I perched on the holding yard fence, unable to sleep. Blue Dreamer filled my thoughts. I wished it had been Aria instead. No! That wasn’t true. In the big private mental game of truth, dare or double dare, the truth was: I was jealous of Aria.
Wherever she went boys swooned. I was crap at the complicated dating dance. I couldn’t flirt like she did. I didn’t bat my eyelashes and lean forward to show my cleavage and do that trilling little laugh thing. I was blunt and honest. I tried to hide my breasts and my laugh was deep and boom ing like Gran’s. I couldn’t be bothered making stupid small talk. I wanted things to be real. I was probably going to become one of those crusty old CWA spinster sisters doomed to a life of baking scones and endless knitting for the Flying Doctor charity drives, while Aria mowed through a string of rich husbands.
Aria’s stricken expression just before I’d taken off on Blue Dreamer flashed into my mind.
My best friend, my only real friend at St Anne’s, had flown all the way from Perth to spend her holidays helping me out on the muster. Aria could have chosen to do anything else – she could have partied with friends, bought up half a shopping mall, headed down to her father’s winery at Margaret River. But she’d chosen to be with me. And instead of appreciating it, all I could do was find fault with her. Her cooking was crap. She had no idea how to calm an animal. She didn’t have a sense of duty and she didn’t seem to care. She didn’t seem to realise what was at stake. This was my life, my family’s livelihood. Not a game. She was a show pony, prissying and prancing across my home territory. And that was the whole point: it was my show. I was running the show – and she was ruining it.
‘You’re too hard on her,’ Dan said, coming up beside me silently.
How did he do that? ‘So you think I’m a cow, too? Like Jonathan does?’
He took off his Stetson and fiddled with the beaten-up brim. ‘I’m not saying that. She’s never been on a muster before. We can only be and do what we know. She was trying.’
‘Trying? Trying isn’t good enough! We’ve just lost a horse thanks to her carelessness. Not just any horse,’ I choked out. ‘My horse.’ I stalked back to the camp.
Elise and Franz seemed unfazed by the prospect of being left in the middle of nowhere, a day’s hard riding from the homestead. I wondered if it was because they were from another country. Damien had once told me that when he was travelling it seemed like the dangerous animals in other countries weren’t real. He’d actually followed bear tracks in Canada and gone searching for Komodo dragons in Indonesia. That was his theory about why so many croc attacks involved foreign tourists. Either that or they couldn’t read the English warning signs.
As dawn broke, I took Magic from the string and fought back another bout of tears as I fitted him with Blue Dreamer’s saddle. Magic was longer and rangier than Blue Dreamer and I had to tighten the girth.
‘Ready?’ I asked Dan, once he’d mounted Sandman.
He nodded.
If Aria had been riding Blue Dreamer he would have eventually taken her back to the homestead. But Blue Dreamer was dead and Aria had ridden off on Bella, an unpredictable horse. ‘Do you think she went towards the homestead?’ I suggested, not really having a clue. It wasn’t as if there was a defined riding track, and the ground was so stony there were no visible hoof prints.
Dan shook his head. ‘I think she went north.’
The exact opposite direction.
He pointed to a branch of grevillea that had been partly broken from the bush. Sap seeped from the crack. I followed him along through the rocky country, scraping past acacias, intrigued whenever Dan halted Sandman and slid off to examine the ground, or point out a snapped twig or a bent branch or some kinked spear grass. At any other time this would have been my fantasy come true – riding through the wild country, gilded with honeyed light, with a beautiful boy who could read the land. But it was marred by the ache of losing Blue Dreamer and the thrumming fear that Aria was out here alone. What if we couldn’t find her? It happened out here. People vanished.
That was one of the reasons I’d found it so difficult to settle into St Anne’s. Not only was I used to the freedom of wild, open spaces, I was used to wild people. People who didn’t legislate against sandbars on the beach, or expect that issuing a certificate, or insuring everything, would keep them safe from nature. Out here we lived with nature. We were nature. Bad things happened. Calves were torn apart by dingoes. Crocs ate the occasional dozy cow. The summer storms threw down lightning and flooded the plains. If you didn’t drink enough water you could die. If you went swimming in the wrong waterhole you could die. If you got caught in a flash flood you could die. If you got lost you could die.
Life in the Kimberley was dangerous. But that was also its appeal. There’s something totally real, adrenaline-filled and completely satisfying about tackling a rogue bull and landing it; about pitting yourself against nature and her dangers. Anything could happen – snakes in the swag, feral pigs, crazed bulls on the loose, bushfires raging in the scrub. Red dirt and red blood. Blue sky and white trees. Emerald water and ochre cliffs. It was all so blaringly, vividly real. It made life in the city seem tired and grey. Tame. Safe.
Aria must have ridden hard because we were in the saddle all day, tracking her with careful slowness. As the sun began to sink, the earth turned rose-gold then pink. A thin turquoise line framed the horizon as the sun’s rays fanned across the blue-green sky.
‘Think we’d better stop,’ Dan said. ‘Set up camp.’
I shifted in my saddle. ‘But Aria . . . She’s all alone.’
‘Can’t see her tracks in the dark and we can’t risk the horses. We’ve already lost one.’
‘Right.’ I rubbed Magic’s neck and felt the tears well again. ‘At least let’s aim for the escarpment,’ I said. ‘It’s not far and if we light a fire on the edge, maybe Aria will see it.’
It was painstaking getting the horses up along the back of the escarpment. The ground rose in a gentle undulation, twisting past boulders and up narrow ravines until we came to the butte at the top. Steep cliffs fell below, forming one wall of Lizard Gorge. The country stretched out below like an enormous basin, like the sea it once was.
‘She must still be on this side.’ I gazed down into a twist of jet-blackness below. ‘The river’s full of crocs. It’s impassable even in the winter, right up to Skinner’s bridge.’
‘How far along is that?’ Dan asked.
I frowned, trying to estimate the distance between our camp and Skinner’s. It wasn’t a real bridge – just a heap of rocks the stockmen had piled up to make the river passable in the dry. Years ago, Gator Pearson and his men could ride the horses straight through the river. But that was when croc hunters could still fetch a bounty for croc pelts and before crocodiles were declared an endangered species and protected by National Parks and Wildlife. Since then, the croc population had boomed.
‘A good two days ride,’ I said.
While Dan gathered sticks and scrubby branches from the sparse, wind-stunted bushes, I spread out my swag and unpacked our supplies – a couple of instant cup-a-soups and a fistful of dried apples.
Dan lit the fire close to the edge of the cliff then cast his eyes over the meagre meal I’d laid out on the enamel plates. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said.
Twenty minutes later, just as I was getting nervous, he reappeared with his hands behind his back. He stretched his right towards me. In his palm was a beautiful scarlet flower. ‘For your hat.’
I took it, touched. It was tradition out here to tuck a knick-knack into your hatband. Dan had his flag. Now I had a Kimberley rose.
He thrust out his other hand.
I backed away. ‘What the . . . ?’
‘Olive python,’ he announced. ‘Great tucker.’
I shook my head, but smiled. ‘If you say so.’
When he declared the snake cooked, I tentatively took a bite. It actually tasted okay, sort of like croc: a mix of chicken and fish. The texture was tough too, because the snake lived in tough country.
We were on top of an escarpment in the middle of nowhere and Dan was right at home. If I didn’t have instant soup would I starve? Dan had followed Aria’s barely visible trail. For him there must be no such word as, lost. He could probably survive wherever he was. He knew where to find food, how to build a fire, where to find shelter.
‘Who taught you to track?’ I asked.
Dan finished swallowing a mouthful of snake. ‘My old man. He was a beauty for hunting.’
‘But you said your dad was a white guy,’ I blurted.
Dan frowned. ‘What’s that meant to mean?’
‘I thought you got all these skills from . . . from being Aboriginal.’
He shrugged. ‘Everyone’s got something to teach us.’
I gestured beyond the cosy halo of the firelight into the vast blackness stretching in every direction. ‘You belong. You really know how to survive here. Not just survive – live.’
‘My dad taught me to pay attention. My grandmother taught me how to connect. If you pay attention and connect, you belong.’
This time, as he fixed me with those beautiful gold-flecked eyes, I stared back. I felt as if I was falling, deeper and deeper, into a world that had no words. And all the time there were stars whirling around me, sweeping me up in one inevitable spiral.
Heat fanned through my body, but it wasn’t from the fire. I wasn’t going to retreat. This time, I’d take the lead. I stood in slow motion, my legs shaking, and bridged the three paces around the campfire to sit beside him. It felt as if I had walked a mile.
My fingers crept to his sharp jaw. It was smooth. His lips were strong, full, soft as a velvet muzzle. I remembered what he’d said about horses one time to Aria. ‘You have to get the horse to trust you. You can’t be frightened. You need to get it to the stage where you can touch all of its body, walk under its belly, lift its feet, breathe its breath . . . You have to let it come over to you.’
I pressed my lips to his.
The kiss was warm and salty.
We laid back on the swag and pressed our long lean bodies together. Tingles raced up and down my spine. I wanted to open myself up for him. I wanted to breathe him in.
The Milky Way shone overhead. There were no lights below. No electricity wires, or cars, or buildings. We were the only two people in the world. I closed my eyes. Dan kissed my eyelids. ‘Your tears have stars in them,’ he said.