Beyond the Black Stump

by Nevil Shute

  She rode off on the left-hand side, and he to the right. He watched her as she went, a small girl in overalls and a big hat, on a big horse. How well she knew the country, how very, very competent she was! And what a girl!

  They rode on like that for about an hour, and came together again on the road to compare notes. “I don’t see that we can do any better than go on as we’re going, Stan,” Mollie said. “We must be about seven or eight miles out, I suppose. He could have walked as far as this by night, quite easily, although we’ve not seen any traces. I’d like to go on for another couple of hours, if that’s all right by you.” She glanced at her watch. “Say till five o’clock. We’d better turn back then, but we’ll have the road to go home on.”

  “That’s okay with me, Mollie,” he said. “I’d certainly hate to think of anybody wandering around on foot in this country.”

  “I know,” she said. “They come out from home, and they don’t understand. It takes a long, long time before they understand.”

  They separated again, and went on with the search, riding far distant from each other, but in sight. An hour later a dry, sandy river bed crossed the road, a river that ran only in the wet; they rode across this and came together on the road again to compare notes. “We’ll give it an hour more,” the girl said. “Come back on the track again at five o’clock. If we’ve not seen anything by then we’ll call it a day.”

  The sun was already starting to decline towards the horizon. Stanton Laird sat in his saddle gazing down the track that wavered unsteadily to the south-west. He did not answer, but sat motionless.

  The girl glanced at him, and asked, “What are you looking at?”

  “I was just wondering what that might be in the road,” he said. “Lookit. Like a stone.”

  “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “See the first kind of wiggle? Well, on past that, the tree on the left. Just a little way past that.”

  She saw the object that he meant, half a mile away. “It’s a stone,” she said.

  “I guess it might be,” he admitted. “But it’s kind of rounded for a stone in these parts, and they’re mostly red.” He moved his horse on up the road. “I’ll just take a look.”

  She followed him. As they came closer the stone turned into a water bottle with a webbing shoulder-strap.

  Stanton dismounted stiffly, for the strange saddle was galling him, picked it up and gave it to the girl. She pulled the cork out; the bottle was empty. She put her finger in the aperture. “It’s still wet inside,” she said. “He must have come this way. Well, now we’ve got to find him.”

  She sat up her horse looking around, taking careful note of the surroundings. “We must be about twelve miles out,” she said, “and just past the second creek. Look, hang it on the branch of that tree, so that we’ll know this place again. And put a few stones in the middle of the road, in a little heap.”

  He did so, and mounted again, and they rode out again on each side of the road. In a few minutes she shouted, and he rode across to her. She had dismounted when he got there, and he found her examining an elastic-sided riding boot, fairly new and in good condition. She passed it to him without comment.

  “His?” he enquired.

  “Must be,” she said. “It’s what they do. They start throwing off their clothes—when the skin stops sweating.”

  She looked around, hesitated, and placed the boot in as prominent a position as she could upon a clump of spinifex. She mounted again. “I don’t believe he’s very far away,” she said. “Look carefully in every bit of shade, Stan.”

  He studied the ground. “I guess this is the trail,” he said. “I think he went this way.”

  They rode on slowly, peering between the clumps of spinifex for any sign. Then they found a khaki shirt on the red earth.

  The next thing they found was a wide-brimmed hat, about a hundred yards away.

  A quarter of a mile further on, upon a trail that curved around towards the river bed, they found a pair of drill trousers abandoned on a patch of bare earth, where the owner had thrown them down.

  “It’s what they do,” the girl said quietly. “He’ll be somewhere in a patch of shade, Stan. Very close here now.”

  He dismounted and put the trousers prominently in a stunted tree, mounted again, and with the girl began to ride around slowly, in ever widening circles. Twenty minutes later the girl raised her arm, and called quietly across the hundred yards that separated them, “He’s here, Stan.”

  He rode across to her, and they dismounted. The body of the boy lay motionless, stark naked, beneath a clump of spinifex. He had burrowed into it along the ground like an animal, parting the coarse, thorny grass, so that only the legs were left out in the sun, the skin dark red in colour, and shiny. They tried to pull him out, but the muscles tightened convulsively and the hands clutched the grass.

  “He’s alive,” the girl said. “Look, let’s cut it away from on top of him. Have you got a knife?”

  “Surely,” he said. It was his habit to wear the hunting sheath knife that he wore when riding on the trails of his home state; he did not use it very often, but in a strange land it was a reminder on his belt of his home town and of the country that he loved. He pulled it out, and began to cut away the grass above the body.

  The sun was getting down to the horizon, mercifully, when they got the boy out of the bush. The body was scratched and torn by the spinifex with wounds that did not bleed; the tongue seemed to fill the desiccated mouth, apparently bitten through. But there was still life there; as Mollie held the boy up in a sitting posture and tried to make him drink from her water bottle, he turned from her and from the sun, feebly trying to burrow back under the bush.

  There was no shade, so they lifted him and laid him in the shadow of Stan’s horse, and went on trying to force water down his throat. Much of it was wasted, trickling down the chin and neck. Stanton was very conscious that their water bottles were practically empty; he had drunk freely from his own and there was little in it now, and from the look of it there was not much more in the girl’s.

  Watching it trickle down outside the face for the fourth or fifth time, he said, “Maybe we should go easy on that water. You’re not getting much in, and there’s not a lot left in my bottle.”

  She said, “We can get more from the river.”

  “It looked pretty dry to me.”

  She looked up at him, smiling. “Of course it looks dry. Didn’t you see where the kangaroos had been digging? Little holes in the sand? The water’s there all right, under the sand.”

  “There’s water in that river—right there?”

  She nodded. “You’ve only got to dig where the kangaroos have been digging.” She glanced down at the body in her arms. “Poor kid—he didn’t know that.”

  “I guess I didn’t, either.” In this country she must lead and he must follow; what was normal and natural to her was strange and menacing to him. “What would you say we’d better do now?”

  She considered for a minute. “Do you think we could get him to the river, Stan? It’s only about a quarter of a mile.”

  “Why, sure,” he said. “I could carry him that far, or we could put him on a horse.”

  She nodded. “If you could carry him, I think it would be better. I think I’d like to make a camp down by the river, where there’s water. We can’t be more than a mile from the road. If we make a fire, somebody will come out looking for us with a truck sometime during the night, and then we’ll be all right. I’d like you to collect his clothes, though, first of all.”

  She bent to the boy again, and for the first time saw a convulsive movement of the throat. “He swallowed a bit then.”

  He went off and returned after a quarter of an hour with the shirt, trousers, hat, and one boot; he had not been able to find the other boot, and had not wasted time in looking for it. He found that Mollie had unsaddled her horse to get the saddle blanket; she had wrapped the damp sweaty thing around the scorched bo
dy of the boy. “He took a little more water,” she said. “My bottle’s finished now. Could you carry him as far as the river, do you think?”

  He bent and picked up the young man. It was a quarter of a mile to the river bed and the lad weighed more than ten stone; Stanton put him down once for a spell, then picked him up and went on. The sun was very near to the horizon when they got to the bank, Mollie following behind with the two horses.

  She indicated a patch of coarse brown grass. “Put him down there, Stan.” He laid the body down gladly, drenched as he was in sweat and breathing heavily. The girl glanced around; about a hundred yards upstream the river sand was pockmarked with little holes. She pulled the blanket round the boy. “We’ll want a bit of wood for a spade,” she said. “Something to dig with. And the water bottles.”

  There was no shortage of wood: fallen, desiccated branches strewed the ground under the sparse trees, and on the sandpits there was desiccated driftwood piled in heaps. They found a root piece with a wide, flat end, and walked up to the kangaroo diggings. Stanton began to dig down in the sand at a spot picked by the girl as being probably the centre of a pool. Before he had got down a foot the sand was moist; at two feet there was water in the bottom of the hole, and by enlarging it he could fill the water bottles. They drank deeply themselves and refilled the bottles, and went back to the boy.

  The girl stooped, and managed to force a little more water down the throat. They unsaddled the other horse and took the saddle blanket for a pillow; then they had done all they could for the moment. They stood together for a moment looking down on him, both knowing that he was very near to death. “It’s the skin,” she said quietly. “He’s so terribly burnt …”

  He nodded. “I guess we’d better make that fire, while there’s still light enough to see.” He turned to collect wood, and then stopped, struck by a thought. “You got a match?”

  She stared at him. “No—I don’t carry them. Haven’t you got one?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t smoke, hardly ever.”

  “Perhaps he had some.”

  They turned to the boy’s clothes, but there were no matches in trousers, shirt, or belt. “We’ll have to try and make it like the black boys do,” she said.

  “Rubbing two pieces of wood, or somethin’?”

  She nodded. “I’ve never done it, but I’ve seen them doing it often enough. They never carry matches.”

  She made him find a straight, hard piece of branch about two feet long, and whittle it straighter with his knife. In the north Australian climate with great quantities of bone-dry wood upon the ground it is not very difficult to create fire when you know how. She picked a piece of wood that had been rotten and was now desiccated to tinder, and put it on the ground, and made him give her the leather bootlace from one of his boots. Then, kneeling down, she held the straight piece of wood vertically on the tinder, the top end pressed down by a pad of wood between her breasts, wound the bootlace two or three times round it, and began to rotate the drill quickly by pulling on each end of the bootlace in turn. After a few attempts a little smoke began to rise, and then there came a glow of fire in the tinder, and presently Stanton was able to light the corner of an air-letter from his mother in Hazel. After that, the rest was easy.

  They made the fire out in the middle of the river sand, mindful of starting a bush fire if they made it on the bank, and they made it big to serve as a beacon. When that was going they lifted the boy and brought him closer to the fire. They judged him to be conscious now, but the swollen tongue still made it impossible for him to talk. They managed to get a little more water down his throat.

  Presently Stanton said, “You know what? We’re going to be mighty hungry before that truck turns up.”

  She laughed; now that night had fallen their bodies craved the refreshment that they did not need in the heat of the day. “I’m hungry, too,” she said. “We’ve just got to grin and bear it, Stan, unless you like to eat a bit of one of the saddles.”

  “Might be kind of tough. How would it be if I was to ride back to the homestead, ’n bring out a truck?”

  “It wouldn’t be so easy to pick out the track, Stan, in the darkness, without lights. It wouldn’t help at all if you got lost.”

  “I don’t reckon I’d get lost.”

  “I’d rather go myself,” she said.

  They discussed it for a time, sitting together by the fire. They were only twelve or fifteen miles out from Mannahill Station and not more than a mile from the road, but the moon would not rise for some hours and in the starlight the danger of wandering off the track was quite a real one. It was urgent, however, to get the boy into the hands of a doctor as soon as possible, and imperative to get him to the station and in shade before the sun rose again. They decided to wait till midnight and see if a car turned up to look for them; by that time the moon would be up and one or other of them could follow the track back without much danger.

  They sat together in the firelight under the stars, rising every now and then to feed a little more water into the boy, or to put on more wood. Once Stanton said, laughing, “I guess I’ve never been so hungry in my life.”

  She laughed with him. “It’s the way it is here,” she said. “You aren’t a bit hungry in the daytime, but then as soon as it gets cool you’re famished.” She turned to him. “Come on and sit down and let’s talk about something to take our minds off it.”

  “Okay,” he said, settling down beside her. “What’ll we talk about?”

  Her mind turned to the magazines she had been reading and to the many things that she had wanted to ask him about America. She said, “Stan, have you ever done any water-skiing?”

  He glanced at her in surprise; it was a far cry from the Lunatic, and a boy dying of thirst beside them, to Wallowa Lake in the cool mountains, the flying spray, the weaving flight over the surface. “You mean, behind a motor boat?” he said. “I used to do that summers, when I was in college.”

  “I’ve only seen it on the movies, and there was an article about it in one of the magazines,” she said. “Tell me, is it tremendous fun?”

  He smiled. “It’s quite a thrill,” he said. “Don’t people do that here?”

  “It’s not very easy without water,” she informed him. He laughed. “I did see somebody doing it once, at Perth, in the distance. I’d just love to learn to do that.”

  “We do quite a bit of it at home,” he said.

  “On the lakes around Hazel?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How do you get the boat? Can you hire them on the lakes?”

  “I guess you can rent a boat, most places,” he said. “I wouldn’t really know. You want an outboard boat with a pretty big motor, twenty-five horsepower or so. Most people take their own boat along.”

  She wrinkled her brows. “Take their own boat? Have you got a boat like that?”

  “Why, surely,” he said. “Most people in Hazel seem to have a boat in the backyard. On a trailer. Hitch it on behind the car when you go fishing.”

  In the aridity of the Lunatic such a possession was beyond her wildest dreams. In the dream world of the magazines people had motor boats and sat about in them in bathers, and fished from them, and tore over the water with hair flying. She said, “People—ordinary people—really do have boats like that, do they?”

  “Why, yes,” he said. “Folks with families mostly have a boat on a trailer, back home. It’s somethin’ for the kids to do, on a vacation. We always had one. Used to get a new boat every three years or so, ’n trade in the old one.”

  The real world was merging with the dream world of the magazines. “Did you learn water-skiing behind your own boat, then?”

  “Why, certainly,” he said. “Dad got a big motor, ’n taught us all one summer, up at the lake. We kept that motor for a while, but I guess he’s swapped it for a smaller one by now. I don’t remember seeing it around the basement. A small motor’s better for fishing, ’n lighter to handle when you put it o
n the boat.”

  “Tell me,” she said. “How do you water-ski? What do you do?”

  They sat together in the quiet of the outback night before the glowing embers of the fire while he told her. She kept him talking, and he needed little encouragement to keep on talking about the country that he loved so well. He told her about water-skiing and about trout-fishing, about the long horseback trips up into the mountains, about deer-hunting, about the deer that he had shot with Chuck, about his bow and arrows, about the head and antlers that he had not seen, that had now been delivered to his father’s house in Hazel. “Dad wrote that the Bowmen of Hazel elected me a member,” he told her. “That was certainly mighty nice of them.”

  “It sounds marvellous,” she said. “Aren’t you terribly anxious to get back home to see the antlers?”

  He nodded. “I’d kind of like to see them,” he admitted. “It’s too bad that Chuck won’t be there, though.”

  “I know,” she said gently. “When do you think you’ll be back in Hazel, Stan?”

  He was silent for a minute. Then, “It depends upon the well,” he said. “Right now it doesn’t look so good.”

  “You mean, you’re not going to find oil?”

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,” he told her. “We got some gas last week, and we thought maybe there’d be oil there underneath the gas, ’n we got all het up about it though we didn’t say anything. But all we got so far is traces in the shale, traces that show up on a water test or else in the laboratory, but not enough to get excited about. Nuthin’ to come up liquid to the surface.”

  “If there’s no oil there,” she said, “what will you do?”

  “I guess I’d resign my job with Topex,” he said, “’n go home and help my father.”

  “Help your father in the business, like you told me?”

  “Uh-huh. He wants me to help run the auto business, so he can go earth-moving.”

  Sitting in the quiet night with her, he told her all about it again. “That way I might be home around July,” he said. “I’d kind of like to do that, go home and live in Hazel. I guess I’ve had my fill of hot countries, in the oil business.”