Corroboree (32 page)

The man whistled to his horse again, and the horse trotted over so that he could take its reins. Then he walked up to Eyre, and slung his rifle on to his back, and held out his hand.

‘Hallo, Dogger,' said Eyre.

‘Hallo yourself.'

Dogger looked down at Chatto and Rose, and then lifted an eyebrow. ‘Not bad shooting, what do you think? Must have been all of three hundred yards.'

‘You realise you've murdered them,' said Eyre.

Dogger smiled. ‘I've brought along some brandy. It's French, none of your home-made hotch. Mr Abbott gave it to me, at the Queen's Head. What you might call a going-away present.'

‘Dogger, this is no joke,' Eyre protested. These two men had papers from the Governor of New South Wales, not to mention the full authority of Colonel Gawler. If they don't come back, then the troopers are going to come looking for them. And they'll find them, too, if they have trackers as good as Joolonga.'

Christopher stood with his hands on his hips, staring at Eyre and Dogger in despair. ‘What on
earth
made you shoot them?' he asked, almost petulantly. ‘You could have come up behind them and made them lay down their weapons. You could have—well, I don't know, you could have hit them on the head, couldn't you? Good God, man, now we'll be wanted for murder, as well as aiding and abetting an escaped convict.'

‘Old hand, I'd prefer, if you don't mind, Mr Willis,' said Arthur.

‘Well, whatever you like,' Christopher replied. ‘But what you call yourself doesn't mean much, not when it comes to the law. You can call hanging a judicial termination of life by means of glottal suspension from entwined hemp; but that doesn't make it any less unpleasant. I saw Michael Magee hung. That was two years ago—the first man they ever hung in South Australia, and believe me I never want to see another. He was choking and gurgling and crying out, and the hangman was swinging from his legs to try and finish him off. I don't want to see that happen again, and I very particularly don't want it to happen to me.'

Joolonga came forward, chewing a large wodge of tobacco. ‘Excuse me, Mr Walker-sir, I think we can hide this killing.'

‘Hide it?' asked Eyre. ‘What do you mean?'

‘We can cut the bodies, Mr Walker-sir, so that it will look as if they have been killed by tribesmen. Some bad Murray River blackfellows passed this way not long ago, causing some damage. The troopers will believe it was them.'

Dogger lifted his rifle off his shoulder, and propped it carefully up against one of their supply packs. ‘He's right, you know. That's the best way to do it. I was going to suggest it myself, as a matter of fact.'

‘Nonetheless,' said Eyre caustically, ‘the fact remains that you killed them.'

Dogger sniffed, and walked around his horse to find his bottle of brandy.
'You
would have shot them, too, if you'd had the chance. It's a question of staying alive, that's all. And if you have to kill the other bastard to protect your own life; well, that's what you do. There isn't any room for fellows with too much religion; not beyond the black stump.'

He found the bottle, and pulled the cork out with his teeth. ‘You can call on the Lord Almighty as often as you wish when you're out here, all alone; and there are plenty of times when you get the feeling that the Lord Almighty is listening to you. Even answering back, bless Him. But
when you're out of water and out of luck, then there's only you. You and you and you alone; and sometimes not even a shadow to talk to.'

Eyre rubbed his eyes. The grey sand-flies were already swarming over Chatto's broken skull, and crawling like a living grey waistcoat over Rose's chest.

‘All right,' Eyre said to Joolonga. ‘Do what you have to.'

They saw the last of the ocean at Kurdnatta, on the third day out from Adelaide. They stopped to rest there at midday, under an extraordinary dark sky the colour of dark-grey mussel shells. Weeip and Midgegooroo went down to the beach to collect Goolwa cockles from the rocks; which they baked in a charcoal pit in the sand. The wind from the Gulf of St Vincent whipped the charcoal smoke through the grassy dimes, and blew a stray cinder into Weeip's eye.

Eyre sat back on a blanket staring out to sea. The waves sparkled in the sunlight like a dazzling treasure-chest filled with shining coins; and against their dazzle the naked figures of Weeip and Midgegooroo darkly danced, gathering treasure of their own. Flocks of muttonbirds, which had just begun to migrate fom the north in large numbers, fluttered and wheeled in the sky. Weeip kept his eyes open for exhausted birds which had fallen into the sea, and might be washed ashore.

Joolonga was silently sitting a few yards away on a sand-dune, his midshipman's hat perched on his head. He seemed to have been in an oddly subdued and uncommunicative
mood since Chatto and Rose had been shot. He had cut off the remains of Chatto's head with a sharpened stone knife, and slashed Rose's plump white chest into bloodless ribbons, so that it would be impossible for anyone to tell that he had been hit by a rifle ball. Then he had broken the bones of both bodies with a wooden club, and burned them. The fire had still been blazing fiercely when they rode out of camp; and as they had ridden northwards the oily black smoke that had risen from it had reminded them for miles and miles of what they had done.

It was only when Arthur had begun to sing,

‘The miller, the dusty old miller

He carries his flour in a sack
…

‘one of his ribald songs from the East End markets, that the mood of the expedition had begun to lighten. Only Joolonga had remained silent.

‘Yοu shouldn't talk to a blackfellow if he's sulking,' Dogger had advised Eyre. ‘He's probably thinking about one of his legends; some story from the dreamtime. What he had to do back there, burning those bodies, he probably thinks it was all told in a legend, hundreds and hundreds of years ago; and that he's going to have to pay for it, somehow. But don't worry. He'll get over it.'

Weeip, who had been listening, said, ‘Joolonga believes that Wulgaru the devil-devil will chase him, because he cut off Mr Chatto's head.'

It had been accepted without any discussion between them that Dogger was to join them. After all, Dogger was an experienced bushman, and he had convincingly proved himself to be an excellent shot. He had also come supplied with all his own provisions. That was what he had been doing away from home on those last few evenings before Eyre and his companions had set off: preparing his packs and his food and choosing a horse.

‘Right up until the last minute, I was still in two minds whether I ought to come with you or not,' he had explained over last night's camp-fire. ‘But then I heard
Constance at the front door, talking to those bounty-hunter fellows. She was telling them that Arthur had been staying with us; and that he was about to leave on your expedition with you; and that if they wanted to catch him they should beetle around to Government House just about as fast as those spindly legs of theirs could carry them.'

‘It was
Constance
who told Chatto and Rose where to find us?' Eyre had asked him, in astonishment.

‘Why are you so surprised?' Dogger answered him, laconically. ‘You know darn well that she didn't want you to go. She was always so afeared that you'd be killed by blackfellows, or bitten by a death adder, or that you'd run out of water and end up wearing nothing but your bones. She sent a boy to fetch Mr Chatto about ten minutes after you'd left the house. She told him she had some private information regarding Mr Mortlock here, but that she would only divulge it if the magistrate could be persuaded to keep you under a year's house arrest, for conspiracy, or whatnot. Anything to stop you going. She thought I wasn't around when she was a-talking to those fellows, but there I was up on the landing, and I'm like our friend Joolonga here. I was trained by practical experience. I can hear a bandicoot break wind from half-a-mile away; and I can certainly hear what Constance is a-whispering-of, even when she's out in the yard.'

‘Well, I'm shocked,' Eyre had told him.

‘Hm, no point in being shocked. A woman will do anything at all if she wants you serious enough.'

‘You had every intention of coming along on this expedition right from the start, didn't you?' Eyre had asked. ‘All that Constance gave you was a convenient excuse.'

‘Constance is a convenient excuse in her own right, my friend,' Dogger had grinned. ‘Is she a woman or is she a Yara-ma-yha-who?'

Weeip had giggled. Christopher had asked, with obvious impatience, ‘What on earth is a Yara-ma-yha-who?'

Dogger's weatherbeaten face had crinkled up like a dry wash-leather. ‘A Yara-ma-yha-who is a creature with such a big mouth that it can swallow a man up whole.' He had slapped his leg, and cackled out loud, and then he had said, ‘That could call for a drink, couldn't it? What do you say?'

On the beach at Kurdnatta, among the drifting sands, they ate a meal of roasted muttonbird, baked cockles, which Weeip called
‘pipi'
, biscuits, and dried dates. Then they drank a little tea, and gathered up their supplies in preparation for their first strike inland.

Just before they mounted up again, Arthur came over to Eyre and said, ‘Supposing they send the troopers after us?'

‘Well,' said Eyre. ‘Supposing they do?'

‘You wouldn't want more killing, would you?'

‘Not if I could possibly avoid it.'

‘But you wouldn't let them take me?'

Eyre shaded his eyes so that he could see Arthur more clearly. The wind whistled through the spinifex grass, and blew the mane of Eyre's horse so that it stung his hand.

‘I suppose I shouldn't have asked,' said Arthur, thrusting his hands into his pockets.

‘No,' said Eyre. ‘We have nature to contend with, just at this particular moment. Let's concern ourselves with troopers when we have to, but not before.'

Dogger was watching them, from a short distance away. With his long-barrelled rifle on his back, and his wide-brimmed hat tugged well down over his eyes, he looked like the archetypal Australian bushman. Eyre thought to himself that one day there would be a statue erected to men like him; and it would look exactly as Dogger did now, in bronze.

They rode slowly northwards under a high sun. There was no sound but the wind and the surf and the jingling of bridles. After a mile or so, Eyre turned in his saddle and listened and realised that he couldn't hear the surf any longer. Ahead of them lay miles and miles of yellow
grassy plain, dotted with saltbush and scrub, and far off to their right the first pink peaks of the Flinders mountains, mysteriously rising in the endless sea of the plains like enchanted and inaccessible islands.

In the distance, scores of big red kangaroos flew through the grass; sending up sudden bursts of pipits. There could have been more than a hundred of them.

Dogger drew his horse close up to Eyre's, and pointed towards the Flinders. Those are the mountains I was telling you about. There, you can see them for yourself now. That's where the Aborigines go for their ochre. It's sacred, as far as they're concerned. Magic. They dig it up, and then they mix it with water; or sometimes with emu fat; and they use orchid juice to stop it from running.'

He rambled on, occasionally taking a swig from his bottle of French brandy, telling Eyre about the day that he had ridden into the Flinders and seen a thousand emus gathered together at once. ‘I watched them for hours. I thought perhaps the end of the world had come. The strangest sight I ever saw.'

Eyre said, ‘What will Constance say, when she finds that you've gone?'

Dogger sniffed. ‘Ah, she won't mind. Well, she may. But what can she do about it? Besides, I was beginning to get suffocated, back there in Adelaide. It was like having a pillow pressed over my face. Too cosy and too polite for my liking.'

He was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘Besides, she never loved me. She never believed that I was good enough.'

‘That's not what she told me.'

‘You? You're her darling. As far as Constance is concerned, you're the best thing that happened to her since her cousin Ada drowned in a vat of maroon dye and left her fifty pounds.' He sneezed, and added, ‘I'm not blind, you know, Eyre; and I'm not deaf, either, although I'm sometimes drunk. A man knows what goes on inside his own house.'

Eyre looked at him cautiously, uncertain if he ought to say anything or not. He decided that it was probably wiser to keep quiet. Whatever Dogger's suspicions about him and Constance, his desire to come north on this expedition had plainly outweighed any husbandly outrage he might be feeling. He seemed more contented now than Eyre could ever remember him; sitting easily in his saddle, his eyes narrowed towards the horizon with an expression of deep and happy hunger, as if he could devour the distance just by staring at it.

Gradually, the sun began to sink on their left, and their shadows began to lean to their right. The Flinders Ranges, pink during the hottest part of the day, now began to glow a curious iridescent mauve. Eyre could see clumps of native pines on the foothills, and white, contorted gums. The ground itself wriggled with dry creekbeds and eroded gullies, most of which were bushy with bright lime-green acacia. More kangaroos fled across the plain like frightened waiters.

The grass began to give way to mallee scrub and clumps of sharp spinifex. Joolonga urged his horse a little way forward to catch up with Eyre and Christopher, and said, ‘We should make camp soon, Mr Walker-sir. We have ridden far today. Tomorrow the land will become more difficult.'

‘Another half-an-hour,' said Eyre. ‘The horses seem still quite fresh.'

Christopher said, ‘The
horses
may still be quite fresh, but
I'm
absolutely exhausted. I feel as if my backside has grown to twenty times its usual size.'