DANNY WAS HALF OUT of his bedroll, his thin body shivering in the moonlight, his hands clutching his temples.
Meg was already at his side, soothing with soft old hands and murmurs. Eventually the boy was calmed enough to lie back down.
‘Bad dreams…’ he moaned.
Meg looked down at him, her face fraught with anxiety.
‘What’s happenin to this boy, Em’ly?’
‘Think the world’s happening to him, Meg.’
‘He bin smoke that Mary Jane in town?’ she asked shrewdly. ‘Make him little bit crazy?’
I shouldn’t have been surprised; she’d have seen her own daughter, Danny’s mother Rosie, ripped mindless on every imaginable substance. Meg had spent years dragging her out of drunk tanks, hospital wards and morning-after ditches. She probably knew more about intoxicants than any rehab worker.
‘You name it, he’s tried it. Comin off any of that stuff drills a borehole into your brain. But with you mob looking after him,’ I tried for a reassuring smile, ‘he’ll settle down, I’m sure.’
I looked at Danny lying there, a sheen of sweat across his brow, mouth moving silently, felt a surge of affection for him. Torn by dreams and delusions he might have been, but he was trying. He’d come out bush, spent time with his elders, tried to learn their vanishing words and ways.
For a boy who’d grown up running wild on the broken-bottle and tin-can fringes of Bluebush, he was doing all right. There was something almost heroic about his efforts.
Meg had made up a concoction of milkweed and bark from an umbrella bush, worked it into Danny’s brow. She placed some aromatic herbs on the fire, made him a pillow of lemongrass. Something in the herbal cocktail must have worked: he began to breathe more easily.
‘We gotta look out for these young ones,’ she said. ‘They all we got.’
I rolled onto my back, gazed up into the deranged planetarium that was the night sky, brooded on the traps and snares that lay in wait for a child of Danny’s generation. God knows, I’d been snagged on a few of them myself. It was returning to the Centre that had saved me. The way I saw it, in coming out here, the boy was searching for a centre of his own.
I realised an underlay of distant noise cushioned my thoughts. It almost sounded like a vehicle revving, but that was unlikely, out here in the middle of nowhere. Had some animal—one of the dingoes, a wild horse—started a little landslide? Difficult to tell: sounds played tricks in the desert at night, carried for miles on the stock-still air.
‘You hear something just then, Meg?’
She peered out into the darkness, shook her head. ‘Nothing.’
That was hardly conclusive; a lot of our old ones have damaged hearing. The prospect of another vehicle sneaking round made me strangely uncomfortable. I picked up my torch, pulled on my boots.
‘Might have a quick scout round before I turn in.’
The idea made her nervous. ‘More better you stay here, Nangali. Out there in the dark, little bit danger. Might be cheeky devil-devil, might be something worse.’
‘I’ll be right.’
But her warning resonated as I scratched around the bottom of the outcrop, then climbed to its summit. I stood on a boulder and scrutinised the dark blue plains.
Nothing: if it was a vehicle out there, it’d stopped, or was crawling along without headlights. I listened carefully, heard nothing.
I made my way down the far slope and onto the flats, the torch beam sweeping before me. Apart from the usual scuttling creatures of the night—a bat swooped, a ningaui dashed at a barking spider—all was quiet.
I turned to go, but was shaken out of my meditations when a huge mulga snake suddenly twisted underfoot, clattered off into the undergrowth.
Shit a brick!
I tripped, heart pounding, found myself tumbling into a gully. My arms went windmilling and my legs flew out. I fell into something face first. Something soft, slimy, like rotten fruit, but webbed with cutting edges and sharp points. A deeply disgusting odour crunched my nose.
I flashed the torch, gasped in horror: I’d landed in the rotting corpse of a maggot-eyed wallaby. I swivelled the beam: there were more of them in the gully, maybe a dozen, covered in a layer of dirt and white powder. Lime? I wasn’t hanging round to figure it out.
I scrambled to my feet, set out running and didn’t stop until I reached the camp and found the water tank. I scrubbed my hands, scoured my arms and face, rinsed my mouth, gagging, trying not to spew. More or less failing.
Magpie rolled over in his bedroll. ‘You right there, Nangali?’
I spat a mouthful of gunk, avoided a direct reply. I felt reluctant to tell him about the dead wallabies; this mob had enough on their plates without worrying about some maniac cruising around slaughtering wildlife, which was what appeared to have happened. A few months ago, at Moonlight, we’d come across a gang of Bluebush meatworkers whose idea of recreation was to hunt roos from the back of a trail bike—with machetes.
‘Snake, out there,’ I replied. ‘Bloody big one. Gave me a fright.’ He nestled back into the hat he was using for a pillow. ‘You watch that one now. Might be snake, might be dream.’
He seemed pretty cool about it, but he wasn’t so cool in the morning when he discovered another snake—smaller but just as lethal, a death adder—lurking under his own bedroll. He stared at the reptile, aghast, mumbled something doom-laden, then raised his voice.
‘Orright, you mob, time to get on the road.’
I wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to accelerate—figured he was already moving at top speed—but accelerate he did, breaking camp at the speed of light and wind at the speed of sound. Hurling our gear together and getting us out of there quick fast.
Everybody joined in. We were going home.
It was almost as if they sensed the slaughtered animals. That, or something else—maybe Eli’s forebodings—had thrown a wet blanket over the journey. The high spirits of the previous day, the sense of rediscovery and return to country, had evaporated but nobody seemed to know why.
Or if they did, they weren’t telling me.