Tracks (9 page)

Over the weeks that followed Gladdy’s departure, Blue dog had managed to inveigle his way into not only my heart, but Diggity’s also. He was a charming old codger, a dog’s dog. His primary preoccupations were eating and sleeping; these were followed, in order of preference, by chasing willing female camp dogs, and fighting male camp dogs. At first both Dig and I ordered him outside, but gradually we relented, until Blue was snoring, scratching and snuffling on our nest along with us, on those freezing desert nights. He had life pretty well cased out. He knew what was important and what was not. His fighting urge came to an abrupt end one day when he was almost killed by a pack of irate camp dogs. He licked his wounds for a week, then, with the admirable wisdom of a dog who has lived long and experienced much, retired into a noble, graceful old age.

I woke one morning early to find him dying on my back porch. He had been poisoned with strychnine. By the time I had collected my wits, he was dead. I cried as I buried him. Dear old Blue did not deserve such a cruel end. There were two thoughts uppermost in my mind — who would be so sick as to do such a thing, and, thank god it wasn’t Diggity. I found out then that it was quite common for dogs to be poisoned this way in Alice Springs. Some unknown person had been doing it for twenty years and the police still had no clues. Had I not lived so long in the town, I probably would have been very surprised. As it was, I merely sighed, and thought, of course, what else could one expect of such a place.

It was once again midsummer, the end of the year, and my room at Basso’s which had been so icy in winter was now a furnace. It was actually a series of cave-like rooms, all stone, with arched windows and doorways, straw on the cement floor and virtually without furniture. It was a haven for the most enormous cockroaches I have ever done battle with. They were fearless and would rise on their hind legs if confronted. They had me bluffed. As I went in at night with my candle, they would scuttle and scratch their way back into their various holes with a noise that made my skin crawl and my stomach heave. They are one creature, apart from leeches, that I simply cannot bear. I laid down large quantities of poisonous powder, something I would not normally do, but they thrived on it. They ate it, chomp chomp, for breakfast, lunch and tea and continued to grow like mutated monsters.

And then there were the snakes. Basso’s was home to these exquisite creatures — they courted, bred and died there, refusing to be interfered with by humans. Although deadly, they did not bother me half as much as the cockies; I quite liked them in a respectful, distant sort of way, and I always acted on the belief that if you left them alone, they would leave you alone. But Diggity hated them with a passion. I worried for her, because she would chase them and try to kill them and although she was very good at it, it would only take one bite to kill her. One night I was sweltering in my little cave reading a book by candlelight, when Diggity began her snake vibrato, a behavioural signal that was unmistakable. Out from under my bed came a small Western Brown, on his way to do business with the world outside. It didn’t bother me too much and shortly I blew out my candle and went to sleep. Somewhere in the night I was woken up by Diggity once again, rigid beside me, hair stiff like a warthog, and teeth bared growling. I lit the candle. On the bottom of the bed on the outside of my sheet was yet another snake, dozing. Dig chased it off. I began to feel extremely goose-pimply then and I was too scared of treading on one of the things to get up and block off the door. It took me a few hours to return to sleep. I awoke at about ten in the morning to see Diggity about to pounce on a huge snake slithering under my bed. Three in one night was just too much. I blocked up all possible snake entry holes in my wall, but it was several weeks before I got a decent night’s rest.

One continues to learn things in life, then promptly forget them. And I should have known by now that pride always comes before a fall. I was beginning to feel cocky. I was beginning to feel that I was in control of events, self-congratulatory, complacent. Life was good and bountiful. Nothing else could go wrong, statistics were against it. My friends were around me. I was in no danger. After all I had been through, the discomfort of not being able to get away from Basso’s for even a day seemed only the slightest of prices to pay. Toly was spending most of his weekends with us, and we all adored him. He worked as a teacher at Utopia, an Aboriginal-owned cattle station, 150 miles north. And if he whisked Jen away for days at a time, and if I could never go with them because I was chained to the camels, I tried hard not to be envious. They left big empty spaces when they disappeared. Literally hundreds of times we planned ways in which I could get to Utopia, but always some little thing cropped up and I would be unable to go.

One of the little things that often cropped up was that I could spend a whole day tracking my camels. Their footprints would become all mixed up and it was difficult to sort today’s from yesterday’s. There were six or seven directions in which they would head out to feed, most of these being rocky places where tracking was not easy. They would secrete themselves away in hidden valleys or dense thickets where I could not see them — they blended in so well with the khaki and reds of the landscape. They had bells on, but I swear they held their necks perfectly still and stiff when they smelt me on the wind. When they saw me, of course, it was all, ‘Hail fellow, well met. Clang clang.’ And, ‘What kept you so long?’ And, ‘How nice to see you, Rob, what titbits have you got in your pockets?’ It got to the point where, instead of catching them, I could simply unhobble them and watch them gallop and buck all the way home, or else crawl up behind some hump and get a lift. Dookie had lost all his bull-headed silliness with the hot weather, and the three were now an inseparable team. Zelly was plumping out in all the right places and her udder was swelling nicely. Camel gestation is twelve months but I had no idea when the calf was due. They had well-defined relationships to one another. Zeleika was the street-smart, crafty, unfazable, self-possessed leader. She was wiser than the other two put together in the ways of the wild. She was the Prime Minister, while Dookie was nominally king, but if anything untoward happened he was the first to hide behind her skirts. And Bub was in love with Dookie. Dookie was his hero, and he was quite brave as long as he had Dookie’s rear end in front of his nose. If Dookie was Hardy, then Bub was definitely his Laurel.

It was on one of these mornings, after I had tracked them down to the creek, that something happened which made me believe the world had stopped. Bub was lying on his side. I thought he was sunbathing so I sat next to his head and said, ‘Arra (get going), you lazy little sod, it’s time to go home,’ and put a lolly in his mouth. (They liked jelly-beans and long sticks of licorice best.) Instead of leaping up to see what other goodies I had, he continued to lie there, chewing the sweet halfheartedly, and I knew something was dreadfully wrong. I got him up and saw that he was standing on three legs. I lifted the foot and checked the soft pad underneath — there was a gash, with a wedge of glass stuck in it. Kurt had had to shoot one of his animals because of just such a wound. These pads were meant for soft sand, not sharp objects, and were the most vulnerable part of the animal. Inside the pad is a squishy, elastic sort of bladder; when pressure is put on the foot, any hole will therefore widen. It is impossible to keep them off a leg, because they need that pressure for circulation. The cut had gone straight through the bottom of the foot, and up through the hairy top surface. I thought he was finished. I sat there and wept on that river-bank for a good half hour. I howled and howled. Camels are such hardy animals, I thought, it’s just sheer perverse fate that has caused this to happen. Who is it up there who hates me? I shook my fist and howled some more. Diggity licked my face and Zelly and Dook bent down to offer their condolences. I had Bub’s big ugly head in my lap. He continued to eat jelly-beans, playing Camille admirably. I pulled myself together, took the glass out of the foot as carefully as possible, and led him slowly home. The vets I knew were out of town, I discovered when I pedalled in to the clinic, and a new inexperienced boy was doing the locum for them. He came out to Basso’s to look at Bubby, stood six feet away from the camel, said, ‘Hmm, he’s got a cut in his foot all right.’ And gave me some injections for tetanus. Not much help. I had met two women at the restaurant, Kippy and Cherie, who managed a veterinary practice in Perth. I pedalled in to work that night and told them what had happened. They came out the next day, their last in town, lanced the top hole so that it would drain, and prescribed hot water and Condy’s crystals. The foot was to be immersed in a bucket of the stuff and I was to massage the wound, cleaning it out thoroughly. Wonderful women, they gave me hope again.

Toly and Jenny then built me a large holding yard out the back of Basso’s, with old star pickets, scraps of wire and netting, and various other assortments of stuff which we picked up here and there. I kept Bubby in there, treated his foot three times a day and prayed. I had now modified the treatment, with the help of the town surgeon, to inserting an infant’s nasal feeding tube into the top of the cut and dousing out the whole wound with strong antiseptic. This went on for a few weeks, and I could never be sure if the foot was healing or if rotten flesh was growing in there like mushrooms. Some days I had hope, others I was once again in the pits, whimpering for Jenny, Toly, Julie or the town surgeon to come and pull me out. Bub did not enjoy the treatments and neither did I. ‘Keep that bloody foot still, you little mongrel, or I’ll chop it off at the knee.’ He gradually came round. Soon the foot looked healthy enough for me to let him go with the others, who had been hanging around the house like bad smells, putting their long necks into the kitchen, or standing expectantly, eyes greedily bulging every time we sat in the garden for a cup of tea. My friends were falling in love with them as much as I was, though they wrongly accused me of projecting human attributes on to them. We laughed at them for hours. They were better to watch than a Marx Brothers movie.

And then one bright sunny day it happened. They disappeared. Into the wild blue yonder, just like that, poof. No camels, no adorable do-no-wrong beasties. They had deserted me, the ungrateful, cunning, fickle, deceitful two-timing traitors — pissed off. It was quite usual for them to wander short distances but this time it was serious. Maybe they were bored, and looking for adventure. But I suspected Zeleika was the culprit. She was going home thank you very much, leading the others back to her herd where there were no such things as saddles and work. She was not as easily conned and bribed with hand-outs and cuddles as the others. Not as spoilt. And she had not for a minute forgotten the sweetness of freedom.

I headed out as usual that morning with Dig to find their tracks. It took me about an hour to pick them up — they were heading almost due east, out into the wild hills. I followed for a couple of miles, thinking that they would be just around the next corner and imagining I could hear bells tinkling not too far away. There is a little wedge-bill bird in that country that sounds just like a camel-bell, and it often had me fooled. It was getting very hot, so I took off my shirt, put it under a bush and told Dig to wait there for me until I got back, which I thought would be about half an hour at most. She was already panting and thirsty. She hated being left behind but it was for her own good, and she obeyed. I was now into rough uninhabited country — there was no one and nothing for countless miles. I was vaguely wondering what on earth could have induced the camels to wander this far, this fast. But I wasn’t worried. I was hot on their trail — their droppings were still moist. I could see from the tracks that one of them had broken a leather strap and was dragging a chain. And I walked. And I walked. And I walked. I crossed the Todd River and immersed my boiling body in a cool pool and drank as much as I could. I wet my trousers and wound them around my head. And still I walked. My speed slowed down now as I was in stonier country. And all the while I was thinking, ‘What’s happening here? Has someone chased them? What’s going on, for Christ’s sake?’ I walked thirty miles that day, tantalized by the belief that they were just a minute ahead of me, but I heard nothing but phantom bells dinging inside my own skull, and saw nary a camel. I returned late at night to find poor Diggity almost fretted away, still sitting under the bush, her pink tongue dry as a bone, and a groove of worried dog-prints a hundred yards in the home direction, and a hundred yards in my direction. But she had stayed, faithful creature, despite what must have been an unbearable anxiety and an equally unbearable thirst. She was so relieved to see me, she almost turned herself inside out.

The next day I left better prepared. I reached yesterday’s point fairly quickly — it was only about eight miles as the crow flies — to find that the tracks petered out a mile or two later into rocky escarpments. I went home and rang up all the station owners out in that direction. No, they had not seen any camels, they usually shot them anyway. But they would keep a look-out for mine.

Then I found some generous people in town with a light aircraft who offered to take me up into the clouds to look for them. Julie came with me. I knew vaguely where they would be, I thought, then realized that if they could go that far in one day, they could go seven times as far, in any direction, in the week that had passed. I felt despondent. We flew in a grid pattern, much lower than regulations ordained, for about an hour. Not a sign.

‘There they are!’ I screamed, strangling the co-pilot from behind.

‘No, donkeys.’

‘Oh.’

And as I sat, straining my eyes out the window of the plane, something rose to the surface which had been buried since the moment I decided on this trip, more than two years before. I didn’t have to go through with it. Losing the camels was the perfect excuse. I could pack my bags and say, ‘Oh, well, I did my best,’ and go on home. I had never really considered doing it of course. I had conned myself into believing I would but no one would be crazy enough to do such a thing. It was dangerous. Now, even my camels would be happy, and that would be that.