THE RIVER slept shade-dappled under the late sun. The sound of it was a whispered counterpoint to the creek of palm leaves and the crepitant buzz of insects.
They came to it on foot, leaving the horses tethered on the high bank, and while Billy-Jo began scouting the sandy verge, Neil Adams and Mary Dillon waited together, watching the play of shadows and the jewelled flight of a kingfisher across the water.
The weariness of the long ride was in their bones, and Mary felt her courage thinning out with the decline of the day. Her face was drawn and dust-marked. Her eyes burned with the glare. Every muscle was aching from unaccustomed hours in the saddle. Adams, too, was tired; she saw it in the deep lines about his mouth, the droop of his shoulders and the slackness of his strong, hard hands. Yet his attitude was one of relaxation and not of tension. He was alert and watchful as ever, and she envied him his leathery strength while she resented his seeming indifference to her own condition. The resentment put an edge on her voice as she questioned him:
‘What have you found, Neil? What are you thinking? You’ve hardly spoken a word for the last half-hour.’
To her surprise, he was instantly apologetic.
‘I’m sorry, Mary. I’m not used to company on the job – certainly not women’s company. Billy-Jo and I don’t need many words, we think in harmony.’
‘And I’m an intruder, is that it?’
He grinned at her, disarmingly.
‘No. Just a figure in the landscape that I haven’t had time to notice. Besides, there’s not much to tell that you don’t know already. Your husband reached the river at this point. The myalls were on his tracks. We still don’t know how far they were behind him. All this happened twenty-four hours ago, you see, and the ground dries quickly in the sunlight. The two sets of tracks look as though they were made at the same time – although we know they weren’t.’
‘You’re trying to tell me they caught Lance?’
‘It’s possible – yes.’
A cold finger of fear probed at her heart-strings, but her voice was steady as she questioned him again.
‘He could be dead by now – is that it?’
‘He could…but he may not be. If I were you I’d prepare myself for the worst – and still hope for the best.’
Once again the calm containment of her shocked him. She said simply:
‘I’m prepared. You needn’t be afraid of me.’
He gave her a shrewd, sidelong look and said dryly:
‘You have a lot of courage, Mary.’
‘More than you expected?’
The question was barbed, but he shrugged it off.
‘Maybe. But I’m glad, anyway. Whatever happens, you’re going to need it.’
Swift anger took hold of her and she blazed at him:
‘You’re very practised in brutality, aren’t you? I suppose that’s what makes you a good policeman.’
Before he had time to frame a reply, Billy-Jo came hurrying towards them along the sandy bank, his dark weathered face set in a frown of puzzlement. Adams questioned him sharply:
‘Find anything?’
The tracker pointed along the bank, up-stream and down from the point where they stood:
‘Blackfella tracks all about. Walkim up and down. Makeim fire, eat and sleep. No tracks for white boss. No clothes, no blood, nothing.’
A gleam of admiration brightened in Adams’s eyes. More to himself than to Mary, he muttered:
‘Clever boy. He used the river to break his tracks. Must have been far enough ahead to throw them completely off the scent. I wonder which way he was heading?’
His eyes searched the farther bank, where the steep, muddy incline was tufted with thorn-bush and creeper and the tangled, water-hungry roots of the pandanus palms. Mary Dillon watched him intently, not daring to intrude again on the patient privacy of his thoughts. It was Billy-Jo who spoke the first word; quietly but with the authority of complete understanding.
‘Loseim light fast, boss. Maybe we cross river and look around, eh?’
Adams pondered a moment, then nodded gravely and turned to Mary.
‘We’ll have to leave you for a while, Mary. There’s swamp-land on the other side and we’d like to make a quick survey before dark. Bring the horses down here, water them and then tether them. Then you could start collecting wood for a fire. There’s a rifle in my saddle-bucket. There’s no danger, but if you want us in a hurry fire two shots. We’ll be back by dark.’
The words were already on her tongue to tell him that she knew nothing about handling horses, that she had never fired a rifle in her life, that whenever they had camped, it was Lance or the stockboys who had gathered the firewood, that her flesh crept at the sight of an insect and that the terror of emptiness haunted her like the beginning of madness. The words were there, but she choked them back and said only:
‘You go ahead. Don’t worry about me. I’ll have a meal ready when you come back.’
For the first time in their day-long company, Adams’s lean face relaxed into a smile of genuine approval. He patted her shoulder and said gently:
‘Good girl! We won’t be gone long. We may have better news for you when we come back.’
He turned away, and with Billy-Jo at his heels walked down-stream to where the river narrowed and the water ran swiftly over a stony outcrop where they could cross without fear of crocodiles. Mary Dillon watched them until they scrambled into the bushes of the farther bank; then, alone, scared yet oddly elated, she walked back to untether the horses and bring them down to drink at the river.
As the tired animals drooped their muzzles into the water, she unsaddled them, awkwardly, yet with a curious satisfaction in the simple labour. Always before she had avoided it, as if it were some kind of concession to the hated country. Now she was happy to do it, at the casual behest of a man who challenged her with mockery instead of love. It was a bleak commentary on her relation with Lance, a terse query on her attitude to Neil Adams. She resented him, but she was eager to please him. She wanted to hurt him, but when she found him beyond the reach of her ill-temper she did violence to herself to earn his off-hand praise.
Not once in three years of marriage had she conceded half so much to her husband, who might even now be lying dead and staring with blind eyes at the peach-bloom sky. In this last hour of the day, with perception heightened to feverish clarity by fatigue and resentment, she understood how far she had failed him and how much he, in his own fashion, had failed her. He had loved her, but love was not enough. He had set her too high, conceded her too much, handled her too gently. He lacked the perceptive brutality of Neil Adams; the egotism, the cool certainty of ultimate conquest. Even now, fear for him as she might, she could weigh his death for profit and loss as if he were alien from her life.
Strange that here in the narrow solitude of the river valley, she could face the thought without shame – if not without regret.
When the horses had drunk their fill, she hitched them to a palm-bole near the embankment and began to walk slowly along the bank, gathering driftwood and branches for the fire. Each armful she gathered took her a little farther from the horses and the rifle. Each return took a little longer in the paling light. At first she was nervous; her eyes searched this way and that among the shadows of the undergrowth, her head full of nameless terrors. Then the tension in her relaxed slowly, so that a moment came when she thought suddenly: I am not afraid; I am alone, but not afraid. There is water and sand and rock and trees ruffling in the wind, but I walk as if in a familiar place. The terrors are elsewhere – with Lance, with Billy-Jo, with Adams; but not with me.
By the time she had finished, the driftwood was piled high on the sand, and she was hot, filthy and uncomfortable. She looked about for a spot to wash herself and found, twenty yards up-stream, a small rock-pool. It was deep, ringed by scored sandstone, clear as crystal over a sandy bottom where small speckled fish swam in a low slant of sunlight. She felt it with her hand. It still held the warmth of the day. Without a second thought, she stripped off her clothes, spread them carefully on the rock shelf and stepped into the water, sliding down into it until it covered her breasts and lapped the hollow of her throat.
The touch of it was like silk on her parched skin. The weariness and the saddle-ache drifted off her like the dust of the red plains so that she seemed to float, a new creature, slack, content, invulnerable, in a strange new element. The tree-shadows lengthened and lay weightless across her body, the peach-bloom sky darkened slowly to crimson, the chorus of cicadas ragged and scattered, the first spasmodic cool of the evening came ruffling along the river-reaches, but she still lay there, lapped in the waters of this illusory baptism, until from far across the river she heard Billy-Jo hailing:
‘…Dillon… Boss Dillon…!’
And then, more distant, the long despairing ululation of Adams’s voice:
‘Dillon!…Answer me! Where are you? Dillon!’
Mundaru, the buffalo man, heard it too – so close that he could see through the stalks of the grass, the trunk of the shouting man. A single leap and a single spear thrust would silence the shout for ever: but Mandaru squatted, motionless as a rabbit in the depths of the grass until the man and the voice had passed far beyond him. This was not his victim. To kill him would profit nothing. Besides, he was tired now from the day’s stalking, from hunger, and from the long, violent ravishing of Menyan.
It was a thing he had not counted on: her terror, her cowering rejection of him, as if he were unclean or a threatening spirit man. Withdrawal, yes – a token flight, an ultimate surrender – this was the ritual of a tribal abduction when a young wife was ‘pulled’ from an ageing husband. The woman must prove fidelity before she could be unfaithful. The man must prove strength before he could possess another man’s woman.
But Menyan’s reaction had been quite different: a panic horror, the desperate bone-breaking struggles of a trapped bird; so that in the end he had to stifle her and beat her savagely before he took her. Only afterward, in the hour of staleness and disgust, did he understand the reason: Menyan knew what he himself had only suspected. The tribe had ranged itself against him. They had pointed the bone at him and sung him to death. Already the executioners were on his traces.
So now he sat crouched in the six-foot grasses, listening to the retreating voices of the white man, listening for the sounds that would herald the coming of the kadaitja men and clinging to his last tenuous hope: that he might find his own victim, eat his liver fat and arm himself against the magic of the tribal avengers. If he failed in this, he was lost and he might as well lie down and die in his tracks.
He had not much time. Night was coming down on the land. He must spend it alone, without fire or company, in a last desperate search for his victim. He clasped his hands round his knees and let his head drop forward, lapsing like an animal into fitful sleep while far voices rang above the clatter of the evening insects.
‘Dillon!…Where are you? Dillon…!’
The kadaitja men heard it too and they froze, their painted faces pointing like the muzzles of hounds towards the sound. They did not understand the words, but their import was clear: the white men were out looking for their lost brother. The white man might be dead or alive – it made small matter. But those who were seeking him were a danger, a possible impediment to a ritual act necessary for the safety of the tribe. If they came upon Mundaru first, they would take him away, beyond the reach of the sacred spears. But since they were still shouting, they had not found him yet. Somewhere in the long, undulant stretches of grass, higher than the head of the tallest man, he was hiding. He could not break out now. He must spend the night in the swamp. In the darkness he would be blind and beset by spirits. They themselves had no fear of the dark because of the potent magic with which they were armed and because of the all-seeing eye planted in their small toes under the feathered boots.
So they waited, rigid and alert for the signal from their leader which would tell them what to do. Ahead of them the cries continued awhile then stopped. Out of the silence they heard the signal – the cry of a whipbird, once, twice and again. They moved forward slowly, parting the grasses as the wind might part them, rhythmically, without damage to leaf or stalk-fibre.
Distant but clear, the shouting began again, but this time on a new note, sharp and urgent:
‘Billy-Jo! Over here! Hurry, man, hurry!’
Lance Dillon heard it, as he had heard all the others, through the whirling confusion of fever. Like the rest, it meant nothing to him but a new, shapeless nightmare against which the tired mechanism of his brain struggled continuously as he made his sluggish, reptilian progress through the grass-roots.
In these last dragging hours he had learned many lessons: that time is relative, that there is a climax to pain, and after that, a numbness; that sick men see visions, that reason is a razor-path, with darkness on one side and a howling madness on the other, that once a man topples off into darkness there is only the blind compulsion of the will urging him forward to a goal once clearly seen but now lost, like a beacon quenched in the storm-wind.
It was the will that drove the tired heart and kept the sick blood pumping round the circuit of arteries and veins and capillaries. It was the will that kept the hands clawing, one after the other, trailing the body after them like a bloated bladder. The will gave sight to eyes puffed and glued with suppuration; it stifled the screaming agony of sunburn and insect poison; it fought off nightmares and shouted down the siren voices that urged him to lie down and sleep, to stand up and dare the spears, to weep for pity in this pitiless land.
Yet there was a limit to what the will could do. One by one, the instruments at its command were wearing out…flesh and muscle and blood and the marrow that kept the bones alive. One by one they would refuse their functions until the driving dynamo which is the core of a man seized up and shuddered to a standstill.
Lance Dillon was beyond reason, but the final syllogism of his last logical thinking was etched deep in the cortex of his brain. He must keep moving. All else was illusion – a swamp-fire luring him to destruction. So he paid no heed to the voices calling his name and kept dragging himself forward. But being part-blind, he did not see that the sun was standing in the wrong position and that every movement was taking him farther from the river and his rescuers.
Darkness came down at a single stride, and Mary Dillon piled more wood on the fire, so that the flames leaped up to make a small island of light on the sand. She could not begin to cook until the blaze had died into coals, but she needed the warmth and the radiance to hold at bay the new terrors of the night. For a long time now, there had been no shouting, no human sound at all – only the whisper of the water, the spasmodic clamour of birds settling themselves to roost, the clump of a leaping wallaby, the squeak and chitter of bats dipping out of the shadows across the star-spotted water.
Never in her life had she felt so lonely. She wanted to scream at the top of her voice for Adams and Billy-Jo, but she feared the echo that might come mocking out of the wilderness. Tags from old bushmen’s tales distorted themselves into nightmares that lurked just outside the ring of firelight: the bunyip monster who lived in dark pools, the headless stockman of the Stone Country, the totem crocodile who picked his teeth with a hairpin and ate a white woman every birthday, the mad Duke of Kilparinga, heir to an English title, who ran crazy with an axe because he caught leprosy from a native girl. In another time, she had laughed them off as follies told by simple men in outback bars, but here on the river verge, they were suddenly monstrous and real.
To divert herself she began unstrapping the packs and laying out the food and the utensils. The tin plates fell from her hands with a clatter. The startled horses whinnied and from the leaves over her head a bird squawked and flapped away into the night. She threw herself on the sand and covered her face with her hands.
Then away down-stream she heard the sound of men splashing through the water and the merciful echo of Adams’s voice. Sick with relief and shame, she gathered up the fallen plates and began to make a brave show of preparing the meal. But when Adams and Billy-Jo stepped into the light, she had a new shock. Billy-Jo was carrying, slung over his shoulders, the limp body of a native girl. Adams’s face was drawn, his mouth tight as a trap, he said curtly:
‘We found her over by the swamp, she’s in a bad way. Put her down, Billy-Jo.’
The tracker laid the dark, childish body down on the sand and Mary gasped when she saw the extent of the injuries. The face had been battered to a bloody pulp. The breasts were torn, as if by animal claws and the narrow flanks were covered with blood. She was alive but her breathing was shallow and irregular. Mary looked at Adams with startled eyes.
‘Who is she? What happened to her?’
‘Beaten and raped. She’s married, the pubic covering shows that. She was gathering food away from the other women. Whoever did it must have surprised her. She fought and this happened. That’s all we know.’
‘She’s only a child.’
‘They marry young in these parts.’
‘It’s horrible…horrible.’ Mary turned away as the nausea gripped her. Adams bent over the small broken body, examining it with clinical care. Without turning, he called sharply:
‘Mary! Bring me a water-bottle and the whisky.’
When they were brought, he raised the girl’s head and forced a few drops of raw spirit into her broken mouth, then he laid her back on the sand and stood up, shaking his head.
‘She’ll die tonight. I’d like to get a word or two out of her before she goes. See if you can clean her up a little, then cover her with blankets and start bathing her face.’
Mary hesitated a moment, then without a word turned away to get blankets and a towel from the saddle-packs. Adams followed her and laid a tentative hand on her shoulder. He said wearily:
‘I’m sorry, Mary, I haven’t anything to tell you about your husband. It might take us half a day to pick up his tracks in the grass over there.’
He ran his hand through his thick hair in a gesture of puzzlement.
‘The girl’s tied in with this somewhere but I can’t see how just yet. It’s possible that the man who raped her is the man who is hunting your husband.’
‘Man? I thought there were a number of them?’
Adams nodded.
‘At the beginning, yes. There were a lot of them searching the river yesterday. They camped for the night. But when we scouted the ground on the other side, we found only the tracks of one man. Billy-Jo seems to think the others went back to their camp and left the one to hunt your husband. At this stage, it’s just a guess. If we could bring the girl round…’ He grinned and patted her shoulder encouragingly. ‘It’s a messy business, I know, but see what you can do for her.’
Once again she felt the small surge of pride in his reliance on her and was glad he had not seen her in her moments of fear and humiliation. She said simply:
‘Give me ten minutes and then I’ll get your supper ready.’
‘Thanks. We could all use it, I think.’ He stretched himself out on the sand, leaned his head on one of the saddles, lit a cigarette and lay staring up at the velvet sky in which the stars hung low as lanterns.
He too had his own pride and part of it was to preserve his credit for strength, experience and laconic wisdom, with this woman who was another man’s wife. By all his reckoning, Lance Dillon was dead, but until he could prove it, he could not say it because the saying might open a proposition he was not yet ready to discuss, even with himself.
The rape of the child-wife puzzled him. It was out of character with what he knew of aboriginal custom. Infidelity was less important in tribal code than the preservation of public order and the saving of face for the husband. A girl of this age would probably be married to an old man. Sooner or later, a young one would be expected either to seduce her privately or abduct her and pay the penalty. In either case, the presumption was that the girl would be willing and reasonably co-operative. Most natives set great store on their virility and claimed that their wives were insatiable. Inside the tribe, rape was an uncommon crime because there was generally no need to resort to it.
There were other contradictions too. As a Territory policeman, he knew something of forensic medicine and more of the sexual habits of the primitives. He had seen more than one case of sadistic mutilation. But the girl lying on the sand did not fit into this category. She had simply fought with her attacker and then been battered into submission. Again the question arose, why? She had been alone. She had neither reputation nor honour to defend. The man must have been known to her. Why was she prepared to risk violence and death rather than satisfy him?
Then a new thought came to him, half-formed at first but growing quickly into shape and solidity. He got stiffly to his feet and walked over to watch Mary bathing the girl’s face with a damp towel, while Billy-Jo still squatted on his heels staring into emptiness.
After a while her body began to be shaken with rigors, her eyelids fluttered and her head began to roll from side to side. A babbling, incoherent mutter issued from her swollen lips. Adams took the towel from Mary and handed it to Billy-Jo.
‘Keep bathing her. If she makes any kind of sense, talk to her.’
The tracker nodded and bent over the girl, crooning softly in his tribal language. Adams took Mary’s hand and walked her out of the firelight down to the edge of the river. She looked at him curiously:
‘Why did you do that?’
‘Just tactics, Mary. If she woke and saw you, she would be afraid. She would probably say nothing at all. Besides, Billy-Jo understands her language. He’s the only one to handle her.’
‘You really know your job, don’t you, Neil?’ Admiration coloured her voice.
‘I know the country, Mary. I like my job…most of the time.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
He made a small, eloquent gesture of deprecation.
‘Nothing of importance. Except that the work is easier if you can do it without personal involvement.’
She turned to look at him sharply but he was staring down the dark reaches of the river.
‘Meaning you’re involved now?’
‘In a way, yes.’
‘D’you want to talk about it, Neil?’
‘No. Not yet, anyway.’
As if on a common impulse, they turned and walked down the beach, hearing as they went the low babble of voices behind them. For the first time since they had met they seemed to be in harmony, thought and emotion pulsing slowly in a matching rhythm with their steps. Their silence came placid and inconsequent as their talk, while the low current of communication ran uninterrupted between them.
‘Neil?’
‘Yes, Mary?’
‘The girl back there…the thing that happened to her…how can people – even primitive people – live such brutal lives?’
‘The answer is, my dear, that they don’t. They live differently, but not brutally. They love their children. They love their wives. They are tender to them, though they never kiss as we do. Walk through a camp and you’ll see a man tending a sick woman, stroking her hair, fanning her with a leaf, crooning to her. The same man, on a long waterless trek, might have killed her newborn child. But the two acts are not incompatible. They belong in different categories, that’s all. Survival comes first. Survival for the group. A suckling child might hold back the mother, drain her strength so that she could not bear her part as a member of the trek. The fellow who raped that girl is as much a criminal inside the tribe as he is to us. In many things our attitudes are common, in others they differ, because the circumstances of our lives are so different.’
‘Lance used to try to tell me the same thing. I was never interested before.’
‘You never had to be interested. Your husband was prepared to think for you.’
There was no malice in his tone. He was stating a simple fact, baldly.
‘Do you think that was a mistake?’
‘I’m a policeman, not a judge, Mary.’
They walked on until they came to a large flat rock that thrust itself out into the river. They sat on top of it; Adams lit cigarettes for both of them and they smoked a few moments, watching the eddies swirling around the base of the rock. After a long while she asked him, hesitantly:
‘Neil, can you explain something to me?’
‘Depends what it is,’ he told her with rueful irony. ‘There are lots of things I can’t explain to myself just now. What’s bothering you?’
‘Myself…Lance, too. How does it happen? How can two people like us begin in love, live together for a few years and end…the way we are?’
‘Just what is…“the way you are”?’
Her hands fluttered helplessly as if trying to pluck the answer out of the air.
‘For Lance, I can only say that he loves me, that he’s hurt and disappointed and beginning to resent me. For myself…’ she flicked her cigarette-stub into the water and watched it float away into blackness. ‘For myself…I’m shocked. Somewhere out there, Lance is lying, wounded or dead. I’m going through all the motions of a good and faithful wife, but deep down inside me I don’t care.’ Her voice rose to a sharp, hysterical pitch. ‘Do you understand that? I don’t care at all!’
‘You’ve had a rough day,’ said Neil Adams with cool good-humour. ‘You’re in no condition to care about anything. For that matter, neither am I.’
‘Is that all you can say, Neil?’
‘It’s all I’m going to say, Mary.’ He gave her a sardonic sidelong grin. ‘Neither of wants to eat our indiscretions for breakfast. You’re tired and so am I. Let’s get back and start supper.’
When they reached the camp-fire they found the tracker squatting beside the coals, smoking placidly. The black girl had lapsed again into unconsciousness and a small mucous foam had formed at the corners of her mouth. Adams stood for a moment, looking at her, then shrugged and turned away to talk to Billy-Jo. Mary busied herself with the meal, listening all the while to the rapid, low-toned parley.
‘Did you get anything out of her, Billy-Jo?’
The tracker nodded, his old eyes bright with triumph.
‘Name Menyan, boss. Wife of Willinja, man of big magic. Man who beat her want her long-time.’
‘Why didn’t she take him?’
‘Willinja pointim bone, singim dead. Send kadaitja men killim. Woman no want dead man.’
‘Why did they point the bone?’
‘Killum bull. Try killim white man. Blackfella want no trouble with you, boss.’
‘What’s the name of this fellow?’
‘Mundaru, buffalo man.’
‘So that’s it!’ Adams’s face brightened as understanding dawned. Then abruptly it clouded again, as the full import of the situation struck him. ‘They’re all out there – kadaitja men, Mundaru, Dillon.’
The tracker shook his head and shot a swift significant glance at Mary. His voice dropped to a whisper.
‘Dillon dead, boss.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Easy, boss. Blackfella way. Make killing first, eat liver fat, make strong. Take woman after.’
Adams frowned, pondering this simple pragmatic logic of the dark people. It was easy to accept. It fitted perfectly, the cyclic psychology of the primitive. But there was a flaw in it, and the flaw was Dillon himself – the twentieth-century man, whose liberation from ancient codes had thrust him into an area of unpredictability.
A sudden sound cut across the path of his thoughts, a scraping and slithering, a long splash, and gurgle of water.
‘Crocodile, boss!’ said Billy-Jo, quickly.
But Adams already had the rifle in his hands and the bolt cocked, while he stared at the pool of shadow on the farther side of the river. Mary Dillon watched, admiring the swift, automatic reaction.
‘Over there, boss, by driftwood.’
The tracker’s sharp eyes had caught the sheen of moonlight on squamous skin.
‘I’ve got him. He’s a big fellow.’
Three seconds later, Adams fired, and the next instant the big saurian was thrashing and heaving in the water, his tail clouting the piled debris and sending it flying in all directions. After a while, the thrashing ceased, the crocodile rolled over, exposing the pale underbelly, and drifted into a backwater under the pandanus roots.
Without waiting to be told, Billy-Jo plunged into the shallows and began wading across the stream. Crocodile skins were worth money and since a policeman could not engage in private trade, this was the tracker’s perquisite. Before he reached the backwater he halted, waist deep in the water and they saw him fish something out of it. Then he headed away from the dead beast and back to the pile of driftwood. They saw him tear it away with his hands, scrabble among the debris and then stand a long time probing in the dark recesses behind it.
Five minutes later, he was back at the camp-fire, sodden but triumphant, holding Lance Dillon’s shirt and trousers and the long, serrated head of Mundaru’s spear.