The Burial (23 page)

Get a couple going so we can take a look inside
, said Jack Brown.

Barlow lit more matches and carried them like a torch in front of him. They moved in slowly.

They could not tell what they were stepping over but the ground crunched underfoot. The matches soon burnt down and in attempting to light more Barlow dropped the packet on the ground. The total darkness played tricks on their eyes and Jack Brown thought he saw the form of a sleeping child and then, further on, the movement of bodies against the cave wall.

Will you light the bloody things?
said Jack Brown.

Barlow was patting around, searching for the packet of matches. He finally found it and lit two more.

Someone has been here
, said Jack Brown. He felt the floor of the cave and it felt warm to him, as if someone had just been sleeping there.

I'm getting the fuck out
, said Barlow.
I'm going to camp outside.

I'm gonna sleep in here
, said Jack Brown.

That night Jack Brown was happy to be inside the cave without the fitful moanings and exclamations of Barlow waking him. He dragged his swag in as far as he could while still able to see the opening of the cave. He lay back and listened. The mountain sounded discordant and strange. With his head upon it, the lowing was amplified. Being inside it he could imagine it better, the wind passing through its tunnels and chambers. He gave his mind to it and he imagined that the source of the sound was not the wind but the wind was merely the carrier and what he actually heard was the echo of past inhabitants. And maybe they had not passed at all but the sound he heard was human voices freshly created.

In his time in the valley he had heard drovers talking. Some of them said that the tribes in the mountains had moved on, but there were a few who said that the tribes remained and that they defended the mountains. There was one drover whose voice he could still hear:
As black as those men are, they can make themselves invisible and you will only see them as they lean over you to kill you.

Jack Brown did not know what of it might be true. He suspected the drovers made things up for their own entertainment. He'd listened to the talk of men around a fire that sounded to him as fanciful as something from a children's storybook. What he knew for sure was that he himself was descended in part from one of the tribes they spoke of. If he had inherited from either his droving dad or his domestic mother an inclination to kill, for all the times he had imagined killing Fitz he did not do it. They were the times he wished he was more possessed of killing than was actually in him, wherever it came from.

He wondered who had camped here last. If it was Jessie. And who had lain here before her. Had they contemplated the sounds that echoed inside the mountains? What stories had they made of them?

Jack Brown was overwhelmed by the thought of it. And soon the thoughts turned to feeling and he could not bear to think of anything else on earth disappearing. Whether it be tribe or man or woman, he could not bear to think of anything of fight or spirit vanishing into rock. He hoped that within the mountains there was indeed a tribe and they were safe in secret places, and if this was their cave, he hoped too that they would forgive his trespass upon it.

THE BOY HAD shown her a gorge and she led the hunters to it. The only way to lose them was through tougher and tougher terrain, and yet she could not lead them back up the mountain for fear they would discover the campsite or any sign of the gang. And she knew she could not lead them directly down into the valley where she would be fired at without cover or protection in the open fields.

The gorge was narrow and dark and promised a steep decline and an uneven surface, then the surprise of rushing water. She ripped along the track, weighing its danger. Three hunters on her trail, if they hadn't collected more. Three armed riders with nothing to lose except the horses they rode. It would be worth it, even to lose one of them.

She pushed on in the dark, finding her way around trees that shone back silver. She could smell the water of the gorge carried up the warm cliffs and she breathed it in. The track vanished and she plummeted down into the deep canyon. She laid herself flat on the stolen horse and tried not to give herself away by screaming out the fear that was in her.

The horse flew down the slope and did not stop. It could not have, even if it wanted to. The drop passed as a terror and she did not know if beneath them was rock or dirt or air or what the horse was even holding on to. The horse skidded down and she breathed relief when the horse's neck evened out and it found its feet. She pulled herself up to sitting.

She heard them then. All three hunters flinging themselves down the same drop. She pushed the horse into the water and rode through, holding its neck pointed to the other side so it had no choice but to get there. She heard the men hitting the water and the screaming of a man as he lost his horse and panicked. From the continued surging sound of the water she knew his companions had not stopped to save him.

She crossed the water and pelted on through the thick scrub, pushing her body right down against the neck of her horse. Its heart was pounding. She urged it on and, though it did not stop and she did not turn back, in her mind she could see the man left behind in the river. The man was grabbing for a stick and, finding the stick without buoyancy, wrestled with it until his shirt and coat twisted up and drowned him.

THAT NIGHT, BARLOW was sick of the sight of Jack Brown's head. He lodged himself outside the cave and by the light of the sky he tried to write in his empty journal. But in pressing down on the nib of his pen it snapped and where he wanted words on the page there was only a blob of ink. He had thought this would be his story to tell, a young sergeant capturing an infamous female bushranger. But he had no spare nib to write the story and there was still no certain sign of her.

In truth, he felt far from victory or hope. Days and days of sitting on his horse directed by whatever sign that Jack Brown intuited had bred an impatience and, later, a hostile anger in him—a force of rage he had never before felt or expected to feel.

He closed his journal and lay down on his swag to sleep but was kept awake by the involuntary grinding of his teeth. He twisted and arched his back and neck and kicked his legs under a blanket, trying to get the feeling out of him.

All day he had watched Jack Brown, easy and relaxed in his saddle, sun-slick, his hands floating on his knees, his body moving as if it were another muscular extension of the body of the horse. Looking this way, looking that, coming out with grand statements beyond rhyme or reason, as though he always knew something that Barlow did not.

For Barlow, the mountains had unfolded without meaning. The colours and shapes continued to be strange to him and as they had moved higher up the slope he felt the clouds weighing in like the ceiling of a room that was sinking down upon him.

All day he saw silver leaves as bullets shooting through the trees and though he wore his badge visible and shiny with its eagle sweeping in, it seemed ridiculous when they saw no one and he knew the badge itself would not deflect a bullet once a gun was aimed at him.

He lay there, his heart racing with the spasms of his body, the kicking of his legs. He knew there was every chance he might die before he saw her again, that bullet or cliff could claim him and he would never get to see her as a grown woman, or reproach and punish her for deserting him. He knew that he might die with her only as a recurring dream and a recurring nightmare of Miss Jessie leaving behind Bandy Arrow.

JESSIE WAS COLD and wet and frantic. She had survived the gorge but her mind was blank and she had no knowledge of the terrain on the other side of it. There were still two men on her trail and she knew that by pushing forward she was only marking a path for them to follow. She could hear the wheezing of their frightened horses and yet they pushed on as she did, reckless as hell in the dark. It was almost too close to continue.

She rode on anyway, searching below her. All she could see was the shiny surface of the rock face disappearing into darkness. She guessed it was slippery with moss and water. But she had to climb down it. She pulled up the horse suddenly and swung to the ground. With a slap she sent it back in the hunters'direction. At best they would think she had been bucked, falling to her death. At worst they would think she had been unseated and would still come after her. She knew they would not risk leaving their horses and there was no way of travelling down the rock face on horseback unless they were intent on suicide. Better if they were.

She rolled up her trousers and emptied the bullets out of her gun in case she slipped and fired it. She strapped it again to her back and began to scale down. Her hands and feet clung to clumps of moss and twisted vines and roots that grew out of the rock.

Silently she went. She could not hear the hunters so she carried on, moving down, clutching at whatever she could, whatever nature offered her. She stopped when she heard them above her, pressed her face and body against the rock and waited for them to pass. She could not risk a loose rock giving her away.

As she held on her legs began to tremble with exhaustion. She clenched them to stop them shaking and then a feeling like pins and needles set into her feet and they finally grew numb.

The hunters passed. She kicked her feet against the rock to prompt her blood's return to them. She trusted only the grip of her hands although they were damp with sweat. She wiped them on her shirt and began to lower herself down again, her hands taking most of her weight.

It worked, this lowering down, the weight of her in her hands, and she could even see an end in sight as the cliff gave way to ground. But the rope of the vine she clung to snapped. Her feet had no hold and twisted out and slipped, her gun, her shirt, all sliding up around her, her bare skin scraping against the rock. She tried to grab for moss or rock or vine, anything, but nature seemed to baulk. There was nothing to hold on to.

She fell and fell until the cliff finally turned her out on a ledge. She landed feet first and then crumpled down with the shock of it. She was conscious, she was on the ground, her body was shaking. And then, the most surprising thing, her body in its shock began to shudder with laughter.

Fuck me
, she said.

She sat back, tried to straighten her legs, to stretch out. She felt her back. It was warm and damp and when she licked her fingers, she tasted blood. She had no cloth to bind herself but for her shirt which she could not sacrifice by ripping it up. She knew when blood and skin meshed with fabric it could be worse than the wound itself, so she took off her shirt and let the night air cool and dry the cuts.

She waited. Still and silent on the ground. She consoled herself that maybe in the fall she had gained a couple of hours from her hunters.

When the blood on her back had dried enough she put back on her scrap of a shirt and realised the ground she was on was actually another, shorter ledge. She climbed down from it, though it would have been shallow enough to jump, and found herself on a track. She walked along, her whole body stiff and sore, carrying her rifle, charged somehow by the adrenaline of her fall and her survival.

She walked through the night.

When she made out the two distinct forms standing on the track she thought she must have been hallucinating. But as she moved closer, it was clear. There were two saddled horses tied up to a tree. One of them she recognised, absolutely.

And then terror struck—the old man's dog was moving towards her on the track and growling—and above her someone yelled,
Miss Jessie!

She looked up and saw a ghost and the ghost was holding a gun and the ghost was all grown up.

And then all stars and dust and hope and loss came crashing together at once as the dog leapt on Jessie and Bandy Arrow fired.

BARLOW HAD THE dog in his sights first. He was already awake and alert to every strange sound. He heard the dog moving through the bush. It was growling. He did not know what wild dogs roamed the mountains, if they came in packs, what they might do to him or the horses. He did not waste time wondering. He loaded his gun and crawled to the ridgeline.

He did not expect to see her. But there she was, standing near the horses, bailed up by the dog. Finally he had her.

His hand was trembling as he trained his gun on the dog and then on Jessie. Both were oblivious to him. He stood and yelled out,
Miss Jessie!
The dog barked and the horses reared up. She grabbed her gun from her back as the dog leapt on her and locked its jaw around some part of her.

Barlow aimed at the dog. He took a shot. The dog unhooked itself from Jessie's arm and went for the horses. He took another shot. Jessie fell down and so did Jack Brown's horse.

Jack Brown appeared on the ledge in time to see Jessie and his horse collapsing.

What the fuck have you done?
he said.

Jessie was loading her gun on the ground. Her arm was bleeding profusely. She pointed the gun at the top of the ridge.

Put the gun down
, said Barlow.

Jessie!

Jack Brown?

Do as Barlow says.

Why should I?

He's the law, Jessie.

Jessie put the gun down and watched the two men climb down the rock.

There was nothing more to fear. Both her ghosts had caught her, both her ghosts were strapping her arm, both her ghosts were helping her to her feet.

THEY SET OFF down the mountain, Barlow doubling Jessie on his own horse and Jack Brown trailing behind them. Barlow had offered his horse to Jack Brown and Jack Brown had refused it. Jessie suggested that the two men should double each other and she could walk. But neither of them would have it, especially Barlow, who foresaw her escaping.

Barlow said,
You know that if you do try to escape you will only be hunted by packs of men and they do not care if they bring you back to the valley dead or alive. For what it is worth, we are your best chance of surviving.