Luke wiled away his days in the wilderness, pressing the rusty gold-panning tin into service. Angus had taught him the technique. Scoop up some earth, hold the dish on a slant and swirl it in the creek. Water carried away light grains of sand. Heavier gold particles sank to the bottom. He soon had a measurable quantity of bright gold dust in a little pouch, together with a few tiny nuggets.
Now and then, the young tigers accompanied Luke up the river on his expeditions. Through the calm, early stillness, scattering after fish in the shallows and playing hide-and-seek with Bear. As the sun rose higher, a yawning Mindi and Bindi always shook themselves dry and retreated to their cave for sleep.
Sometimes King stayed on longer, intent on securing a plump spotted trout for breakfast. One such morning, Luke was fossicking where the stream flowed close to the cliff-face. Baffled by the quicksilver swiftness of his prey, King splashed out of the stream in disgust, flinging himself down in the entrance of an arching cave.
‘I reckon he’s got the right idea, eh, Bear?’
Luke flopped down beside the grumpy tiger. He poked King in the ribs, hoping to provoke a play fight, one of their favourite games. King gave an impatient growl and raised himself, kangaroo-like, on hind legs. His ears were cocked beyond Luke to the rocks behind. Without warning, King launched himself right over Luke, landing on a boulder and flushing out a spotted quoll hiding behind it.
The quoll fled, bounding up the wall and shooting into a granite fissure above Luke’s head. King rocketed after it, slamming into the narrow space with such force that his head and forequarters became firmly wedged in the gap. He let out a series of piercing cries, while his hind legs scrabbled vainly for purchase on the smooth stone wall.
Luke stopped laughing and tried to help. Grasping King’s flailing back legs, he tugged with increasing force. This produced a fresh chorus of yelping, but the tiger remained stuck fast. Luke picked up a sharp stone and painstakingly chipped away at the ledge, gradually widening the gap. Eventually he managed to extract the tiger. King licked his bruises for a while in an embarrassed sort of way, touched noses with Bear and slunk off home.
Luke stood on his toes and peered into the crumbling breach in the wall, hoping to spot the quoll. Something half-hidden in the gloom caught his eye. An odd shape with contours too soft to belong to the rocky hollow. Luke reached in. His fingers closed on a coarse hessian sack. Another lay behind it. He dragged the bags from their hiding place: one large and weighty, one small and light, both coated in inches of dust.
Luke moved out into daylight and opened the larger bag. He couldn’t believe his eyes. A treasure trove of coins and gold nuggets, some as big as hen’s eggs. Luke opened the second sack. Bundles of pound notes spilled to the ground. Stunned, he carefully replaced the money and fastened both sacks with their frayed ties. Angus’s words came to him: Clarry had a fortune hidden away somewhere . . . Stashed in the bush, he told me.
A sudden fear of being observed made him raise his eyes to the cliffs. He saw nothing but their rugged outline against the sky, heard nothing but the desolate cawing of crows.
Luke put the bags in his swag and whistled to Bear. As he turned to go, a thought struck him. What if there were more? He returned to the cave and inspected it more thoroughly. Right at the back, where it was hard to see, he found pick-axe marks in the walls. He narrowed his eyes and poured a little water from his flask onto the scored rock, rubbed the moist surface with his sleeve. A vein of gold gleamed in the faint light.
Back at the entrance, Luke made a makeshift footstool of rocks, which allowed him to get a better look inside the hollow. Another bag lay in a shadowy nook. He pulled it out and looked inside.
What he found made him spring back in alarm. Dynamite, perhaps ten sticks. And blasting caps too. Old explosives and detonators could be highly unstable and blow up at the slightest disturbance. Judging from the dust, this bag must have lain hidden in the rock for years. With the careless way he’d hauled it out, he was lucky not to have been blown to kingdom come.
Luke inspected the dynamite. A crystalline substance coated the sticks – nitroglycerine leached out over time. Some of it had pooled and hardened in the bottom of the bag. With exaggerated care, Luke lifted the sack, positioning it as safely as he could at the back of the cave. Then he surrounded it with a protective ring of rocks. The last thing he wanted was for some unfortunate animal, particularly one of his tigers, to inadvertently trigger an explosion.
Luke picked up his swag and headed back to the home cave. A kaleidoscope of possibilities whirled through his mind. He was rich, very rich, for surely it was no crime to take a dead man’s gold. Rich enough to do whatever he wanted. Rich enough to marry Belle. Their wild dream of a future together would come true after all. For a short, painful moment, he wished Angus were alive to share this good fortune. He could have bought Molly a dozen shops.
Luke couldn’t stop thinking about Clarry, while walking the same track he’d walked. The old bloke had lived like a hermit, when he could have led a privileged life in Hobart or anywhere else for that matter. What could drive a man to embrace that sort of deliberate isolation? Luke reflected on his own circumstances. If not for Belle and Daniel, he might have ended up the same way.
Luke looked at his watch. Two-thirty in the afternoon. He could be gone by three, with hours of light left. What day was it? He’d lost track. He went to the carved notches on the wall that served as his calendar. Wednesday. With luck, he’d be home by Saturday night. A few days early, maybe, but what difference could a few days possibly make?