eye out for a hollow branch which he could block at one end to carry water, and finally found a piece burnt in an old bushfire. Now he used that to hold water. He had also searched for soft clay that he could use to make an eating or cooking pot, and remove the need to carry his heavy stone, but that had not materialised so far.

  On the third day, when he had made all the urgent things he needed and started to rebuild his strength, he had set out to explore his surroundings. His cave was on a shoulder of the hill with the creek to one side. It still flowed steadily but had fallen to a level where he could cross it in knee deep water.

  The hill shoulder went for a few hundred yards on a moderate slope before it came up against a huge cliff, hundreds of feet high. At one end it curved around making an impenetrable barrier up against the river, where the gully cliff merged with the river cliff. At the other end he could see the hill shoulder with the cliff behind it narrowing in towards the gully where the creek flowed out of higher hills. It followed this path as it curved out of sight. This direction, away from the river, was where he would look for a path to the top.

  It sounded easy, and he tried to trace it on his map. But his map gave him no detail at this scale; it simply showed a broken place running in the rock and going back for several kilometres before it vanished somewhere towards the top of the mountains. He knew he must get to the top of these mountains before he could head out cross country.

  By his figuring he had to climb up several hundred feet to reach the flat land at the top. He had used a process of trial and error to work out a way. The hillside valleys were treacherous places, with many areas of loose sliding rock and never ending sheer cliffs, where an apparent path suddenly ceased, vanished into thin air and a chasm of hundreds of feet lay before him.

  He had planned to set off and soon carry his gear to the top then head overland, but it was much more difficult than that. With his level of incapacity he could not explore safely and carry his gear at the same time. So he had evolved an approach where he would explore alternate days and shift his base camp on the other days. The exploration was to find a safe path higher and further away from the river, as well as a place with food, water and shelter to allow him to stop and rest.

  The day after he found a new campsite he would first shift his gear and then spend the rest of the day fixing and improving his equipment and building up his stores of food. He experimented with cooking and drying the animals he caught. At the start the frogs were plentiful, then he caught a couple of fish which were big enough to smoke. One night, at dusk, he managed to bring down a fruit bat with a throwing stick.

  He had also worked out how to make a cake with a starchy plant root that grew in the soft dirt in gullies. He would pound this up into a paste, shape it into palm sized flat cakes and cook them on a hot stone. Their flavour was close to disgusting but they did not upset his stomach and, after he had eaten a couple, he would feel better, as if some real food had part satisfied the hunger which always sat beside him.

  He had figured he needed a reserve of food, and tried to achieve this while he could, sensing the going was likely to get much harder in some places. What he had really hoped for was a wallaby, because then he could dry a large amount of meat in one sitting, as well as fully satisfy his current craving for meat. He experimented with making snares, which he set on likely looking trails along rock edges, fashioned out of wire and bark twine. He had succeeded in catching a couple bush rats in them, but the bigger game eluded him.

  The search for an escape from the maze of cliff valleys had been so much harder than he expected. His first creek soon broke into several branches each climbing along its own valley gorge. He would follow the winding passage along a rocky creek bed, slowly clambering up and down over boulders only to find it ended in a fifty foot waterfall with no way to get to the top. He also tried the hillsides to see if they gave ways to come around the sides of steeper cliffs, but again he mostly struck dead ends.

  In the end the most promising valley system had seemed to be a larg
e secondary creek which ran off the main creek about a kilometre up from the main river. It climbed steadily following a relatively open valley, with steep but not sheer hills flanking it.

  Twenty notches had been cut into his stick by the time he got to a place which he reckoned was about five kilometres along it. At this point it turned suddenly hard right. As he came around this bend he saw towering cliff all around and no way up. Looking at it he had begun to think it was impossible to get to the top, a maze with no exits.

  At that point he had contemplated a return to the river, to try and fashion a raft which would allow him to float down to the mouth and from there he could use the tide to bring him up the Victoria River until he came to somewhere like Bulloo River where he could get help. He decided to give it another week to try for the top before he retreated and sought an escape that way.

  He backtracked along this valley for about a kilometre to where he remembered a significant branch to the right. At that time the country to the right had seemed steeper and it had seemed counter intuitive to go up there. But he must try.

  By then, despite limited food, his body was getting much stronger; he was using his broken leg, not to take real weight, but to give him an extra hold and counterbalance as he climbed. He remembered movies where mountaineers used pegs driven into rock crevices, for hand holds and thought that was worth a try. There were a couple places where, early on, he had to retreat from ten foot cliffs which, if he was fully able, he could have scaled, but which were beyond him in his then state.

  So he had reasoned that wooden pegs could be driven into rock cracks to surmount these, and twine used to lift his pack up after him. He found a place by the creek where several large saplings grew. He bent and broke these into lengths which he put in the fire and burnt theme through in their middles into increasingly smaller lengths. When it was done he had twelve solid wooden sticks, each one to two feet in length, with a fire hardened point at one end.

  That, plus about ten metres of bark twine which could hold his weight, became his climbing equipment. As he worked along this new valley he had begun looking at it with different eyes, searching for parts where the sides might be scalable with his new climbing gear.

  About a kilometre along this new creek he came to a waterfall of about twenty feet, where the rock ledge blocked him. But at the sides were cracks in the rock which he thought he could scale. It took several hours and many goes, but his techniques improved with practise and in the end he mastered a crab style, sideways climb where his strong arm and leg pulled him to the next level while his weaker side gave an anchor. By nightfall that day, using three pegs left in key locations, he made it to the top of this waterfall.

  He rested there and the next morning he replenished his stores. To his great delight he had caught two fish of eating size in his dip net. He set off again in the late morning and by about lunch time he came to another similarly sized cliff. This time, his climbing technique was much better and it only took an hour to scale before he pushed on again.

  From there on the creek bed was covered in large boulders higher than his height and his progress had been incredibly slow. The valley sides had become much too steep to climb. Slowly he had advanced, only making a few hundred feet a day. For three days he followed this narrow valley. It twisted and turned like a corkscrew but he climbed steadily.

  By the end of that time he had felt he must be nearing the top of the mountain. In the late afternoon he had rounded another twist in the valley, conscious of a noise ahead. As he got a clear view, in front of him had been a beautiful waterfall, flowing over cliffs into a lovely circular pool of water. Above this waterfall it had looked like the hillside ended, at least from his view from below he could see no more hills rising behind. But all the cliffs in front of him and to the sides were sheer. There was nowhere that a mountain goat or rock wallaby could scale, let alone a half crippled man.

  He had felt a burning disappointment to be trapped there despite the majestic waterfall. The beauty of the scene took his breath away, but he had wanted to scream in frustration at being so near and yet so far.

  He had made himself rest for two hours. He had swum in the waterfall pool, luxuriating in its crystal clarity and speared a fat catfish, the best meat he had found thus far. With this food in his belly he knew he must not give up.

  It took another five days to get to the top and the application of a different logic. He backed up to the first useful looking side valley, but this time rather than trying to think as a person he tried to think as a rock wallaby.

  He sat and watched these elusive creatures. He looked for places where they had left their dung, he looked for places where they rested. But he particularly looked for their trails. If there was a place where they could get up and down the side of these hills then he would do so too, even if he had to crawl.

  After a couple of blind tries which left him exhausted and still at the bottom of the valley he cracked it. It was a really unobtrusive place; it just looked like a fissure and crack in the rock. But as he watched and learned he realised that rock wallabies were following this path from the high sides of the hill down to water.

  So he worked his way up, just himself this time, his gear left on the valley floor. In the end it was surprisingly easy, a couple of times he had to worm around narrow gaps sliding over smooth rocks on his belly, but he suddenly found himself on a gently rising rock scree slope that continued for a few hundred yards to a low ridge. At the top he came out into an open valley, a sort of grassy woodland, with rich deep soil and a creek meandering along it before it plunged over the cliff edge. Behind it were only the low ridges of upland hills.

  That was two days ago. He had felt so elated; he had made it to the top and at the top was food aplenty. It had taken the rest of the day to bring his things to the top, but it was easy labour knowing the way ahead was open. That night he had caught a large fish in the creek and a duck, both of which he roasted and fed on until he could eat no more, then he had dried the leftover meat.

  He had rested more yesterday and replenished his larder, making a good batch of his flat cakes. He had even found a native bee nest in a low branch and broke out a piece of hive. The sugary bush honey gave him a wonderful energy lift and he had used some as flavouring to hide the bitter taste of his cakes.

  He had thought of setting a snare on this narrow path to catch one of the wallabies, it was the perfect place and he was sure it would have succeeded. But within a minute of thinking this he had decided he would not do that; like the ‘River God Baru’ crocodile the wallabies had helped his escape and in return he would do them no harm. Instead he ascribed them their own special, dreamtime ancestor totem, in thanks.

  Now, on this new day, his thirtieth day he was leaving nowhere and on the way to somewhere. He walked on with purpose, despite pain in his shoulders and an already aching leg. At last he crested his first ridge and thought, a kilometre down, only 399 to go.