Castaway (2 page)

‘So these are the two blokes I’ve heard about? G’day, fellers.’

A big callused hand shook Sam’s and George’s hands in turn, almost crushing them in a bone-crunching grip. They looked up into the face of one of the tallest, biggest men they’d ever seen. A pair of bright blue eyes shone out from under jutting red eyebrows, which matched the red hair and the red beard that framed them. The voice that went with the face was loud and deep, and laughed uproariously when George said:
‘I always knew I got my red hair from someone.’

‘Yep, the McAllister clan blueys, that’s us. One pops up every generation or so, they reckon. Looks like you’re it this time round, young feller.’

Mungo McAllister was Mac’s older brother. He was six feet five inches tall and powerfully built, with broad, muscled shoulders. The backs of his enormous hands were freckled and sun-spotted, and wiry red-blond hairs curled over his forearms. Beside him, Mac looked almost short, in spite of being six feet two inches himself.

‘You haven’t gotten any shorter with old age, Beans, that’s for sure.’ Mac grinned at his brother. ‘It’s great to see you again!’

The two men clapped each other on the back, and walked up the steps to the verandah. Sam and George watched them disappear inside the house, and both exhaled simultaneously.

‘Whoa, how big is
that
guy!’

‘I think my hand is broken.’

George stopped shaking his hand for a moment and turned to his brother. ‘Why did Dad call him Beans? I thought his name was Uncle Mungo.’

‘It’s a nickname. Mungo – mung beans. Or maybe he grew fast like a
string
bean?’

‘Doesn’t look much like a string bean now.’ George considered this for a moment. ‘More like a giant red
pumpkin, maybe. How long’s he gunna stay?’

‘Dunno. But it doesn’t look like
you’re
gunna get called a string bean for a lo-o-ong time. Maybe we could call you Spud, cos you’re still so close to the ground!’

Sam dodged around his brother’s punches and laughed. ‘C’mon, let’s go feed your guinea pigs. I want to see if there’s any babies yet.’

At dinner that night Sam and George discovered that Uncle Mungo was staying for a few weeks. He had just sold his cattle station in the Kimberley, in the far northwest of Western Australia, and hadn’t decided exactly what he was going to do next, so he was visiting his younger brother for the first time in fifteen years.

‘Y’ lookin’ well, Jock,’ Uncle Mungo said to the old man seated across the table. ‘Still keepin’ the neighbours honest?’

Old Jock’s wrinkly face split into a grin, and he nodded vigorously. ‘Yep. Not much gets past this feller. Ev’ry time that flamin’ snake sticks his nose across the boundary, Ol’ Jock knows about it, don’t you worry.’

Old Jock had lived on Brumby Plains for as long as Sam and George could remember. He was well past retiring age, but he insisted on working for his keep, and still poked around the fence lines, keeping an eye
on them and doing small repairs. He had a long-running border war with the O’Dearns, their shifty neighbours to the east.

‘So, Mungo, you’ll be here for the first muster! We might have a spare bull catcher for you.’ Sarah smiled at her brother-in-law. ‘That is, if it’s not going to rain again.’ She glanced at Mac, who shook his head and grimaced.

‘Yeah, it’s a bit funny, the weather,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a really late wet season, but now it won’t seem to finish. Every time it nearly dries out enough to put the buffalo back on the flood plains, it rains again. Never seen it like this before. But I reckon it might be right now. Got a muster planned in a few days’ time. We can handle the cows and calves ourselves, but the bulls and the new buffalo are still a bit wild, so we’ll get Marty and his boys out to give us a hand. If I can get a chopper, that is. Everyone’s in the same boat now, having to work around the weather.’

‘A bit late for rain, isn’t it?’ said Uncle Mungo, helping himself to more roast lamb. ‘It’s already
June
.’

‘Yeah, it’s weird, all right,’ said Mac. ‘And it’s not just rain. We’ve had a couple of decent storms too. We had a good one a month ago – blew in and howled all night, but didn’t do too much damage, just a few branches over fences, that sort of thing.’

Sarah put her knife and fork down. ‘It’s
climate change
. Scientists have been talking about it for years and no one listened, and now we’re starting to see it. There’s been crazy weather all over the planet – hurricanes, floods, droughts, really high temperatures, and the ice caps are breaking up and melting. We could all be in real trouble in a few years.’

Uncle Mungo scoffed. ‘Come on, Sarah, you’re not fallin’ for that tree-huggin’ stuff, are ya? I reckon the only reason those blokes whinge about the so-called greenhouse effect is because they didn’t buy shares in the oil industry in time. Sour grapes.’ He laughed. ‘The climate’s always changed. Remember when we were kids, and how cold it used to get at home? Hardly ever get a frost down there now.’

‘My point exactly,’ said Sarah, a little tersely. ‘We haven’t had storms out of season like this as for long as anyone up here can remember. The climate’s changing, Mungo, and it’s going to affect everybody sooner or later.’

Uncle Mungo just shook his big head and laughed again, directing his attention back to his plate, but Sam, listening to them across the table, felt a tinge of worry nibbling around his edges. The weather
was
strange. In his thirteen years, he’d never known a storm to happen once the Wet was over. Something wasn’t right.

The next morning Mac took Uncle Mungo for a drive around the station. Sam and George piled in the back and went along for the ride. They crisscrossed the station from north to south and east to west, finally pulling up a couple of hours later at the camping spot on Deception Point. They unpacked some lunch, Sam and George lit a fire to boil a billy of water, and the four sat around comfortably eating cold roast lamb sandwiches made with Sarah’s freshly baked bread, and drinking pannikins of hot sweet tea.

‘Lovely spot, this,’ said Uncle Mungo, gazing out to the sea. ‘Had one just like it on my place, where you could get away from home and camp out for a few days, fish the salt water.’ He took another huge bite of his sandwich.

‘What are you planning to do after this, Beans? Now you’ve sold your place, I mean,’ said Mac.

Uncle Mungo chewed thoughtfully, his big red beard moving up and down. ‘Thought that now I’ve got a bit of money and a lot of time, I might go and check out the ancestors. You know, go and look up some of the family in the old country.’

‘What’s the old country?’ said George.

‘Yer grandmother’s country, Estonia.’

‘We have a grandmother from Estonia? I never knew that,’ said George, completely mystified.

Mac scuffed his boot in the sand, and said, ‘Well, she died when I was about your age, George. Guess I never thought to tell you about where she came from. Just never came up, I s’pose.’

‘Where’s Estonia?’

‘It’s in Eastern Europe,’ said Uncle Mungo. ‘Used to be impossible to go there, bein’ behind the Iron Curtain. But some time back the Russians changed their government, and now anyone can go there.’

Sam and George pondered this information for a while. ‘If your mother came from Estonia, how did she meet your father then? He’s not from Estonia, is he?’ asked Sam.

‘No, he’s from Scotland. They met during the war, in England. Our Pa was a soldier in the British army, and he met our mother when she came to England with her family to escape the war in Estonia. She was only a girl, about seventeen when they met,’ said Uncle Mungo.

‘Was she a refugee?’

‘Yeah,’ said Mungo. ‘Lots of people had to make a run for it when the bombs started droppin’. Yer grandmother’s family escaped and went to England, and they lived there fer a while. Yer grandparents married in England, and they came out to Australia in 1946, right after the war.’

‘Wow,’ said George. ‘We’ve got cousins we’ve never met!’

‘That’s why I thought I’d go see if any of ’em are still there. S’posed to be a nice place fer a holiday, they reckon, so even if I don’t find anyone, it’ll still be okay.’

They went for a walk along the beach before they left. George darted ahead and picked up a few interesting pieces of driftwood while Sam trailed along behind the two men, looking at the sea. The wind was blowing strongly from the east, and the waves slapped at the shoreline with more force than usual. In the distance he could see a long low mass of grey cloud, and high, fast moving clouds above their heads. The air felt heavy and strange. In spite of the hot sun, Sam felt an involuntary shiver ripple along his spine and prickle the back of his neck. He was very glad when they climbed back into the Land Cruiser and turned for home.

That night Mac, Sarah and Mungo were talking in the living room while Sam and George played chess on the dining table after dinner. The phone rang and Mac went out to the office to answer it. He came back after a few minutes looking a bit bothered.

‘That was Harry Parker,’ and to Mungo he added, ‘he’s our neighbour to the west, across the river. Good bloke. Harry said there’s a storm warning declared for the coast east of here, and it’s moving this way pretty fast. We could see it in a day or so.’

He frowned at Sarah. ‘That puts the kybosh on the muster then. I’ll have to put it off. We’re having a slow start this year, that’s for sure. I’ll go and phone Marty and the boys and tell them to stay in town till we know what’s happening. No point in getting them out here yet.’

Sam felt the prickle at the back of his neck again.

Monday was a school day. In the morning the sky was overcast, and a fitful wind gusted occasionally, but otherwise it was quite calm. Jaz Hilaby, their governess, had arrived back from her weekend in town and was talking in the kitchen with Sarah after breakfast. Sam and George dawdled over to the schoolroom.

‘I was hoping we would’ve had a storm by now, instead of school,’ moaned George. ‘How much longer till the holidays?’

‘Two weeks.’

‘Tess and Darcy still coming out?’

‘Yeah.’

Sam opened the door of the little caravan, and they stepped up into it, opening the windows and showing the door to a bush rat they startled on top of a desk. It scampered up the huge African mahogany tree that shaded the van, and sat on a limb, staring at them with bright, alert eyes.

The caravan was divided into two rooms. The larger area was used as the classroom, and had two desks and a table in it. A computer and a small printer sat on the table which was also the governess’s work space. A few shelves held rows of books and oddments. There was a large whiteboard at one end, and a pinboard stuck to another wall, covered in pictures, artwork and a map of the world. There was a second, smaller room that was used as the radio room for the half-hour School of the Air lesson that they each had every day.

Sam turned on the radio to let it warm up, and found his maths workbook. He really didn’t feel like school today. Still, they’d almost finished the term’s work. He glanced up at the map on the pinboard and went over to have a closer look.
There it is … Estonia.
It didn’t look terribly big. He stared at it for a few moments, trying to imagine what it must be like, and then Jaz stepped up into the caravan, and the school day began.

The storm came in a rush. One minute the McAllisters, Old Jock and Jaz were quietly sitting around the table after dinner, the next the sky fell on them. Lightning had been crackling away in the east for a while, and the wind had picked up in strength, gusting in at the windows, and moaning through the tops of the trees around the house. Suddenly there was a blinding flash which lit up the house as if the walls had vanished, and instantaneously a deafening explosion sounded directly above their heads. Missiles pelted the roof and they
heard glass smashing on the floor of the kitchen.

Mac leapt up from the table and ran to the kitchen door, Sam and George close behind him. A large chunk of a tree branch, splintered and twisted, lay on the floor in the wreckage of the window, with glass and torn flywire strewn across the room. The sharp, strange smell of ozone hung in the air.

‘Wow! The lightning must have hit a tree outside,’ Mac said. ‘I think we better take this storm a bit more seriously. You guys help clean this up while Mungo and I close the cyclone shutters.’

They came back inside fifteen minutes later, soaked to the skin from the driving rain that had blasted them as they lowered the heavy shutters and secured them against the windows.

‘Should’ve done that earlier,’ said Mac, shrugging off his wet shirt and drying himself with a towel. ‘But I didn’t think we’d need to go as far as dropping the shutters. I hope nothing else is damaged.’

Sarah made mugs of hot chocolate, and everyone sat close together in the living room, reading or playing cards, but not talking much because it was next to impossible to hear each other – the thunder was too loud. It rolled and rumbled and cracked without ceasing for over an hour, and lightning struck close by a few more times. Fierce, howling winds kept the house shivering
and rattling until gradually the storm moved on and the sound of steady rain on the metal roof was all that remained.

Sam and George woke early the next morning. It was barely daylight, but they were anxious to see what damage had occurred during the night, and Sam was worried about the horses. They left the house before anyone else was up, and ran over to the horse paddock. The ground was littered with broken branches and leaves, and the surrounding bush had a decidedly battered look about it. The fences appeared to be okay, as far as they could see, but the horses were huddled in the middle of the paddock looking skittish and nervous. Sam called to them, and his mare, Holly, threw her head up and trotted over to him. The others followed her but they danced around, edgy and upset.

‘They’ve really had a fright, haven’t they?’ said Sam as he climbed through the fence to pat Holly and her little foal. He ran his hands over her neck and legs, and turned to look at the others. They all seemed fine, but Sabre, the big bay gelding, had a nasty gash on his front nearside leg. He stood apart from the others, shivers rippling down his skin from time to time.

‘Oh no, poor Sabre,’ said George. ‘Is it very bad?’

‘Looks pretty bad to me. It might need stitching.’ He moved towards the gelding, but Sabre rolled his eyes and stepped away. Sam spoke gently to him and moved closer, and the big bay horse quietened down and let Sam rub his neck and back while he had a closer look at the wound.

‘Let’s go and tell Dad. I hope the guinea pigs are okay. Hey, maybe the schoolroom blew away – let’s check it out.’

George’s guinea pigs were inside the hay shed near the horse paddock, and proved to be none the worse for the night’s excitement. As they rounded the machinery shed and walked back to the house via the schoolroom, both boys stopped in amazement.

‘Oh my God,’ breathed George. ‘He heard my prayers …’

The schoolroom caravan was still in the same place, but it didn’t look the same. The huge African mahogany which shaded it for most of the day had fallen down, completely crushing the van. It was totally destroyed.

The schoolroom turned out to be the worst casualty of the storm. Sabre needed five stitches, which Mac put in with Sam’s help, and apart from several shattered trees and a lot of fallen branches, the homestead area was in good shape. The kitchen window would have to be repaired, but otherwise the house itself was undamaged.

‘Well,’ said Mac at breakfast, after they had all surveyed the effects of the storm, ‘looks like you fellers won’t be doing any schoolwork today.’

George’s face lit up with delight, while Sam tried unsuccessfully to look as mournful as possible about the demise of the caravan.

‘Oh, I don’t know, Mac. I’m sure I could find something for them to do.’ Jaz grinned as the boys began to object. ‘Just as well we posted the last of your work off already. You’re all finished for this term anyway.’

Sarah smiled at them. ‘You can go with Dad to check all the fence lines first, but after that we’ll do something about getting that tree off your schoolroom. We might be able to salvage something out of it. Lucky for us the holidays start soon!’

Mac, Uncle Mungo, Sam and George headed off in the Land Cruiser, a coil of fencing wire, a chainsaw and tools in the back. The ground was relatively dry as the rain hadn’t lasted very long. The storm had dropped trees across several fence lines, and they spent a couple of hours sawing them into sections and dragging them away with the vehicle. As they repaired the last broken wire and strained up the fence, George’s stomach rumbled loudly.

‘We’ll drive across to Deception Point and check out the damage over that side,’ said Mac, ‘and then
we’ll go home for lunch. I can’t hear if the chainsaw’s running properly with George’s stomach making so much noise.’

Everything at the campsite looked storm-lashed but otherwise intact. Sam and George headed down to the beach. It was low tide, and lots of debris had been left behind by the retreating waters. They fossicked along the shoreline, finding among the trash of driftwood and rubbish a tangled length of fish net and some splintered planking. George found a waterlogged school atlas. He put down the water bottle he was carrying, and picked up the soggy book.

‘Hah! Looks like ours wasn’t the only school that got wrecked last night. I wonder how this got here?’ He tossed it aside.

‘What’s that thing out on the reef?’ Sam shaded his eyes and peered out to sea. George did the same.

‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Looks like a heap of seaweed maybe, or …’

‘No, it looks like a boat or something. Hey, Dad!’

Mac and Uncle Mungo appeared over the edge of the dune.

‘Look, out there on the edge of the reef. Can you see that black shape?’

The two men squinted in the direction Sam was pointing. There was definitely something there. The four
of them carefully made their way out onto the exposed reef. The black shape was indeed a boat. Or it had been once. The hull had been badly damaged, and it leaned drunkenly to one side on its keel. The remains of the wheelhouse and deck hung at odd angles, splintered and shattered beyond repair. It had obviously been through a bad storm, no doubt the same one that had battered Brumby Plains.

‘Where do you reckon it’s from?’ said Uncle Mungo.

‘No idea, but it must be old. See that wooden tiller? You don’t see many boats like that anymore. I saw one in Darwin once that had this old-fashioned steering system.’

Sam was poking around nearby. There were bits of broken planking, scraps of cloth and wrought iron bolts crusty with age. He stopped and bent to pick something up.

‘Hey look – a saucepan!’ It was a blackened pot. The heavy cast iron was cracked on one side, and the handle held on with wire. He tossed it into the hull where it landed with a dull clunk. There were some battered cooking utensils scattered around, but not much else. George climbed into the hull. It rocked alarmingly and Mac told him to get down.

‘There’s a name painted on the side – see?’ said Sam. The words didn’t make any sense to anyone.

‘Looks like a foreign boat,’ said Mac finally. ‘It could have been a dinghy come adrift from a trawler – we get a lot of illegal fishermen up here.’

‘There was a piece of netting over on the beach,’ said George.

‘Flamin’ illegal fishermen,’ snorted Uncle Mungo. ‘Flamin’ foreign thieves comin’ here and takin’ our fish. The navy oughta blow ’em all outta the water. Y’ better let Customs know, Mac.’

‘Yeah, I will. We should get back. The tide’s already coming in.’

As they climbed up the dune to the camp, Sam turned to gaze at the wreckage. There was something else in the water.

‘Dad …?’

‘Holy hell, will you look at that!’ Uncle Mungo had seen it too. An enormous crocodile was cruising slowly around the edge of the reef, just metres from where they had been standing a few minutes before.

‘Hey, that’s old Lumpy! The croc we saw up at the rookery, remember? Haven’t seen him around here for at least ten years. The storm must have upset him, and he’s moved back out into the river again.’

They all watched intently as the huge reptile swam slowly and sinuously past the reef, his head and back clearly visible out of the water.

‘That’s a monster!’ Uncle Mungo was impressed.

‘We’ll have to watch out when we come down here, if Lumpy’s back. He’s a cranky old man. Remember how he rushed our boat last time? You blokes be very careful.’

On the way back to the house they found a couple of broken wires on the fence line leading from Deception Point. The fence needed tightening up in a few sections as well.

‘We won’t stop now,’ said Mac. ‘You blokes can come down here on the quad bike and fix it this afternoon while Uncle Mungo and I check the weaner paddock fence line. That can’t wait.’

‘Oh-oh … I left my water bottle at the camp, Dad,’ said George sheepishly.

‘Pick it up when you go back this afternoon, okay?’

Sarah, Jaz and Old Jock had been busy clearing away fallen branches from around the homestead, and had got the tractor ready to lift the tree off the school caravan. Lunch was the first priority, though, and they had just finished eating when they heard the whap-whap-whap of rotor blades coming towards the house. Sam and George watched from the verandah as a large Jetranger helicopter landed on the grass a couple of hundred metres in front of them. A door opened and a tall, lanky figure climbed out, folded itself in half and
scurried away from the chopper. When it was clear of the rotors, the figure unfolded itself and ambled casually towards them. It looked vaguely familiar.

‘Hey, that’s Charles! What’s he doing flying around in helicopters?’ yelled George happily.

He and Sam raced down the stairs. They had first met Charles Rowntree when he was working as an undercover Federal Police officer trying to catch a gang of bird smugglers who were operating on Brumby Plains. Sam had been very suspicious of Charles at that time, but he now considered the eccentric Englishman practically a family member.

‘Well, well, fancy meeting you two characters! Hello-hello-hello – wonderful to see you both,’ he said, his bushy eyebrows and brown ponytail keeping time with the handshakes.

‘G’day, Charles!’ Mac had come up behind them, and he shook hands with the visitor too. ‘This is a bit of a surprise! Improved your mode of transport, eh?’

‘Ah, yes. Bit of an improvement on battered old white vans, isn’t it? Actually, I’ve been seconded to Customs for a while. Get to hurtle around in flying machines all over the countryside. Great fun!’

‘Well, you must be psychic then, because I was just about to ring Customs. Come inside …’

The pilot shut down the engine and joined them as
they trooped into the house. Mac introduced the visitors to his brother Mungo, and to the governess Jaz, and explained about the boat wreckage down at Deception Point while Sarah poured tea.

‘Well, we’re keeping pace with you, Mac. We were doing some reconnaissance along the coast and came across it just now, so I thought I’d nip up and see you about it.’

‘Dad thinks it might be a dinghy from a trawler,’ broke in George. ‘Sam and I spotted it from the beach, didn’t we, Sam?’

‘It may well be just that, George. However, we’ve had reports of another group of suspected illegal immigrants heading towards Darwin and coming through this way, which is somewhat unusual. Two boats landed at the Tiwi Islands last week with fourteen people on board, and we understood there were a couple more out there still. We stopped and had a look at the wreck at the Point, but there’s not enough evidence to say what it is, or rather, was, and certainly no sign of any people, so you’re probably right, Mac. Just the same, we want you to keep a sharp eye out, in case anyone might have come ashore.’

‘When are you fellers goin’ to do yer job properly an’ blow these boats outta the water when you spot ’em, eh?’ Uncle Mungo said loudly. ‘Underminin’ our
way of life, they are. Got no business comin’ here, none at all.’

‘
Mungo!
’ said Sarah in a shocked tone. Jaz made a quiet exclamation and looked askance at the big red-haired man.

Charles just raised his eyebrows, nodded at Uncle Mungo and said, ‘Yes, that’s how a lot of people feel about illegal arrivals. But we’d have a bit of trouble on our hands if we just started shooting people on the water.’

‘Yeah, ease up, Mungo, that’s a bit savage. They’re refugees. They’ve got nowhere else to go,’ said Mac.

‘A lot of miserable queue jumpers is what they are,’ growled Uncle Mungo. ‘Come over here because they don’t like things in their own country, get on the dole and Medicare, and we’re the poor beggars who pay for ’em. Oughta sink the boats before they get here. You let one lot in, they’ll
all
come.’

‘But aren’t they running away from war and stuff?’ asked Sam. He could think of nothing worse than being forced to leave his home.

‘Well they should stay at home and sort out their own country’s problems, not bring them over to us. And they’re
not
refugees,’ Uncle Mungo said, looking at Mac. ‘They’re flamin’ illegal immigrants!’ He wrapped his big hands around his mug and glowered into his tea.

Jaz picked up her cup, her face stony, and went into the kitchen. Sam elbowed George, and the two of them excused themselves from the table, and slipped outside.