The roar of the water now competed with the rain, and instructions had to be shouted. The horses knew that they’d be expected to swim, and they were dangerously jumpy. Fulton stripped off his clothes and entered the water.
‘It’s fast,’ he called.
When the water reached his shoulders I could tell that it was an effort for him to keep his footing. In the centre he was obliged to swim a few strokes to get over the deepest point, but despite being a strong swimmer he was carried several feet downstream. From the look on his face when he found his feet again, I could tell that swimming against the current had used considerable reserves of his energy. I wasn’t a strong swimmer — I was capable, but not strong — so watching Fulton hadn’t been reassuring. To my surprise, he returned, and when he’d recovered his breath he said, ‘It’s do-able. The horses should be fine.’
The plan was to ride one and lead one, and the expectation was that the process would take at least a couple of hours, with each of us swimming back to collect the remaining horses.
Urging the Walers into the flow was surprisingly straightforward. I felt secure astride my mount, and it and its companion experienced no difficulties. This was true for all the horses in the first group. But I found returning to the crossing point both strenuous and frightening. The fact that I survived it had nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with luck. It was almost as if the creek took a breath just as I reached the deepest part, and the current eased sufficiently to allow me to swim without being swept downstream.
It was when we were taking the second group of horses across that disaster struck. I’d made it safely to dry land and looked back in time to see a great surge of debris-laden water rise like a liquid escarpment and fall with hideous force on Brian and the horse he was riding. They were pushed with astonishing speed out of reach and out of sight. The creek resumed its steady flow, and the sense that it had chosen Brian out of us all was inescapable. It took a moment to fully comprehend what had happened. We were agape. I looked at Fulton foolishly, as if I thought that he should be doing something to retrieve Brian. Despite the beard and the hairy chest, his rain-soaked face betrayed him as the young boy he still essentially was. His eyes were shocked and desperate, and he watched the water with impotent despair.
I scanned the banks. Glen and Ngulmiri were yet to cross. Any attempt to follow Brian on dry land would be frustrated by the thick scrub that grew along the creek’s edges. The openness of our crossing point was the exception, not the rule. All this I took in in a matter of seconds. My decision to enter the creek and allow it to carry me in the direction it had thrust Brian had nothing to do with courage. It was more like rage — an irrational anthropomorphising of the creek into an entity whose bullying indifference to decency needed to be challenged. It was anger, not love, that propelled me into the brown swell.
I swam to the middle, and was immediately and efficiently relieved of the need to swim, except for an occasional stroke to prevent myself from tumbling out of control. The Nackeroos were soon lost to sight, and the folly of what I’d done struck me forcibly even as I struggled to remain buoyant.
I had no idea how far downstream I’d been carried. The inexorable, terrifying, and impersonal force of the water made time and distance meaningless, unless some witness on the bank were able to say, yes, he drowned at precisely this moment and at that spot. Even though I wasn’t struggling against the flow, I was struggling with it, and I knew that exhaustion was close.
Then, by chance, I saw Brian. Water had washed into my eyes, and the grit in it had forced them closed. I opened them for the briefest of moments, and saw his body caught in a tangle of overhanging branches. Bizarrely, his horse stood on the bank nearby, its load intact. Using reserves of strength I didn’t think I had, I pushed myself out of the deepest part of the creek and found my feet. The walk against the current in the shallows wasn’t dangerous, although every step sank into mud, and every withdrawal sapped more of my energy.
When I reached Brian there was something so inert in his attitude that I thought he must be dead. He was stuck fast in a web of thin and whippy branches; I couldn’t see what exactly was supporting his weight, so I assumed a sharp, sturdy bough must have skewered him somewhere. With trepidation, I touched his chest and looked closely at his face. He was bleeding profusely from a head wound, and his expression was hidden by blood.
I stood, paralysed by sudden grief, and I was vaguely aware, too, that somewhere in amongst the maelstrom of my emotions lurked the dread of having to tell Mother where, and how, he’d died. I knew that she’d hold me responsible, and that from that moment I’d be subjected to a kind of emotional excommunication. I bowed my head and closed my eyes, and when I looked up I found myself staring into Brian’s open eyes. The relief I experienced at that moment is the closest I have ever come to ecstasy. With the power that comes with madness, I wrapped my arms around his waist and dragged him into the water. Perhaps if I’d been a bit more careful he wouldn’t have suffered quite such severe lacerations on his back. He was semi-conscious and confused, but I managed to manoeuvre him to the small, clear area where his horse still stood. It hadn’t wandered anywhere because there was nowhere to wander. We were hemmed in by thick, sharp shrubs — so thick as to appear impenetrable.
Brian sat with his head between his knees. The rain pounded his back, sending pink rivulets of blood into the mud where his buttocks rested. He finally raised his head and said, ‘Bloody hell.’
Having come close to death, and having been pulled from its jaws by his own brother, one might have hoped for something grander, or more edifying.
‘You’re all right,’ I said, and told him what had happened.
‘And you jumped in after me?’
‘You needn’t sound so surprised. Of course I jumped in after you.’
He nodded, and his eyes reddened.
‘Thanks,’ he said quietly.
I was suddenly embarrassed by what threatened to be an upwelling of emotion from him, and said, ‘I have no idea where we are, or how we’re going to find the others, and this rain is driving me mad.’
‘At least it keeps the flies and mozzies away.’
He was right about that. Without the rain it would have been impossible to prevent a blowfly strike at the site of the ulcer on my leg; and with blood oozing from various cuts and abrasions on his body, Brian would have been more fly than man.
‘How far do you reckon we are downstream?’
‘No idea,’ I said. ‘I think I was probably in the creek for fifteen minutes before I saw you. We must be at least a couple of miles from where we were. Maybe more.’
‘So if we follow the creek back, we’ll be right.’
I looked over his shoulder at the dense vegetation.
‘Easier said than done. We’ll be cut to pieces crawling through that stuff.’
Brian pointed to the horse, and reminded me that our costumes were in the packs on its back. He’d wear Glen’s suit, and I’d wear mine. It would be a black-tie crawl to safety. We had no choice, though. However absurd it might look to be wandering through this wilderness dressed as if we were on our way to an opening night, the alternative of walking through it naked was out of the question.
We knew the going wouldn’t be easy. What we didn’t know was that it would be almost impossible. The bushes didn’t part accommodatingly as we pushed into them. Their roots, trunks, branches, and mean little leaves resisted our advance. It was the necessity of bringing the horse with us that made us abandon a route close to the creek and to deviate away from it through scrub that allowed us to pass. We thought if we kept within earshot of the rushing creek we’d be right, but we’d barely gone any distance at all when what was rain and what was creek became uncertain and, finally, indistinguishable.
Wherever we came upon a clear passage we took it, relieved to be moving forward. We stopped after an hour’s trek, and I climbed a spindly trunk to get some idea of the lie of the land. The tree was only slightly taller than the undergrowth, and ahead, behind and side to side, all I could see was an endless vista of low-growing green, with here and there a protruding tree. There was no sign of the creek, and when I climbed down I realised with dismay that I could no longer be certain whether it was to our left or our right. I hoped Brian’s sense of direction was better than mine.
‘I can’t see a thing from up there. It’s all the same. Do you have any idea where the creek is?’
‘I’ve been following you. My head is killing me. I haven’t been concentrating.’
‘Well, here’s something that might focus the mind. We’re lost.’
‘They must be close,’ Brian said.
‘That depends on whether we’ve been walking towards them or away from them.’
‘Haven’t we been going in one direction?’
‘No, Brian, we haven’t, and that’s not my fault.’
‘All right, all right, keep your tuxedo on. I’m sure we’re vaguely heading towards them. Besides, surely someone will come looking for us.’
I had no confidence at all that this would happen. The Nackeroo’s assumption would be that, if either or both of us had survived, we’d find our own way back to the group. Our only hope would be if Fulton was prepared to risk the further splintering of his already depleted party by allowing Ngulmiri or Isaiah to search for us.
We were stuck on the horns of every lost person’s dilemma. Do we stay where we are or do we move on? We agreed that remaining in one place, particularly this place, would lead to the discovery some years hence of the two best-dressed skeletons in the Territory. Our only hope was to move.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any food in those packs?’ I asked.
Brian shook his head.
‘Our costumes, Glen’s props, odds and ends.’
‘If the horse isn’t carrying any food, it might have to become food.’
‘You know we look ridiculous, don’t you?’
‘I think we might be facing bigger problems than the incongruity of our appearance, ‘I replied. ‘We should keep moving.’
The rain intensified until I thought it might be possible to drown standing up, on land. We walked in the only direction open to us, and we’d both become so disoriented that the only direction we could safely eliminate as not being one in which we should be headed was up.
Time ceased to be measured in minutes or hours, and became instead manifest in the gathering strength of hunger pangs, and weakness in the limbs. Nightfall took us by surprise. The world went from grey to black with almost an audible thud. We were still hemmed in by scrub, so there didn’t seem any point in tethering the horse. We didn’t bother unpacking it, and allowed it to wander our narrow demesne searching for whatever grass it could find.
‘I don’t like this,’ Brian said. ‘This is the most hungry I’ve ever felt in my entire life.’
It wasn’t possible to light a fire, and we were obliged to lie as comfortably as we could in the mud. The distraction of conversation was denied us by the incessant drumming of the rain. Sleep was a remote likelihood, but I was so exhausted that it came upon me in spite of everything; as I slipped into a semi-conscious slumber, I marvelled at the body’s ability to adapt, however reluctantly, to the hostile demands of its immediate surroundings. Even through my intense discomfort I was grateful I wasn’t cold, and that the mosquitoes had been suppressed by the rain. If we’d been subjected to their harrowing attacks I think I might have lost my mind.
Brian and I awoke almost simultaneously to the ferocious droning of mosquitoes. It was dawn, and the rain had ceased. Instinctively we plastered mud on our faces, hair, and hands. The mozzies still swarmed noisily around our heads, but we were protected to some extent from their vicious little probes.
‘I’m starving,’ Brian said — a statement, as I told him, which could be added to the many redundant remarks he’d made in the course of his life.
‘Where’s the horse?’ he said suddenly.
Not wishing to trade further in the obvious, I confined myself to a straightforward expletive which sufficiently covered the fact that the horse was unequivocally gone. So we stood in our tuxedos, caked in mud, hungry and horseless — and then it started to rain again.
‘What day of the week is it, Brian?
‘Thursday, I think.’
‘Thursday, 5 November.’
‘Should that mean something?’
‘It’s the anniversary of our father’s death.’
‘Like I said, should that mean something?’
‘Why do you hate him?’
‘I don’t hate him. If I hated him, I’d celebrate his death. I barely remember him. I think what I feel is indifference, but even if I’d loved him, I’d swap all my memories for a piece of toast.’
It was Isaiah who found us. We’d been walking for a few hours, and the rain had eased, although the dark, ponderous clouds were a guarantee that more would fall. We’d come across some fruiting trees, but as we’d been warned in our training that some berries could kill or blind a careless forager, we resisted the temptation to ease our hunger. We filled our bellies with water, which gave us no energy but which went some way towards alleviating the nagging pain of an empty gut.
We were resting in an open patch of scrub, saying nothing to each other — only too aware that the situation was a desperate one — when Isaiah stepped from behind a bush and said, ‘Hey, boss.’ It was as if he’d materialised from the earth itself, and my first impulse was to crawl on my hands and knees and kiss his feet in gratitude. Not wishing to offend him, I settled for vigorously shaking his hand. Brian grabbed him by both shoulders and kissed him on each cheek — a continental gesture that took Isaiah entirely by surprise.