LATE ON THE SECOND day we struggled round the south side of a range, and there it was, three or four kilometres away: the rocky outcrop from Doc’s photo.
‘Irinipatta,’ chanted Eli. Dingo Springs.
I drove towards it slowly. The outcrop was an island of jumbled rock that glowed in the hovering sun like the fires of its dreaming. It was crystalline in the main, a mass of rhomboidal joint blocks with the odd slab of speckled ironstone on the higher reaches. The vegetation was sparse: a few figs and a bush olive, tenacious little caustic vines that clung to the grooved slopes.
We climbed out of the vehicles, walked towards the site. A pair of dingoes broke cover and dashed across the sand, vanished into some invisible declivity.
The women tore off branches, formed a line and moved around the base of the outcrop, sweeping the rocks as they approached, making their peace with whatever spirits lingered there.
A wallaby came out of the rocks, took a few awkward bounds, stood looking at us.
‘Quiet one,’ murmured Meg, puzzled.
Eli tilted his head in the animal’s direction, his jaw stiff. ‘Maybe sick?’
‘Maybe.’
Perhaps because of its tameness, the distant look in its eyes, nobody seemed inclined to kill it.
The granite walls were worn mirror-smooth at wallaby height, polished; there must have been a lot of them here at some time.
I took a close look at a cutaway rock face on the eastern approach, saw at once why the place had intrigued Doc. From a geological perspective, the outcrop was extraordinarily diverse. Some of the rocks were clearly volcanic: rhyolite flows, perhaps. Yet directly abutting them were dropstones. Ice rocks, if I remembered my theory correctly, fallen from the frozen sheet that had covered the globe six hundred million years ago.
There were other seams embedded there I couldn’t recognise: banded dolomites? Doc’s cap carbonates, perhaps. Rocks that could only have been formed by a rapid change of atmospheric conditions to extreme heat.
Even with my limited knowledge such a diverse stratification—rocks from the ages of ice and fire in a single outcrop—seemed unusual.
But what did it have to do with the murder I’d come to investigate? Why would anybody want to expunge any reference to this place from a geriatric geologist’s records? The outcrop may have pointed towards some sort of geological discovery, but who the hell would have killed him over that? Another geologist? Crazy. I’d heard of geos going hammer and tongs over competing theories, but the hammers didn’t usually end up in their throats.
Was there something else here? Had Doc stumbled across a metalliferous lode, gold, platinum or the like? It didn’t look like it, but I’d need more equipment than I had with me now to be certain.
I was struck by the variety of fossil evidence, much of it from the Ediacaran period. Geordie Formwood had told me about Doc waving fossils under the Reverend Bodycombe’s nose when they were arguing about evolution. Was this where Doc had found them? But there were fossils all over the desert. Surely the Rev wouldn’t have murdered him over evo-bloody-lution?
Another idea drifted in from left field. Could Doc have been killed for some interference in blackfeller law? God knows, it was possible. I’d made a similar mistake myself once; paid a heavy price for it. And this place was obviously an important dreaming site…
The thought disappeared as quickly as it came: no kudaichi I’d ever heard of would even be able to read Doc’s notes, much less steal them. I’d come here with a group of traditional owners: they, more than anyone, would have known if a law had been broken, and yet they’d been keen to make the trip.
Magpie and Meg joined me, and together we began the climb to the summit, maybe sixty feet above ground. Half way up was a spring, a trickle of water flowing from a fissure, which created the illusion that the rocks were weeping.
I cupped my hands, was about to take a drink, when we were distracted by a call from below.
‘Em’ly!’
Danny.
Eli was crawling towards us on his hands and knees, his face peeling and panicked, racked with grimaces and wrinkles. He seemed to have aged ten years—and he hadn’t looked like he had ten years in him to begin with. Danny moved alongside, struggling to support him.
‘What you doin, old man?’ implored Meg as we helped him to his feet. ‘Shouldn’t oughter come up all this way on your own.’
‘Somethin wrong…’
His ancient goanna claw clutched the air, frustrated, helpless.
We stood there, mystified.
‘Nothin wrong, Japanangka.’
He gazed into his own darkness, shook his head. ‘All buggered up…Not workin…’
Magpie frowned. ‘What not workin…?’
‘Fire song. I don’t understand.’
Meg put a hand on his shoulders. ‘Please, Japanangka, take it easy.’ Her voice was as soft as the desert after light rain. ‘We getting old, all of us, jumpin at shadows, runnin round in circles. But we back on our own country now—right way. Young people around us, the land comin back to life…’
‘But aiee…’ He sighed, felt his way towards a rock, flopped against it. Tears, or beads of sweat, glistened through the stipple on his cheeks. ‘Maybe just me, me and these useless bloody eyes…’ But it wasn’t just Japanangka: I noticed Danny studying him, a dark cloud moving across his face. Whatever Japanangka’s finely tuned radar was picking up, Danny was getting by osmosis. I worried for him. His outer layer was a delicate membrane, letting through too much of the world.
Danny led the old man back down and did his best to make him comfortable. They made an odd couple, the slight young man, the heavy-set elder. An instinct for country the link between them. And a shared sense of jeopardy and loss.
Magpie stretched his back, studied the land below. ‘Track down there: motor car bin ’ere, little while back.’
It took me a moment to discern them: twin red ribbons of dirt cutting through yellow porcupine grass.
‘Heading directly back east,’ I said. ‘What’s over that direction?’
‘Keep goin straight, take you allaway back to Gunshot Road. Roadhouse.’
‘Maybe the way Doc and Jupurulla come out here?’
‘We might have a look.’
We scrambled down the far side of the outcrop, walked over to examine the tracks.
‘What were they driving?’
‘That old blue Jeep bilonga Doc.’ These tracks were wide, wider than Doc’s Jeep would have made.
‘So somebody else has been out here?’
‘Look like.’
He studied the wheel marks, picked up a handful of sand, let it drift through his dirty fingers.
‘How old?’ I asked.
‘Fresh.’
An idle thought strayed across my mind. ‘Wouldn’t be from that campervan the pastor drives?’
He gave the idea a moment’s consideration, then scratched his chin. ‘Maybe not’s wide as that.’
He turned his eyes to the east, emitted a soft worried whistle, his tongue up against the stumps of his teeth.
We headed back to the cars, an uncomfortable sensation stealing over me—and, I couldn’t help feeling, my companion.
What did Dingo Springs have to do with Doc’s murder? And why was it affecting us all in a way that seemed so out of proportion to the deaths of two old men?
We piled the fires high that evening, but the atmosphere in camp was a far cry from the cut-glass beauty of the night before. The sky seemed darker, the stars on fire. The Kantulyu were rattled and restless. A choir of dingoes yelped from the hills, pissed off that we’d driven them from their home.
Eli sat on his bedroll, chanting softly but purposefully, pausing to sip at his pannikin of tea. Danny was looking edgy: once or twice he got up, stood staring into the darkness, nostrils aquiver. Meg said a prayer—to Jesus, praying for Him to watch over us in the night. The notion of praying to an alien god while on a journey into her own traditions didn’t seem to strike anyone but me as strange.
I drifted off early, but it was a fitful sleep. I’d only just closed my eyes, it seemed, when I was awoken by a terrified scream.