It was very quiet and lonely on Wytaliba, all day, before the blacks carried the wooden box Mumae had made Joey Koonarra put together for her, and laid it in the grave Hugh and Joey dug under a tall white-barked creek gum.
Very frail and light his mother’s body felt as Hughie lifted it into the rough wooden box still smelling of redgum.
There had been wailing in the uloo at dawn. Hugh gathered all the flowers he could find, punti and little green bird-flowers, with trails of Nor’-West creeper and its red and yellow lanterns, to spread over the box, when he had nailed down the lid.
Cockatoos, scattered snow-white on the ground, flew off with a rustle of stiff silken wings as Hugh, Bandogera, Meenie and Joey Koonarra carried their burden towards the creek gum and the place they had prepared for it.
After the box was lowered, Hugh shovelled red earth and stones over his mother. The blacks wailed and howled, Meenie and Bandogera cutting themselves with sharp stones, as though it were one of their own people who had died.
Hugh sent the blacks away, and stayed himself under the tree. He lay there a long time stretched out on the sand. People in the uloo watched him, but were afraid to go near. Then towards sunset Hugh got up and walked across to the house. He called Joey, Meenie and Bandogera, handed out stores, and told them to keep the dogs away from his mother’s grave. Doors banged; keys were turned in flour and sugar bins.
Then Hugh rode out, and away along the track back to the To-Morrow where Warieda, Chitali, Coonardoo, Bardi, and the rest of the boys were mustering. There was no need to tell them what had happened.
In the morning before dawn a fierce wailing went up. Hughie listened. Coonardoo was wailing for his mother, he knew; and all day, as he rode, the sorrow of her dark eyes followed him. At night whenever he awakened Hugh heard Coonardoo crying, sobbing and beating her breast.
Warieda’s fire glowed red through the darkness, at a little distance from where Hugh himself lay, watching the dead branches of his fire smoulder, and fall into ashes.
“Coonardoo,” he called, when it was morning and the camp astir again.
She came to him. Hugh had barely spoken to anyone. Warieda and Chitali watched him, staring away into distances of the hills, forgetting to eat, starting suddenly and riding off as if to escape some torturing thought. Coonardoo went to him. She hung her head. Thin, and sorrowful as Hugh, Coonardoo looked as she stood there before him. Hughie went to her, parted the shirt over her breast, saw the raw red gashes sharp stones had cut in her brown skin.
“You know Mumae sick long time?”
“Eeh-mm.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Mumae say not.”
“If you had told me,” Hugh said harshly, “we might have saved her. She might have been here now.”
He knew he was unjust; that Coonardoo had done as she was told. It gave him some satisfaction to see her shrink away as though he had kicked her. He turned his back on her, picked up his saddle and went over to the well where the boys were watering the horses, saddled Demeter, the mare Warieda had brought in for him, and telling the boys to meet at Yallerang clay-pan that afternoon, rode off into the ranges.
Next day, cut off from the rest of the men, while they were scouring the shelving hill-sides for strayed cattle, Hugh rode up to Coonardoo as she went drooping over her horse, scarcely looking in his direction.
She was like his own soul riding there, dark, passionate and childlike. In all this wide empty world Coonardoo was the only living thing he could speak to, Hugh knew; the only creature who understood what he was feeling, and was feeling for him. Yet he was afraid of her, resented a secret understanding between them.
But Coonardoo the playmate — Coonardoo whom he had seen long ago under the shower, young and slender, her lithe brown body, wet and gleaming, brown eyes laughing at him, her hair, wavy and sun-burnished, lying in wet streaks about her head. Coonardoo? Why should he hurt her by a harsh, indifferent manner he showed no one else?
It had been funny to find her one of Warieda’s women with a kid of her own when he came home from school. But sentimental about a gin Hugh had promised himself never to be. His regard for Coonardoo was a relic of their old playmateship, his admiration of her horsemanship. Every finer, less reasonable instinct he had stamped on, kicked out of his consciousness.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked roughly as he came up to her, leaning against her horse. “Warieda beat you?”
“Wiah.” She looked at him with deep, beautiful eyes.
“Is it — about Mumae?”
The gesture and movement of her head reproached Hugh.
As if he had forgotten how to sleep, he lay by the side of his camp-fire, throwing wood on, watching the stars, listening to the horses feeding with tinkle of hobbles out over the plains; or wandered about restlessly at night.
The blacks exclaimed among themselves at his worn, wretched expression, his distraught gaze. Hugh was liable to fits of anger, unfathomable dejection. There was no pleasing him. He became gaunt, almost unrecognizable under the rough beard and in the filthy clothes he was wearing.
But wherever he wandered at night, a slight dark shadow streaked after him. Wherever Hugh went, Coonardoo followed, terrified though she was in the darkness, of the gliding death which might strike her feet at any moment; of the narlu, flapping from tree to tree and fixing her with ghost eyes. But Coonardoo was more afraid of what might happen to Youie while he roamed about at night only half conscious of what he was doing.
Hugh wore her and himself out. The blacks were becoming afraid of him; that he was bewitched. “Baba” they cried to themselves when they saw him streaking past their camp-fires at night. The spirit of Mumae had come back to pursue and possess him, it was said. She intended to take Hugh with her, whither she had gone. Nobody doubted he was becoming mad. He had been heard calling and talking to Mumae, as though she were with him, when no mortal eyes could see anything but the air before him and silver writhen shapes of dead mulga in the starlight. And Coonardoo — everybody recognized it was her right to watch over and look after Hugh as well as she could. Had not Mumae commanded her to? Warieda was as anxious as Coonardoo herself to save Hughie from the recklessness of his misery and the evil threatening.
From an agony of fitful sleep Hugh wakened one night to find Coolardoo watching beside him, a still, dark figure on the other side of the dying embers of his fire. She sat looking towards him.
“What are you doing there?” he asked.
“Warieda send ’m,” she murmured humbly.
“Well,” Hugh snarled angrily, “you go back to Warieda and don’t come hanging round my camp again. Do you understand?”
Coonardoo stood uncertainly before him a moment, humbly with prayerful eyes; then moved away through the darkness of the slender low-growing trees.
It was a few nights later that Coonardoo found Hugh wandering so far from the camp that he did not know where he was. He had walked off restlessly, absentmindedly, along a saddle of the ridge. Scrub was thick there, low-growing trees tufted sootily against the sky. Hugh turned to go back the way he had come, and after walking a while sat down on the earth near a clump of dead mulga whose branches shone in the starlight. He recognized the trees, so lustrous they were, like giant candelabra in the gloom. He had passed them several times, and knew he was bushed.
“Show ’m track, Youie,” Coonardoo said, moving from the shadow of the trees.
“Coonardoo!” Hugh started to his feet.
He understood what she had been doing as she wavered there against the thronging tree stems, afraid to come near him.
“Do you mean to say you’ve been following me?” he asked.
“Eeh-mm.”
“All the time. Ever since Mumae — went away?”
“Eeh-mm.”
Hugh sat down again. A trembling seized him. He had a swift vision of passion and tenderness stalking him through all the lonely misery of his wandering. When he looked up he saw Coonardoo was still standing there in the shadow.
“Sit down,” he said. And a moment later, “You must be tired too. We’ve come a long way, Coonardoo?”
She nodded and sank down on the earth at a little distance from him. Her fingers, as a matter of course, went after the sticks lying about; they piled leaves and twigs. Hugh struck a match and set a flame spurting over the leaves and sticks. He saw then how tired she was, her body sagged; she was half asleep already as she sat beside the fire.
“We’ll rest here a bit,” Hugh said. “Then you can show me the way to camp again, Coonardoo.”
She nodded, smiled and stretched to sleep on the far side of the fire. Hugh sat watching her. Years fell away between them. She was Coonardoo, the old playmate; he felt about her as he had when they were children together. This was a childish adventure they were on. His gratitude shook him as he thought of how she had followed and watched over him during the last weeks. It yielded to yearning and tenderness. Deep inexplicable currents of his being flowed towards her.
“Coonardoo! Coonardoo!” he murmured.
Awakened, she came to kneel beside him, her eyes the fathomless shining of a well in the shadows. Hugh took her in his arms, and gave himself to the spirit which drew him, from a great distance it seemed, to the common source which was his life and Coonardoo’s.
They slept beside the fire near the clump of dead mulga until it was morning. Hugh started up to find Coonardoo stirring embers of the fire. They had walked back into the camp then.
“Lost me tracks. Was fair bushed when Coonardoo found me,” Hugh told the boys. No more was said of the matter.
He was more like his old self that day, quieter, saner; and for two or three weeks went about his work picking up and cutting out cattle for the road, much as usual. He did not seem to be grieving in the same way for Mumae. The boys believed Hugh’s fibres had been snatched at and attached to the earth, so that Mumae could not draw them away.
Then suddenly he became sick, could not eat, rolled about with a pain in his stomach; his eyes and hands blazed feverishly. Hugh declared he had eaten or drunk something which disagreed with him. But Warieda, Chitali and the rest of the boys were sure Mumae had come back, entered into Youie and was struggling to take his spirit away with her.