IT IS ONE of the ironies of existence that a man’s life may hang on the humour of his surgeon’s wife, or the state of a taxi-driver’s liver, or the angle of sight from a bucketing aircraft. At the precise moment when Adams might have seen Dillon waving from the grass, his attention was caught by Billy-Jo, shouting in his ear and pointing out through the perspex window.
‘Look, boss! Kirrkie come up! Bird belong dead thing.’
Sighting along the black-tracker’s hand, Adams saw, high above a sandstone saddle, the wheeling flight of hundreds of kite-hawks, sure sign to the bushman of a carrion kill. He leaned forward, tapped Gilligan, the pilot, on the shoulder and shouted in his ear.
‘Over to the right – behind the ridges!’
Gilligan gave him the thumbs-up sign, banked and headed for the red hills. As the aircraft came in, low and lurching through the air, the kites rose, screaming, and Adams looked down to see the green valley, the brood cows cropping contentedly with their calves at heel, and, in the centre, the mangled carcase on which the kites had been feeding.
The next moment he was flung violently back in his seat, as the plane climbed steeply to clear the saddle. When he levelled off, Adams tapped him again.
‘Any chance of putting her down in there?’
Gilligan shook his head and shouted:
‘Not a hope. It looks flat enough because of the grass, but we’d probably tear the undercart off!’
‘Can you make another circuit?’
‘Sure!’
As he banked and turned again, Billy-Jo turned to Adams.
‘Boss! I know this place! Spirit caves for Gimbi tribe!’
‘You sure of that, Billy-Jo?’
‘Sure, boss! White man’s cows in spirit-place. Maybe Gimbi men make trouble, eh?’
Adams nodded thoughtfully, staring out at the red scoriated rocks and the rich pastures between them. It was, at least, a working hypothesis. Half the trouble in the territory began with the clash between the pragmatic philosophy of the whites and the dream-time thinking of the aborigines. The small aircraft rocked again as Gilligan lifted it over the ridge. Gilligan turned back and shouted:
‘Where to now?’
‘Head for the homestead. See what we can pick up on the way.’
‘Roger!’
The Auster lurched and shuddered in the air-currents that rose from the hot earth, and Adams sweated and battled against the nausea that threatened him at every moment. Billy-Jo called to him again:
‘Stockboys, boss!’
They were riding in line abreast, strung out across half a mile of grassland and sparse timber. When they saw the aircraft they reined in and waved their hats in greeting. Adams counted them – five in all. They would be the riders from Minardoo, and they had still not found Lance Dillon. Again he questioned Gilligan.
‘I’d like to talk to ’em. Any hope at all of a landing?’
‘Look for yourself! Rocks and ant-hills! I daren’t risk it – unless you want to walk home…’
Adams grinned and shook his head.
‘No, thanks. Cruise around for a bit. Let’s see if we can spot any myalls.’
He was not sure what he was looking for; he was simply going through a routine – assembling the sparse human elements in this big country, setting them in their geographic location, in the hope that the geographic relationship might develop into a human one. A man, black or white, was in a given place for a specific reason. His reason and his attitudes were, normally, predictable. There was no place for strollers and vagabonds in the outback. The country was too harsh, the loneliness too oppressive, to coax them outside the familiar circuits of water-hole and game-land and grazing areas and sacred places.
In the next fifteen minutes, he saw nothing that deviated from a work-a-day pattern of primitive life: a dozen women, waist-deep in a lily-pond, another group digging for yams on a river flat, three bucks flushing an old-man kangaroo out of the paper-bark trees, a lone man squatting in the lee of a conical rock, a deserted camp, with lean-to shelters made of bark, and thin smoke rising from the sand-covered fires.
The things he needed to see were hidden from him: Lance Dillon crouching in the swamp-reed, Mundaru, working his way through the six-foot grasses, the buffalo men in a limestone cave, burning their small toes with a hot stone, then dislocating them, and, afterwards, putting on the feathered kadaitja boots which are always worn in a ritual killing.
Adams leaned forward and tapped Gilligan on the shoulder.
‘That’s the best we can do from up here. Make for the homestead.’
Five minutes later they were bumping across the runway to where Mary Dillon was waiting for them.
She came to him, running, a slim, dark woman in a mannish shirt and jodhpurs, her face flushed from the sun, her hair wind-blown from the slipstream of the aircraft. At the last step she stumbled, and almost fell into his arms. He held her for a moment longer than was necessary, feeling her need and her relief and her unconscious clinging to him. Then, reluctantly, he released her. With Gilligan and Billy-Jo looking on, his greeting was studiously formal.
‘Hope you haven’t been too worried, Mrs Dillon. We made a circuit of the property before we came in.’
‘Did you see anything?’
The eagerness in her voice gave him an odd pang of regret. He shook his head.
‘Only your stockmen. They haven’t found anything yet.’
Her face crumpled into fear and disappointment.
‘We flew over the valley behind the sandstone bluffs. That’s where your husband was going, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes. That’s where the breeding herd was. You didn’t see him there?’
‘No… But one of the animals was dead. It looked like the bull.’
‘Oh no!’
The terror in her voice seemed disproportionate to the occasion. Adams questioned her gently.
‘Is it so important, Mrs Dillon?’
Her voice rose on a high, hysterical note.
‘Important! Everything we had was there ! We paid three thousand pounds for that bull. Mortgaged ourselves to the neck to buy it. Lance said it was our only hope of holding out and making a success.
‘I’m sorry.’ What else was there to say? He shot a quick glance at Billy-Jo. The black-tracker’s eyes flickered in agreement with his unspoken thought. Dillon would not kill his own animal. If the myalls had done it and he had come upon them in the act…
Mary’s voice challenged him sharply.
‘What does it mean, Neil?’
‘We don’t know yet, Mary; and there’s no point in making nightmares for ourselves. As soon as we’re ready, we’ll ride out and see. Can you give us a quick lunch? It’s a half-day ride.’
‘Of course. It’s ready for you now. The horses are saddled and the packs are made up.’
‘Good girl!’ He turned to the pilot. ‘You’d better eat with us, Gilligan. I’ll want you to look out for a few things on the way back.’
‘Suits me, Neil. I’m hungry, anyway.’
‘Let’s go, Mary.’
They turned and walked towards the homestead, with Gilligan and the black-tracker walking behind them.
Luncheon was a hurried meal and a dismal one. Mary Dillon was full of questions which Adams parried carefully, because he did not want to be drawn into speculation on the fate of her husband. Gilligan’s attempts to brighten the conversation with territory gossip fell flat, and after a while they ate in silence. When they had finished, Adams sent Mary outside to check the supplies on the pack-ponies, while he had a swift, private conference with the pilot.
‘This looks bad, Gilligan.’
The pilot nodded.
‘Time’s running against us. We’ve got a twenty-mile ride before we even reach the Stone Country. Dillon could be dead already.’
‘What do you want me to do, Neil?’
‘Can you make another flight out this way tomorrow morning?’
‘If it’s a police matter, sure.’
‘How much runway do you need to land?’
‘Three hundred yards’ll do me. Provided it’s clear.’
‘I’ll try to find you one. When we catch up with the stockboys, I’ll set them clearing a strip. Billy-Jo and I will try to pick up Dillon’s tracks. Better we don’t have a whole mob milling about and messing up the signs.’
‘How will I know where you are?’
‘We’ll build a smoke fire. If we want you to land, we’ll lay the word in stones on the ground.’
‘If not?’
‘Make the same flight the following day. After that, I don’t think it will matter.’
‘Blackfellow trouble?’
‘I think, so.’
Gilligan whistled softly and jerked a significant thumb towards the door.
‘Are you going to tell her?’
Adams frowned and shook his head.
‘Not before I have to. When you get back, pass the word round, but keep it general. I’m not sure of anything myself yet.’
‘Will do, Neil. And good luck.’
They shook hands and walked out into the sunlight, where Mary was fixing the last straps on the saddle-bags and Billy-Jo was examining the shoe-prints of Lance Dillon’s pony. Gilligan made his farewells to Mary and Adams went with him to watch the take-off. When he came back, he saw for the first time that there were three saddle-horses instead of two, and that the pack-ponies also carried blanket-rolls and ground-sheets and water-bags for three. Before he had time to comment, Mary told him in a rush of words.
‘I’m coming with you, Neil. Lance is my husband and – and I think I’d go mad if I had to wait here for news.’
For a moment, he was tempted to refuse violently. All his experience – of the country, of women, and of himself – told him that this was a dangerous folly. Instead, he grinned and said simply:
‘Better bring something warm. The nights are damned chill. Pack some liniment too – you’ll have saddle sores before you’re much older.’
‘Thank you, Neil.’
She gave him a small, grateful smile and hurried inside. Neil Adams shrugged and began to check the saddle-girths and the set of the packs, while his private devils grinned sardonically at so easy a surrender.
Lance Dillon was very near to despair. The moment he had leapt up from his hiding-place and tried to signal the aircraft, he knew that he had made a fatal mistake. Even had the pilot seen him, he would have understood little of his situation, and even had he understood, there was little he could have done about it. The nearest safe landing-strip was at the homestead, twenty miles away, and no pilot on earth would have attempted a landing in the swamp-lands. In one futile gesture he had expended his strength, and the advantage he had gained during the night.
Now, for a certainty, his pursuers would be on his track. He had not seen them, but he had no doubt at all that they had seen him. Soon, very soon, they would come to beat him out of his hiding-place. He was trapped between the grass and the lily-water, a pale frog on a mud-patch waiting for the urchins to scoop him up in a bottle.
A sob of weariness shook him, and the first tears since childhood forced themselves from his eyes. Self-pity swamped him and every instinct urged him to lie down and wait for the merciful release of a spear thrust. He buried his face in his muddy arms and wept like a baby.
After a while, the weeping calmed him, and he began to take note of the swamp noises: the shrilling of the cicadas, the low buzz of the insects, the susurration of the grass, the occasional boom of a frog, and the chitter of a pecking reed-hen. There was a rhythm to it, he found, a comforting regularity, as if the giant land were snoring and wheezing in its noonday doze.
Suddenly, the rhythm was broken. Far away to his left, there was a shrill squawking, and a few seconds later a big jabiru flapped its ungainly way over his head. He knew what it meant, and the knowledge jerked him back to reality. The hunters had flushed the bird as, soon, they must flush the man. Desperately, he tried to discipline his thoughts. There was no way of escape, and there was no weapon to his hand, but the swaying reeds.
‘The reeds…!’
From somewhere out of a forgotten story-book, a picture presented itself, vivid as a vision: a prisoner, hunted by his gaolers, hiding in a stream and breathing through a reed. His reaction was immediate. He grasped a handful of reeds and tried to tear them out, but the tough fibres resisted him and the stalks frayed in his hands. A few second of reasoning showed him a simpler way. He knelt and bit off a pair of stalks close to the root. Then he bit off the tops, tested them by suction, and found that the air flowed freely.
With infinite care, he slid himself into the water, feet first, at a spot where the green scum had parted. When he found it deep enough, he exhaled, so that his body sank to the bottom, and then, anchoring himself to the mud, he worked his way slowly under the lily roots, feeling blindly for a snag or a sunken tree that might hold his buoyant body submerged. His rib-cage was almost bursting before he found it, but he hooked his toes under it and let his body lie diagonally under the surface, face upward, so that the reed projected upward through the lily pads. He had to blow desperately to clear it of mud and scum, but finally he was able to breathe in short, regular gasps through his mouth.
His body tended to drift upward against the anchoring feet, and the stretch of his muscles was a painful strain, but after a few moments, he began to hold himself in equilibrium, breathing the while through the slim reed. He could see nothing but the dull underside of the lily-pads, and the vague bulbous shapes of their roots; but he wondered desperately whether the myalls had come and seen his first blundering passage through the water and whether they might not be coming, even now, to gaff him like a fish, a man-fish, helpless under the pink lily blooms.
Mundaru, the buffalo man, was puzzled. He had moved fast and straight through the grasses, and now he was standing on the very spot where his quarry had lain. The marks of him were everywhere: the shape of his body in the mud, the crushed and torn reed-stalks, the place where he had slid into the lagoon. Yet there was no sign of him.
The surface of the pond was clear and unbroken. The green scum in the shallows was neither torn nor disturbed. The blue ducks were swimming placidly, the ripples fanning out in their wake. The egrets stood in elderly contemplation round the verge. A blue kingfisher dipped like a flash of lightning over the pink flowers.
Mundaru squatted on his heels and waited, his eyes darting hither and yon across the shining water and the broad, gleaming stretches of lily leaves. He waited a long time, but no alien sound disturbed the familiar harmony. The swamp-birds fed unruffled and the grasses swayed in unbroken rhythm to the warm wind blowing off the Stone Country. The white man had disappeared completely, as if he were one of those spirit-beings who could hide themselves in the crevice of a rock, or the trunk of a tree, or the hollow of a grass-stalk.
A small chill fear began to creep in on the buffalo man as the leaven of unacknowledged guilt began to work in his subconscious. Perhaps, after all, it was a spirit man. Perhaps the white man was already dead, drowned in the river, and his restless emanation was walking abroad, mocking Mundaru and leading him on to ultimate destruction. Perhaps he was still alive, but using a more potent magic than Mundaru had known or expected. Perhaps this was not white man’s magic at all, but the malignant working of Willinja, who had already begun to sing evil against him.
As the fear grew, the guilt thrust itself further and further into his consciousness, until, finally, it was staring him in the face. Like all his people, Mundaru was a believer in the supernatural; and, though he lacked the words to define it, he was facing the dilemma of all believers: the dichotomy between belief and practice, the conflict between tribal discipline and personal desire. By his own act, he had set himself outside the tribe, made himself an outlaw. The channels of strength and sustenance were closed to him for ever. His choice therefore was predetermined. He must go on to complete the killing cycle – be the victim ghost or man. He must survive by his own efforts, live on his own fat, and on the protection of his own totem.
Abruptly, but with a curious, inverted logic, his thoughts turned to Menyan, who was the wife of Willinja. Inside the tribe, she was denied to him, but now, an outlaw, he might take her, if he could, and whether she consented or refused. Afterwards, they could not stay in the tribal lands. But they could flee to the fringe of the white settlement, where other detribalised men and women lived a new kind of life, incomplete, but free at least from the threat of ancient sanctions. The thought pleased him. It gave him a new goal, a new, if temporary, courage against the influences working on him from hour to hour.
But first, he must find the white man…
The water was still unbroken. The reed-bed still whispered in the breeze. Wherever the white man was, he would be heading roughly in the direction of the homestead. His track must lie along the inner bank of the lagoon, nearest to the river and pointing down-stream. Mundaru picked up his spears and his killing club and headed off through the reed fringes.
When, a long time later, Dillon broke despairingly out from the lily-beds, the myall had disappeared and there was nothing to show which way he had gone.
Mary Dillon and Sergeant Neil Adams were riding stirrup to stirrup across the red plain, with Billy-Jo a few paces behind them, leading the pack-pony. The heat and the glare and the steady jogging of the horses had reduced them to a drowsy harmony, a laconic familiarity, as if they and their dusky attendant were the only folk left in an empty world. For long stretches, Adams rode in silence, staring straight ahead, absorbed in himself; but, just when it seemed to Mary that he had forgotten or was deliberately ignoring her, he would turn and point out a new thing to interest her – a strange bird, a distorted bottle tree, a pile of fertility stones raised by the aborigines. He had a care for her, an unspoken understanding, and she was grateful to him.
But there was still something that needed to be said, and she put it to him calmly.
‘Neil, there’s something I want to say to you.’
‘Go ahead and say it.’
‘You mustn’t try to hide anything from me – anything at all.’
He shot her a quick, shrewd glance from under his hat-brim, but his face was in shadow so that she could not see whether he smiled or frowned. Only his voice held a hint of humour.
‘I’m not hiding anything, Mary. I don’t know anything yet.’
‘But you think it’s serious, don’t you?’
‘Any accident is serious in this country, Mary.’
‘But you don’t believe this is an accident. You think it’s blackfellow trouble, don’t you?’
‘I told you, I’m guessing. I don’t know anything.’
‘But Lance could be dead…killed.’
‘He could be. He probably isn’t.’
‘It might be better if he were.’
The bleakness of the statement staggered him, but he had been long drilled to composure. His eyes never wavered from the vista before him and the ponies continued their steady amble over the plain. After a moment he said quietly:
‘Do you want to explain that?’
‘There’s not much to explain, Neil. We’re head over heels in debt to the pastoral company, and they told us last month they wouldn’t advance us any more. If the bull is dead, as you think, we’re finished – ruined. I don’t think Lance could stand that. I’m sure I couldn’t.’
‘Aren’t you under-rating yourself – and him?’
‘No. It’s the truth.’
They rode on a while in silence, then Adams reined in and said casually:
‘Let’s rest awhile and cool off.’
He dismounted and came to help her out of the saddle. She was stiff and cramped and she had to hold to him a moment for support. He grinned and said lightly:
‘That’s nothing to the way you’ll feel tomorrow.’
‘I’m tougher than you think, Neil.’
‘I believe it,’ he told her soberly, and moved off to water the horses while she drank greedily from the water-bottle. Later, when they were sitting in the shade and smoking a cigarette before remounting, Adams picked up the thread of their talk. He asked her:
‘Do you really think Lance would crack?’
She nodded emphatically.
‘Yes. I think it’s quite possible. I know him very well, you see. He has great courage, great endurance. But he’s too single-minded – too dedicated, if you like. Everything in his life has been subordinated to this ambition of his – even me. He’s gambled everything on this breeding project, and he’s told me more than once it was his last throw. I believed him. I still do. There are people like that, you know, Neil. So long as the goal is clear and possible, they can take anything. But when the goal is unclear or beyond them – they snap. Lance is a man like that.’
‘And you?’
His eyes were hooded, but she caught the undertone of irony in the question. Her answer was blunt.
‘I’m one of those who survive by walking away and cutting their losses.’
‘You’d walk away from Lance?’
‘From the country first. But from Lance, too, if he insisted on staying. I’d already made up my mind to do it before this happened.’
If the answer shocked him, he gave no sign, but looked at her with level eyes and said:
‘Don’t you love him, Mary?’
‘Enough to be honest with him – yes. But not enough to stay and let this blasted country wear out everything that was good between us. Does that shock you, Neil?’
He shrugged and gave her a sardonic sidelong grin.
‘Nothing ever shocks a policeman. Besides, it’s a pleasure to meet an honest witness. If you’ve finished your cigarette, we’d better move. I want to get to the ridges before sunset.’
He turned, and began walking away towards the horses, but her voice stayed him.
‘Neil?’
‘Yes?’
She moved to face him, her eyes cool and challenging.
‘One question, Neil. What odds will you give me on Lance being alive?’
He chewed on the question a moment, then answered it flatly:
‘At this moment, even money. But the odds might be better on the course… Come on, let’s ride.’
But the longer they rode, the more the question nagged at him: which way did she want the odds – longer or shorter? And which way did he want them himself?
Willinja, the scorcerer, was waiting for the buffalo men to complete their ritual preparations and present themselves to him, ready for the kill. He, too, had his own dilemmas of time, circumstance and responsibility.
Like all the initiates of the animistic cults, he was a man of singular intelligence and imagination. In any society he would have risen to eminence and the exercise of power. The whole history and tradition of his tribe was stored and tabulated in his memory. He knew all its chants and all its rituals, many of them hours long and all of them intricate.
The complex relationships of tribe and totem, of marriage and generation – the whole codex of human and animal relationships was as clear to him as the legal canons to a twentieth-century jurist. He was pharmacist, physician, psychologist – and within the limits of his knowledge and experience, good in each capacity. He was priest and augur, diplomat and judge in equity. Behind his broad receding forehead he carried relatively more knowledge than any four men in a twentieth-century society. More than most men, he understood social responsibility. He, and others like him, held the tribal life together and maintained it in a workable pattern against the constant tendency to disintegration.
This, in effect, was his problem now. He had ordered a killing: in the tribal code, a legal killing. But the legal process would fail of its effect if Mundaru killed the white man first. Adamidji, the white policeman, would see two crimes instead of one, and the punishment would be all the greater. Even tribal killings were forbidden by the white man’s law, and so, he could not explain, in any intelligible fashion, his effort at prevention and punishment. There were things the white man would never understand: like the exchange of wives to satisfy a quarrel, or to show hospitality; like the payment of blood for blood, and the need to keep certain things secret under penalty of death.
When a man stole another’s wife, or took to himself a woman of the wrong totem, the white man gave him sanctuary and protected him against the spears of the avengers. He impeded the course of age-old justice. When, in the old days, he drove a tribe out of its own preserves into a new territory – even a better one – he did not understand that he was signing the death-warrant of the social unit. There was no bridge between these two worlds – no concordance between their ethics and philosophies.
So, in this moment of crisis, Willinja must work alone, according to his own knowledge and tradition, a Stone Age Atlas, carrying the weight of his world on his own ageing shoulders.
From the shadowy recesses of a cave in the kangaroo rock the buffalo men came out, limping from the recent ordeal. Their feet were shod with the kadaitja boots – made of emu feathers and the fur of kangaroos and daubed with blood drawn from their own arms. When they walked they would not leave footprints like ordinary men – because until the act was done, they were not ordinary men any more. Even the spears they carried were special to the occasion.
When they came to Willinja they stood before him, heads bowed, eyes downcast, waiting his commands. They were crisp and clear, but ritually careful. Time was important. If possible Mundaru must be killed before he killed the white man.
The manner of the killing was equally important. He must be speared from behind – in the middle of the back. The spear must be withdrawn and a flake of sharp quartz, representing the spirit snake, must be inserted to eat the liver fat. The wound must be sealed and cauterised with a hot stone, and Mundaru, bleeding internally, with the spirit snake eating his entrails, must be driven forward until he died in his tracks. No woman or child must see the act or the death. The man who threw the spear must never be named, because this was a communal act, absolved from all revenge or the penalty of blood.
Did they understand it all? Yes. Did they understand that if they failed they too lay under threat of death? Yes.
He dismissed them curtly and stood a long time, watching their swift, limping run towards the river. Then he picked up his instruments of magic, wrapped them carefully in a bundle of paper-bark and strode back to the encampment.
The women were beginning to straggle back, loaded with yams and lily-bulbs and wooden dishes full of wild honey, but Menyan was not among them, and Willinja waited, puzzled at first and then uneasy, for the arrival of his youngest wife.