A tremendous calm settled on Luke in his solitude. Bear disappeared each evening with the tigers, but, in this remote place, Luke didn’t fear for their safety. Men and his flocks were a world away.
Each day, Luke and Bear explored the valley’s extensive limestone cave system. There were more hand stencils to be found on the rock walls. Daniel said this art was many thousands of years old. A recurring image of a pair of hands showed the outline of an elegant, long-fingered right hand, and only the stubs of fingers on the left. Luke amused himself by inventing theories to explain this. In other caves he discovered engraved symbols, lines of dots, carved domes, spirals and circles.
Luke carefully recorded and mapped each find, as Daniel had asked him to. His favourite carvings were of animal tracks, particularly those of emus. He’d heard stories of this unusual flightless bird, hunted to extinction only fifty years earlier. Apparently it stood as high as a man’s shoulder. Daniel said its even-larger cousin still survived in numbers on the mainland. One day he’d take Belle to see them.
It was an unseasonably warm winter. At night, the Southern Cross blazed, brightest of the countless stars in the sky. Each day dawned more brilliant than the last. Lorikeet, magpie and butcherbird song beaded the fragrant air. Emerald rosellas flashed like flying jewels through the trees, and, at twilight, lazy flights of black cockatoos came to roost in the sheltered valley. Days melded into each other. Luke scratched notches in the wall of his home cave to mark the time. He kept a daily journal, so he could share every detail of his trip with Belle when he went home.
It became easy to imagine that he and Belle might have a future, easy to imagine that one day she’d be his wife. In this grand isolation, far from the constraints and conventions of civilisation, anything seemed possible. This wasn’t like those lonely days back at Clarry’s little hut. Things were different now. He belonged.
Soon he’d return to Belle and the complications their love inevitably faced. But, for now, Luke was content to just exist – exist with the animals, exist free from guilt, exist outside of the rules. Some invisible pressure lifted, allowing an exquisite appreciation of the teeming life around him. Occasionally, at dawn, he hunted with the pack, feeling at one with all creation. Luke would dearly miss this place.
Then at dusk one night, while he cooked a stew with the last night’s wallaby and some onions from his dwindling rations, he heard the distinct call of a tiger. Not one of his. Bear and the cubs still lounged in the cave, relaxing ahead of the night’s hunt. They pricked their ears, then stole off into the twilight. Luke’s skin tingled with excitement. This was what he and Daniel had hoped for – the cubs weren’t alone in the valley.
Next morning, Luke scoured the nearby forest trails with a tracker’s practised eye. In mud, beside a shallow upstream pool, lay the distinct tracks of a thylacine, too large to belong to the cubs. He examined the prints, memorising their appearance and location, followed them for a while, then lost them on a rocky riverbank.
‘Well, mate,’ he said to Bear, who seemed keen to follow the trail. ‘It’s up to you now.’
The dog gambolled round and round his master, pretending to pounce. Then off he went, nose to ground, Luke close behind. They travelled for almost an hour, following the dark, swift-running stream. As the day warmed up, they sometimes stopped to play in the water. Bear, with the odd, webbed feet of the Newfoundland, was a strong, enthusiastic swimmer. Luke enjoyed holding onto his collar and being towed around the deep pools that punctuated the stream’s course.
After one such swim, Luke lay back lazily in the winter sun, on clean, white river sand. Something jabbed him in the back. He sat up. There, almost buried, was a rusty gold-panning dish. Luke picked it up in disbelief. Daniel was wrong; others knew about the valley. How long might the pan have lain there? No more than a couple of years, by the look of it.
Luke re-examined everything he knew of the caves in light of this find, wondering if he’d missed something – signs of a fire or a camp. This intrusion from the outside world shattered his perfect peace. He was suddenly mindful that he didn’t even have his rifle with him, so foolishly complacent had he become. Abandoning the tiger’s trail, he hurried back home, keenly aware the cubs slept there unprotected.
Sleep would not come that night, although drowsy stars blinked in the sky and winds swirled in lazy play about the cliffs. The moon rose over timber-crested escarpments, coating everything in silver, and a terrible nostalgia overcame him. Thoughts of his mother and sister. Perhaps, right now, they gazed up at that same moon. Thoughts of his father, so hard-working and kind. Dead because of him. Their old rooster. Did he still crow on moonlit nights like this? But that was silly. That cock would be dead, too, the house and coop owned by strangers. His memories of home were trapped in time, frozen in childhood. Perhaps writing his journal might distract him from this terrible homesickness. Luke took it out by the falls. The bright sky was mirrored in the water’s polished surface, magnifying the moonshine, turning night to day.
He tried to write, but couldn’t concentrate. That voice, the murmuring voice of the waterfall, sounded a different note this evening – one of melancholy sweetness. The song of the falls was always in his ears, day and night. He heard it when he ate, when he woke, when he slept, when he dreamed . . . and now it somehow became Belle’s voice, urging him home to Binburra.
From far down the valley, Bear’s howl echoed, long and mournful, into the empty pit of the sky. Luke put down his journal and dived in the freezing water, swimming lengths of the glassy pool until his restless limbs trembled with fatigue. Then, his nervous energy spent, he returned to camp. Still restless, still uneasy.
He resigned himself to a wakeful night, waiting for morning to outline the cave entrance against the brightening bush. It was only when Bear and the tigers returned safely from the hunt that Luke allowed himself to sleep, rifle cocked and ready at his side.