Walkabout (7 page)

They stayed by the pool for three hours, avoiding the worst of the heat; then the bush boy decided it was time they moved on. Soon they were again on their way, traversing the upper slopes of the gently-sloping valley.

That day they covered fifteen miles. The bush boy could have walked twice as far. But Peter tired easily;
and the Aboriginal adjusted his pace accordingly. Also Peter had lost his shoes – had left them together with his shirt somewhere beside the billabongs – and his feet, unused to hard going, had started to blister.

Late in the evening they came to the head of the valley, to where it petered out on the edge of a million-acre plateau. The trees were still with them, though not so thickly-growing now. So were the birds. The chat-chats, the corellas, and the sweetly-singing bellbirds; and, a little before dark, the bustards. There were three of the bustards. Foolish, inquisitive birds, rather like scraggy turkeys, they followed the children almost at their heels: sniffing, scratching, and pecking. The bush boy watched them thoughtfully, calculating their food value. One was smaller than the others: the chick: he would be tender, and plump enough to satisfy the hunger of three. Slowly, imperceptibly, the bush boy dropped behind; edging ever closer to the foolish birds. Suddenly – as if it had been thrown – his hand flew out. His fingers closed round the baby bustard's neck; cut off its life in a single twisting jerk.

Swinging his victim carelessly, the bush boy went up to the girl. Before she realized quite what was happening, he had thrust the bustard, wings and body still a-twitch, into her arms. For wasn't she a lubra: a carrier of burdens ?

A drop of blood from the broken neck splashed darkly on to the girl's dress. But she didn't drop the bustard. She held on to it: tightly: though her face puckered in nausea with every twitch of its wings.

Peter saw her distress.

‘Say, Mary! He should'a given it to me. I'll hump it for you.'

He tried to take hold of the bird, but the girl turned away.

‘It's heavy,' she whispered. ‘I'll take it.'

In single file they pushed on, over the rim of the plateau; ebony silhouettes against a sunset sky.

That night they camped in a fault, a broad slab-sided rift that split the plateau like a crack in sun-dried mud. There was no water; but the rocks retained the warmth of the sun, and the twilight wind passed high over their heads.

The bush boy again made fire, though this time there was little yacca wood, and it proved more difficult to light. But by the time the sun had set flames were flickering cheerfully, their shadows duplicated on the firelit rocks of the fault; and by the time the Southern Cross had tilted up, low on the horizon, the bustard was cooking in the fire-heated ash. They would eat it, the bush boy indicated, in the morning.

As they lay down to sleep, all the day's constraint – which had ebbed somewhat away during the lighting of the fire – came flooding back. The girl kept moving about, keeping the fire between herself and the bush boy. Peter, worn out by the day's exertions, quite lost patience with her.

‘Stop fidgeting, Mary!' His voice was peevish. ‘I can't get to sleep.'

‘Sorry, Pete.'

For a while there was silence. The bush boy moved
quietly about the camp, banking down the fire, brushing aside random splinters of wood. Watching him, the girl tossed and turned. At last she could bear it no longer.

‘Peter!' Her voice was low, and somewhat different from usual. Pleading: almost frightened.

‘Yes?'

‘Come and lie close to me. Please.'

‘What for?'

‘I'm cold.'

Reluctantly he crawled across, and the two children snuggled closely together.

The girl insisted on lying with her face to the fire. From where she lay she could see the bush boy, silhouetted against the firelight; he was standing on one foot, staring into the moonlit valley. She wondered what he was thinking: wondered if he was waiting for her to fall asleep. But I won't sleep, she promised herself. Not till he does. She said it over and over again. Not till he does. Not till he does. But at last her eyes started to droop, her breathing to deepen; and a little before midnight, in spite of her resolutions, she slept the sleep of the utterly exhausted.

But the bush boy didn't sleep. Hour after hour he stood there: silent: motionless: a shadow carved in ebony and moonlight.

P
HYSICALLY
the Australian Aboriginal is tough. He can stand any amount of heat, exposure, or cold; and his incidence to pain is remarkably low. But he has his Achilles Heel. Mental euthanasia. A propensity for dying purely of autosuggestion.

Experiments have proved this: experiments carried out by Australia's leading doctors. On the one hand a group of Aboriginals – voluntarily of course – have spent a day in the desert at a temperature of roughly 95°-100° Fahrenheit, and have spent the night in a sealed-off chamber, thermostatically controlled to a temperature of minus 15° (47° of frost). They slept well without any sort of protection; and, though they were naked, felt no cold. On the other hand, Aboriginals who are a hundred per cent physically fit have been known to die purely because a tribal medicine man has put the death curse on them. One such man was admitted to a state-capital hospital. Thorough tests proved that there was nothing the matter with him; psycho-analysts tried to instil in him the will to live, the will to fight. But in vain. The medicine man had said he was going to die. And die he did: of self-induced apathy.

Death, to the Aboriginal, is something that can't
be fought. Those whom the Spirit wants, he takes; and it's no good kicking against the pricks.

That was why the bush boy accepted the fact of his impending death without question, without struggle. There was in his mind no flicker of hope. The lubra's terror, to him, could have only the one meaning. He had seen tenor like hers before: in a woman's eyes after prolonged and unsuccessful childbirth; in an old man's face when he had become too weak to walk and the tribe had passed him by, leaving him alone, alone in the waterless desert. And so he now stood; without hope; passively waiting; wondering, as he stared across the moonlit valley, how and when the Spirit of Death would come to claim him.

A
LL
night the bustard baked in the ashes, and by morning it was tender as broiled lamb. The children ate it hungrily.

Peter and Mary wanted to linger over the meal, would have liked to pick every succulent scrap off the bustard's bones; but the bush boy was impatient to be off. Morning mist was still clinging to the sides of the rift valley, when he smoothed out the ashes of the fire, beckoned to the others and moved off along the fault. He set a fast pace.

Mary, not knowing the cause of his hurry, wished he'd be more considerate: for Peter's sake. But, in spite of her misgivings, Peter's vitality – at least in the early morning – seemed to be limitless, quite capable of measuring up to the bush boy's long loping stride. Indeed, he apparently had energy to spare. For he hopped around the bush boy like an exuberant puppy, his shrill questioning voice echoing back from the rocks. And strangely enough the Aboriginal seemed to be understanding – and answering - his questions.

Peter had decided to learn the black boy's language – it would be far more useful than the French his sister was always boasting about. He trotted up to the Aboriginal, holding a fragment of rock.

‘Say, darkie! What you call this?'

‘
Garsha.
' The bush boy spoke with a grating harshness, hard as the flint itself.

‘And this?' The white boy plucked at a tussock of grass.

‘
Karathara.
' The word was whispered, liltingly, like the rustle of wind through a sea of grain.

‘
Garsha. Karathara
…
Garsha. Karathara
,' Peter's reedy treble echoed down the valley. He went rushing on ahead. Presently he came trotting back, and handed the bush boy a lump of quartz. Hour after hour the questioning went on. Mary felt very much alone.

For lunch they ate yams: queer-looking bushman-drakes that grew in dishevelled heaps beneath an outcrop of rock. Once again they rested through the midday heat – at least Mary rested; the boys chattered like gossiping kookaburras – then they were walking again, heading south-west across the red sandstone plateau.

The plateau was not a pleasant place for walking. It shimmered with heat; the children's footsteps kicked up a cloud of fine red dust, and there was no water. Soon even the ebullient Peter was reduced to a sober plod. The dust hung for a long time in the motionless air; so that looking back the children could see behind them a winding haze of redness stretching far across the plain. After a while Peter started to sneeze. The dust was tickling his nose.

At the first sneeze the bush boy grinned (remembering their original meeting); but when the sneezing continued, becoming louder and louder as the dust inflamed Peter's nostrils, the bush boy looked at him
anxiously. He hoped the little one hadn't caught the fever-that-comes-with-the-rains.

Peter, in fact, was starting nothing worse than a common cold – the type that is almost chronic among people who fly long distances and experience sudden changes in temperature – and this cold was now being aggravated by the plateau dust. He sneezed and sneezed and sneezed; he went red in the face; his eyes poured water. The bush boy regarded him with astonishment. Aboriginals know all about fever, but they never have colds and they seldom sneeze. Certainly the black boy had never witnessed such prolonged and noisy paroxysms as Peter's.

All that afternoon and half the evening the little boy sneezed his way across the dusty plain; he only stopped when they came to the edge of the plateau and the soft redstone gave way to granite; smooth and hard, not to be kicked up by shuffling feet. By the time they stopped for the night Peter was utterly exhausted: too tired to help the bush boy with fire-making : too done-in to eat. He crawled wearily across to his sister, put his head on her lap, and fell instantly asleep.

The bush boy banked down the fire. He was pleased with their progress – that day they had covered seventeen miles. If they kept to this pace, another seven sleeps would see them to the valley-of-waters-under-the-earth. Once they got there, the strangers would be safe.

He didn't go near the lubra – knowing that for some reason his nearness alarmed her (perhaps because she
was ignorant enough to think that the Spirit of Death might pass, in juxtaposition, from him to her). Instead, he lay quietly down, on the opposite side of the fire.

He was just drifting into the dream-time when, quite unexpectedly, he sneezed.

Morning mist refracted the rays of the sun, tumbling them into the valley like a river of molten gold. Bathed in sudden light, the children stirred.

The bush boy was first to wake. He woke completely and instantly, every bit of him together: one second lost to the world, the next completely alert. He rose, flexed his muscles, sniffed the air, and walked quietly down-valley.

Peter woke next. He sat up yawning, rubbing eyes and nose. He'd have liked to blow his nose really (it felt all bunged-up) but having no handkerchief, he sniffed. Loudly.

His sister rolled on to her side and looked at him critically.

‘Peter.' Her voice was disapproving. ‘Where's your hanky?'

‘Lost.'

He didn't wait for recriminations, but got up quickly.

‘I'm going to look for the darkie. Coming?'

She shook her head, and, lay down again. He wondered why she looked suddenly hurt: as though he'd slapped her across the face.

He wandered off; hands in pockets, sniffing loudly.
Instinctively he headed down the valley, down the broad granite cleft that ran like an axe-cut from plateau-rim to fringe of plain. He had been too tired the night before to take notice of their camp site – it had been simply a place to go to sleep in; but now, the scenery's bizarre grandeur caught his imagination. It was, he decided, just like the moon: just like those rocky, fierce-coloured lunar landscapes of the comic strips. He peered at the rocks a little apprehensively, half-expecting some Martian monster to come leaping out; indeed, from the far side of a jagged outcrop of granite, he could, now that he listened carefully, hear something that sounded rather like a Martian feeding: a sort of scrunching-mingled-with-heavy-breathing noise. Fear fought curiosity, and lost. Cautiously he squirmed his way up the wall of rocks, and peered over the edge.

Twenty feet below him was a small pool, rock-ringed, crystal clear, and motionless as glass. And beside it was the bush boy, trundling a small boulder of quartz, about the size of a football (but ten times its weight). He saw Peter and grinned.

‘
Yarrawa!
' He pointed to the pool.

Peter glissaded down. He saw the
yarrawa
at once. Fish. Silver-scaled, glistening, darting; ranging in size from three to fifteen inches; on their sides a row of small black dots, like the port-holes of a liner. He suddenly remembered that he'd had no breakfast.