Bill took the axe and made a V gap in the saw cut. He thrust the broad end of an iron wedge in the opening and drove it home with ringing blows of the sledge hammer. The breath burst from him in grunts at each impact. The wedge went in with little jerks.
‘Drive him well home,’ said Blue. ‘We don’t want it falling on our heads when we are getting down. I know a bloke that was killed that way.’
Bill drove another two wedges into different sections of the cut, then returned to his place at the end of the saw.
‘I hope my first peg doesn’t go with the tree,’ said Blue. ‘Sometimes these leaning cows go with a snap. You don’t have time to do anything. If he splits to the peg hole I’ll land on my backside.’ He looked down at the ground below him. ‘I hate skidding off spurs.’
‘Hurry up,’ said Bill. ‘Here comes the tractor.’
A faint roar of sound came up from the valley. It was not a consistent sound but waxed and waned in a swinging rhythm. Its clattering echo fled up gullies and ricochetted from the side of ridges until it was impossible to tell where the sound originated.
It suddenly faded into a faint clatter as the revolving treads moved the tractor slowly into the thick scrub at the foot of Mount Campbell.
‘We’re nearly there,’ said Blue sawing with the fresh vigour that comes when the task is almost done. ‘A few more will do the trick.’
The mountain ash had become strangely still. The leaves were motionless. The gentle swaying of the branches had ceased. A silence deeper than the absence of sound seemed to hover around its mighty head. A tenseness flowed from it, silencing the birds and imbuing the surrounding trees with a quality of grief.
No sound but the tearing of the saw—to and fro, to and fro. . . .
Suddenly, high above them, the topmost leaves of the tree began an agitated fluttering. Each leaf shook in panic as convulsive tremors shot up the limbs.
A series of faint cracks and reports came from the tree’s centre.
The men moved swiftly. Bill lowered himself to a peg beneath him and dropped to the ground. Blue stood erect on the platform and raised a curved hand to the side of his mouth.
‘Timb-er-r-r-r.’
His call echoed across the gully and down the track. It faded on a sad intonation that drifted through the trees like the spirit of sound.
He followed Bill to the ground and stood back with him, looking aloft at the head swaying slowly over as if the tree were about to bow.
A loud report came from the cracking butt. The head gathered speed.
The tearing trunk groaned as the rushing limbs, sweeping earthwards, hurtled through the air with a swishing scream.
As the head met the crown of other trees, limbs smashed with reports like artillery. The reports mingled into a roar as black-wood and wattle snapped and collapsed beneath the blow. Limbs and bark flew like thrown stones.
The roar rose to an immense thunder and ended in a dull boom as the trunk hurled itself into the soft soil.
The earth trembled and was still. Silence snapped into being like a presence. Struck trees swayed drunkenly. Dry leaves fluttered down, rocking and twisting as they fell.
The fallen trunk lay beneath a covering of leaves, strips of bark and dry twigs that, torn from other trees, had followed it to the ground. A sloped tree-fern projected from beneath its rounded side.
The severed end lay thirty feet from the butt. It showed the bevel top of the scarf which dropped in a step behind the line of daggered splinters to the smooth face of the saw cut, edged with three dark blue patches where the wedges had bruised the wood.
‘There he lies,’ said Bill suddenly angry. ‘Most of him will rot, but that’s got nothing to do with you or me. We’re here to slaughter them.’
‘What’s biting you?’ asked Blue, grinning.
‘My grandmother loves trees,’ said Bill in a change of thought.
‘You’re always quoting your bloody grandmother,’ said Blue.
‘She is a fine woman.’
‘Too right, she is! She’s a sneezer if ever there was one.’
They turned to watch the tractor nose its way into the open space like some enormous wombat foraging for food. The roar of its approach shattered against the near trees and spread through the bush in tatters of sound.
Behind it lurched the bobtail, a two-wheeled conveyance supporting a bull wheel for use in hauling logs.
Steve Turner, the swampie, walked ahead of the tractor. He stopped beside the head log while it pivoted slowly round and came to rest beside him.
The roar of its engine died to a muffled throbbing. It spat puffs of fumes from its exhaust.
The driver climbed down and stretched himself.
Paddy Dwyer was a short man with bowed legs. His blue, unclouded eyes sat oddly in a face lined by misty years spent knocking down cheques. (‘The longest bender I ever had was eight months. It took me three years to get over the shakes it gave me.’)
His hair untouched by any brush grew straight from his scalp. His appearance had once led Blue to remark, ‘Pat you on the head, Paddy, and a bloke’d be a week pulling out the splinters.’
He hailed Blue now, his face crinkled with a quick grin.
‘How’s the best lead-swinger in the bush?’
‘Strike me if it’s not Lord Salisbury himself!’ exclaimed Blue, walking over and seating himself on the log. ‘The bloke that starts his car at nine and don’t come in till eleven.’
‘I don’t have to start earlier,’ said Paddy, helping Steve to drag the cable from the winch at the back of the tractor. ‘You blokes can’t keep the logs up to me.’
‘We’ll have three beauts for you after lunch,’ said Blue.
‘What’s the time now, Paddy?’ asked Bill.
‘About eleven.’
‘It’s time to get out,’ muttered Steve, driving the dogs into the logs with vicious blows.
‘Steve’s a grape on everything,’ explained Paddy.
‘There’s a big fire working up behind Barret’s and he reckons we’ll roast if a north wind comes up.’
Blue looked disturbed. ‘How far behind Barret’s?’
‘About four miles. It’s at the foot of Mount Gold. It won’t do any harm out there. It’s creeping back into the Crown Lands.’
‘No!’ said Blue. ‘It won’t do any harm, eh! Let me tell you, Paddy Dwyer, any fire’s a bad fire. It was a fire that “won’t do any harm” that burnt thirty-two of us in ’26.’
Steve straightened himself. ‘That’s what I’ve been telling him. I was through the ’26 fires. This fire behind Barret’s is only a scrub fire, but a north wind would whip it into a crown fire in two ups and where would we be then?’
‘In the pub at Tandaluk,’ said Paddy.
‘In the ’26 fires,’ said Blue looking ahead of him through the trees, ‘I saw Cocky McKinney squeal himself to death in the sawdust twenty yards from me and I couldn’t do nothing because I was burning myself.’
‘Where was that at?’ asked Steve.
‘Trembo’s.’
‘I was at Warren’s and they had two dug-outs for thirty of us. Twenty of us came through, but old Joe, the engine driver, had his eyes cooked in their sockets.’
‘I’ve met him,’ said Blue.
‘He loved the bush, old Joe,’ reflected Steve.
‘He was like Bill here, only he was old,’ said Blue.
‘I saw him a month ago,’ said Steve, ‘and he says to me then, he says, “The bush has no beauty for me now, Steve.” That’s what he said.’
‘I’ve never seen a crown fire,’ said Bill.
‘Those that see them hardly ever live to tell about them,’ said Blue, turning to look across the valley.
The Wombat Ranges, convoluted with the crowded heads of trees, reared to a ridge clean cut from the lighter blue of the higher range. And behind this, line upon line of reinforcements, powdered with the palest of blues, were pasted on the distant sky like the silhouette of arrested waves.
But the valley had changed. The visitation of some pale spirit had softened its outlines. The squat mill lay closer to the earth. The smoke from its stack no longer formed a contrast to the unrelated air but merged its pale outlines with a kindred presence.
The pungent breath of burning eucalypts had crept in and filled the hollow between the mountains. There were no rolling movements of visible smoke. It came in furtiviness. It brought with it a strange disquiet, a restlessness.
It brought a fear-smell—the smell of a bushfire.
‘Look,’ said Blue, pointing. ‘The breath of the bastard.’
‘The month of the burning heat,’ murmured Steve. ‘February—the bushfire month. Whenever I smell one I go cold.’
‘You two blokes give me the dry horrors,’ said Paddy gloomily. ‘If I was holding right I’ll roll up and snatch it.’
‘Snatch it because of a fire!’ said Blue, and laughed ironically. ‘We talk like that; we always talk like that, but when she comes you’ll find us four silly cows standin’ round waiting to save the mill for the boss.’
‘Why are we like that?’ asked Bill wonderingly. ‘Why are we?’
‘It’s a hang-over from the depression,’ said Blue. ‘We worked so long under fear of the job, we lost our guts. Now when they say, “Stop in and fight it,” we stop in and fight it, and after the mill has melted together the doctor comes and lifts our singlet and all our hide comes with it.’
‘That’s what happened to you, isn’t it, Blue?’ asked Steve.
‘Yes.’
‘Let them have a look at your back,’ said Bill. Blue pulled his flannel over his head and turned so that the three men could see his back. They stood in silence looking at it.
As the dry skin on new paint slides and wrinkles at a thumb thrust, so had the skin on his back slipped over the weeping flesh when the fire had gone.
Pale skin, glossy and bereft of pores, rose to soft ridges and wrinkles.
Faint lines of tension converged on points of puckered flesh. Beneath this covering his muscles slipped and moved untouched.
‘I felt it drying out and wrinkling like a green gum leaf on coals,’ said Blue, ‘and not a flame touched me.’
‘Now you know why I leave my wife and kids in Melbourne,’ said Steve.
‘And now you know why I wear a flannel,’ said Blue. ‘Blokes that wear singlets always burn. You’ve got a chance with a flannel.’
He slipped it on once more.
‘I’m missing the best years of my kids’ lives,’ complained Steve.
‘If the mill built dug-outs you could have them up here with you,’ said Bill.
‘If. . .’ said Steve.
‘Are those dogs right?’ asked Paddy, climbing on to the tractor.
‘Wait till I put joggles in for the legs.’
Steve picked up his axe and cut two notches, one on each side of the log end. He slipped the wire ropes attached to the dogs into these grooves, then yelled, ‘Righto!’
The engine roared, the cable tightened. There was a moment’s strain, then the dogs flew out above the writhing cable.
‘They’re a bit tight when the dogs fly out of them,’ said Blue.
Steve hammered them home a second time. ‘How about sniggin’ him up with a winch?’
The winch whined as it took the strain. Silver dust of steel fell from the cable where it ground into the bull wheel.
The log grunted, rumbled as it moved to the pull of the winch. It slid over its curved bed of crushed fern and bark, slowly raising its tethered end to the bull wheel on the bobtail. The winch’s cable drum screeched in protest, then held the weight in silence.
‘Let her go,’ said Steve.
The tractor roared forward, then, the treads failing to grip, it dug into the ground like an echidna, piling heaps of soil at the rear of its steel tracks. Granite stones, bared by the revolutions, smoked as the steel plates skidded, then gripped on their surface.
The log lurched forward, one end held high above the ground, the tail swaying and rolling from side to side like a fish fighting against a hook.
But its movements were slow as though it were tired. It lumbered heavily, rolling against tree-ferns that shook their green crowns frantically.
Dead saplings snapped and crashed at its impact. It gouged a groove for itself in the ground and slid over littered bark with a scraping hiss.
The tractor stormed ahead, filling the bush with its clamour.
‘See how the log toms along,’ said Blue, watching it.
‘Come on,’ said Bill. ‘We’ve got to log this tree yet.’
They returned to the fallen tree and marked the limbless section of the trunk into sections for cross-cutting into logs.
‘There’s a twelve, a fourteen, an eighteen, a twenty-eight and a twenty,’ said Blue placing the measuring stick on the ground. ‘What does that make?’
Bill took the stub of a pencil from his pocket and wrote figures on a smooth piece of bark.
‘A hundred and sixteen,’ he said.
‘He’s a good stick,’ said Blue.
They cut a ring of bark from around the trunk and, standing one each side of the fallen tree, they drew the long saw across the peeled section.
‘Anyway, he hasn’t bridged,’ said Bill, falling into a rhythmic swing. ‘We won’t have to saw him upwards.’
The saw snarled through the sap wood, then changed its note to a higher key. White sawdust gave way to that of a darker colour. The two men, joined by the saw, moved with the even drive of a machine.
‘I can’t help thinking about your back,’ said Bill. ‘You’d’ve thought you’d’ve gone mad being burnt like that.’
‘You don’t feel it,’ said Blue. ‘You’re too busy trying to live. It’s afterwards you feel it. A crown fire only takes about ten minutes to go over, you know, and in that ten minutes you think of nothing but breathing.’
‘I always thought bushfires were the same,’ said Bill.
Blue stopped sawing and looked at him across the log.
‘Listen. There’s three kinds of bushfires. One just creeps along in a calm. It burns leaves and that on the floor of the bush. It’s easy to belt out. This one behind Barret’s is a scrub fire. It can travel at a fair bat, but it stops below the heads of the trees. But say it comes out hellishun hot and a north wind comes up. The scrub fire gets going then. It climbs up the messmate bark and sets off on its own. It travels in the tops of the trees.
‘It makes a wind that’d blow you flat. Underneath the scrub fire races to keep up. Flames go ahead flappin’ like sheets. They’re hundreds of feet high. It’s not only the bloody trees that are burning, it’s the air.
‘See this mountain here,’ Blue pointed to the slope rising behind him. ‘A crown fire’d leap that like a kangaroo. It jumps a gully like I’d jump a gutter. Little fires start up miles ahead of it. Then they join, and the crown fire swallows the lot in a bloody roar that’s in your ears for hours afterwards.
‘Before it hits you a black-out comes and you can’t see your hand in front of you. The smoke’s that bad you don’t know where the little fires are starting. They bust into flame at your feet. And all this before the fire reaches you. God Almighty! you don’t know what to do.
‘Blokes that have never been through a crown fire always say, “Why don’t you get out into an open space?” “Why don’t you lie in a creek?” Little creeks boil in a crown fire, and there’s no open space in this bush big enough to save you. People don’t seem to think that air can burn. Well, I’ve seen it and, by cripes, I’ll see it again if a north wind and a hot day gets that fire going.’