Corroboree (52 page)

Eyre was exhausted, both by days of riding and by disappointment, and he found it increasingly hard to keep his eyes focused on Minil as she sat by the fire. He dozed, and dreamed, and woke up; and she was still sitting there, naked, tearing voraciously at handfuls of horse-flesh, her attention focused on feeding, and nothing else; the single-mindedness of a wild animal. When she had sex with him, she thought of nothing but sex. When she drank, she thought of nothing but drinking. Now she was presented with nearly seventy pounds of uneaten horse-flesh, she thought of nothing but feeding.

The grease ran down her chin and over her breasts. Her eyes were half-closed but totally concentrated on what she was doing. As he watched her, Eyre began to feel very lonely, because he knew that he could never get to know her, not closely, not a girl who saw daily life as a continuous struggle to ward off the dangers of tomorrow. Minil was probably right and he was probably wrong; particularly in the outback of Australia; but all the same he would rather invest his trust in God, and the fairness of destiny, than in nine pounds of half-raw horse-meat.

He slept, and dreamed of Mount Deception and Mount Hopeless; and that future citizens of Australia would damn him for giving them such defeatist names. But then he woke up and thought that nobody would ever find out what he had christened them, because he would never reach Adelaide alive, or, if he did, it would be in deep disgrace, a waster of money and a wanton killer of innocent Aborigines. And if Captain Sturt had to wear the green bonnet simply because Eyre had failed to penetrate northwards to the inland sea, or discover any opals or gold and silver; then he could imagine what an outcast he would become. ‘Not-Fall-Over' indeed. How could anybody have called him that?

He slept again; and woke up again; and when he woke up Minil was still squatting by the fire, devouring raw crimson lumps of horse-meat. Eyre looked at the stacks of meat remaining on the plates, and saw that she must have consumed nearly twenty pounds. Her stomach was bulging out as if she were pregnant, and glossy with fat; but she continued to pull at the meat with her sharpened teeth as if she were ravenously hungry.

He propped himself up on his elbow, and watched her in silent fascination. She had given up bothering to cook the meat, and now she was cramming everything she could into her mouth: bloody lumps of raw horse-liver, stringy shreds of neck; even lungs, like pale gory balloons.

Towards dawn, he lay back and dreamed of Yonguldye, disfigured and wounded, and hunting him to the ends of the desert. He woke up again with a peculiar jolt, and Minil was lying by the ashes of the fire, asleep at last. He crawled over towards her, and covered her with a blanket. He didn't know whether to kiss her or not. She seemed like a girl from another age altogether; not repulsive; not frightening; but utterly different from anyone he had ever met before, even Yanluga.

For a moment, he lifted the blanket again and looked at her. Her face, pouting and black, with its decoratively scarred cheeks, one hand touching her lips the way children do. Her breasts, swollen and shiny with grease. Her hugely distended stomach; and her unconsciously parted thighs, revealing labia as pink as parakeelya petals. He covered her up, and went over to the fire to brew himself a small pot of tea. Perhaps she disturbed him because she was the personification of Australia, this continent that he had so badly wanted to conquer, and failed.

Perhaps, on the other hand, she disturbed him because in an extraordinary way he had fallen in love with her; or at the very least, felt deeply reluctant to be parted from her. Unlike Charlotte, she had seen him both at his very best and at his very worst; and had accepted him without question. Charlotte had always adored his fashionable
clothes, his silk neckties and his fancy patterned waistcoats. Minil had first met him when he was naked.

Charlotte had been delighted by his cheek and by his confidence. Minil had seen him stare at the endless saltlakes of the Southern Australian outback, and give in.

What love do I owe, he thought to himself; and to whom? Do I owe anything to anybody? And he tried to think of his father in Derbyshire, and what his father would have said; and it was peculiarly dizzying to think that his father was probably awake now, and going on his rounds, all those thousands of miles away, on a winter's afternoon; safe and slow through the rain-dewed Dales of England.

He was woken up by the sun, lancing under his eyelids. He blinked, and raised his head, and his neck was stiff as a board. Dogger was already awake, frying up some slices of horse-meat with pepper and salt. Minil was squatting not far away, her hand covering her face, which meant that what she was doing was private. Dogger called it ‘picking daisies'. Eyre stood up, and limped towards Dogger on a leg that fizzed with pins-and-needles.

‘Good morning, chum,' said Dogger. ‘Fancy a slice of beast-of-burden?'

Eyre shook his head. ‘I feel as if I've eaten the whole of that horse, tail-first.'

‘I think Miss Minil beat you to it,' grinned Dogger. ‘Have you seen the size of her belly this morning?'

‘I watched her in the night.'

‘Well, I don't know how they do it, these Day and Martin's.'

Eyre said, ‘Don't call her that. Do you mind?' and there was enough sharpness in his voice to make Dogger look up. Day and Martin's was a popular brand of boot-polish, and a name commonly given to blacks. Dogger prodded his frying meat, and made a face; but he was too much of an old hand to argue. Arguments caused bitterness; and even the best-equipped and most well-fed of expeditions could be ruined by bitterness.

‘When you've finished eating, we'll go on,' said Eyre. ‘We should reach our cache of food by nightfall tomorrow, if we make good time.'

‘Always supposing there
is
a cache of food there,' said Dogger.

‘Of course there's a cache of food there. Christopher promised.'

‘Well, Christopher is Christopher, my old chum,' said Dogger, ‘but food is food.'

‘It will be there,' Eyre asserted.

Dogger said, ‘You're a greater morepork than I thought you were.'

‘What does that mean?'

Dogger grinned. ‘It simply means that you'll always believe the best of people who are out to do you down; and the worst of people who like you. It's a commonenough disease. Poor old Joolonga had quite a dose of it, as far as I could see.'

‘And what have you ever done?' Eyre demanded. ‘You came along on this expedition uninvited, and since then we've heard nothing from you but philosophic advice, and salty aphorisms, and twopenny-halfpenny mottoes.'

‘Did I ever offer anything else?' asked Dogger.

Eyre stood in the morning sunlight looking at Dogger carefully. His shadow stretched thin across the salt-lake; his hair was ruffled by the wind. ‘You're trying to tell me something,' he said, at last.

Dogger turned his meat over, and sniffed at it with exaggerated relish. ‘Only a twopenny-halfpenny motto,' he said.

‘Tell me,' Eyre insisted.

Dogger sniffed. ‘What about a rhyme?' he suggested.

‘A rhyme?'

‘What about, “When you fear the pointing-bone, Fear much more the John-and-Joan.” Now, that's good, don't you think. You never knew I was a poet, did you?'

Eyre tugged at his curls, and then propped his hands
on his hips, and then turned away. ‘God in Heaven,' he said.

Dogger forked out some curled-up horse-meat, and began solemnly to chew.

‘God in Heaven,' said Eyre again; and then, ‘Do you really think that?'

‘Well,
I
didn't do it,' said Dogger, ‘and I know
you
didn't do it; and nor do I believe that Weeip or Midgegooroo had any hand in it. So who does that leave?'

Eyre walked a little way away and stared for a long time at the western horizon. He knew what Dogger was saying; he had thought the same thought himself. ‘John-and-Joan' meant ‘homosexual'; and there had only been one homosexual on this expedition; and that was Christopher. The man upon whom they were relying so heavily for their next cache of supplies. The man who, for whatever motive he may have done it, was circumstantially most likely to have poisoned Arthur Mortlock.

The following day, another of their pack-horses collapsed, this time with a splintered fetlock joint; and Eyre shot it straight away. Everything that the horse was carrying they had to discard; all their tenting equipment, all their spare clothing, their pick and their shovel.

They left the horse's body lying where it was, and rode on; while up above them the vultures began to collect, like flies on a dirty window.

The weather was unexpectedly cool, and the skies were overcast with thin woolly clouds. They enjoyed the relief
from the overpowering sun; but the coolness brought higher humidity, and when they made camp for the night it was clear that all the half-dried horse-meat they had brought with them was begining to spoil. Eyre ate as much of it as he could, but he gagged on the last gamey piece, and gave up. The day after was blazing again, up to 115 degrees. They threw all their remaining meat away, and decided to ride as long and as hard as they could, until they reached the cache of provisions which Christopher was supposed to have left for them. Eyre had calculated that even if Christopher had taken ten days to return to Adelaide from Parachilna, he should have taken no more than another five days to reach the agreed spot, sixteen miles west of Woocalla.

They reached the cache late in the evening, under a sunset of trumpeting crimson. Eyre had seen from some way away that something was wrong; and that the stores had been disturbed.

‘Maybe it's only dingers,' Dogger had suggested; but when Eyre dismounted and walked across to it, there was no question at all who had been here. Barrels of flour had been dug up, and emptied all over the sand. Biscuits, tea, sugar, and salt were flung around everywhere; not stolen, but wantonly destroyed. Most serious of all, three large barrels of water had been deliberately split open, and left to drain into the dry soil. There was no message, no letter, not even a marker to show who had left the cache, and for whom.

‘I suppose the nearest water-hole is Woocalla itself,' said Eyre.

Dogger nodded, and couldn't even spit. ‘We could try heading due south, to see if we could make it to Adelaide without taking on any water at Woocalla, but in this heat I doubt if we'd get too far. It's not us I'm worried about so much, it's the horses. And the last thing I've got a fancy to do is to walk there.'

‘We'll go to Woocalla,' said Eyre. ‘If we ride for most of the night, we should be there by morning.'

Minil asked, ‘No rest tonight?'

Eyre shook his head. ‘Definitely, no rest.'

They turned westwards, and rode through the thickening sunset with the sun glaring right into their eyes like the open furnace of an iron-foundry. At last, however, it was dark; although still stifling; and they rode through scrub and spinifex grass, their horses stumbling with almost every step, and they felt as if they were going to have to ride like this forever.

Just before dawn, after the moon had gone, they rested. They lit a fire, and brewed a little scummy tea; and then, when it was light, they set off again, leaving their fire burning in the way that Aborigines always used to. Aborigines believed that fire cleansed and fertilised the land; and so they would often burn hundreds of acres at a time, a style of agricultural husbandry which enraged the white settlers, especially the sheep-farmers. Sheep were too stupid to run in front of a fire; they invariably stood still as the flames approached, and allowed themselves to be roasted alive. ‘I've been through some red steers,' Dogger used to say, ‘when there so many sheep being burned that you only had to sniff and you could imagine yourself at Charles's Chop House.'

They reached Woocalla a little after ten. But as they neared the water-hole, with its white gum trees and its mulga scrub, Eyre lifted himself up in his stirrups and peered carefully ahead.

‘What's the matter?' asked Dogger.

‘I'm not sure. Just a feeling.'

‘Aha. You're beginning to grow into a bushman. What kind of a feeling?'

‘Well, look, there are no birds around the water-hole, like there usually are; and no animals. Not even an emu. Now, what could be keeping them away?'

‘The same buggers who broke into our provisions, I'd guess,” said Dogger.

‘That's what I'd guess, too,' agreed Eyre.

Minil said, ‘You think they wait for us?'

‘This is the nearest water-hole. They must have been fairly sure that we'd head straight here.'

Eyre said to Dogger, ‘Give me your rifle. The big one.'

Dogger drew his long hunting-gun out of its canvas holster, and swung it over. ‘It's all primed and loaded,' he said. He didn't say that this was the first time he had ever allowed anyone else to use it.

Eyre lifted the heavy gun and aimed low towards the mulga bushes around the water-hole. He fired, a great bellow of a shot that echoed for miles; and foliage burst in all directions.

Immediately—even before the echoes had died away—twenty or thirty black warriors rose from the rim of the water-hole, raising their spears and their war-clubs; and they screamed at Eyre with a high, unearthly ferocity.

‘Aha,' sniffed Dogger. ‘I do believe they're trying to tell us something.'

‘Where's the next water-hole?' Eyre wanted to know.

‘Due west is the only one I've heard of,' said Dogger. ‘A place the Aborigine hunters call Mulka.'

‘West? But we want to go east.'

‘There's nothing that way; not east; not within living distance.'

‘All right,' nodded Eyre. ‘In that case, we'd better go west.'

‘We've got to get past these blackfellows first.'

Four or five Aborigines were already running towards them, screeching and waving spears. Eyre nudged his horse to the right, and clicked at it, and gradually they began to circle away from the water-hole, hoping that the tribesmen would be satisfied by having chased them away. But the tribesmen suddenly realised what they were doing, and changed course so that they could cut them off.