The Third Day, The Frost (13 page)

Chapter
Sixteen

Hunger’s a funny thing. It goes in stages.
First you’re so hungry you think you’ll faint. Your stomach is one
huge empty refrigerator: the light’s on, the door’s open, but
there’s nothing in it. Then that stage passes and it gets better.
You don’t think about food nearly as much, and the idea of food
actually makes you a bit sick. You can go on for quite a while when
you’re in that stage.

I kept walking for a long time, avoiding any
clear spaces, any roads or fire trails. I stuck to the thickest
bush, trying to stay invisible, not just to anyone on the ground
but to people in the sky too. It was extra tiring, having to
concentrate so hard all the time.

When you’re lost in the bush you’re meant to
go back to your last-known point and start again. I’d had that
drummed into me often enough. I couldn’t do it though, because I
didn’t really have a last-known point. Or if I did, it was the
wharf at Cobbler’s Bay. I could have gone back there, but would
they have lent me a map and a compass? I didn’t think so.

I just kept walking, though my walk soon
became a limp – eventually a very slow one indeed. I was looking
for any place I could recognise. I’d arranged to meet the others at
a river crossing on Baloney Creek, on a logging track that came off
the main Cobbler’s Bay road. It was a good fishing spot that a lot
of Wirrawee people knew about, but now I didn’t have a clue where
either the creek or the road might be. I crossed so many creeks as
the day went on, some of them quite large, but they didn’t have
little signs telling me their names.

When the sun got higher I crept into a spot
under a bank, shaded by a creeper, and had a sleep. It was a warm
sun for winter; seemed like we’d had a lot of warm winters the last
few years. The hard walking had made me uncomfortably hot and
sticky, but I’d rather have had that than rain and cold winds.

I slept only half an hour but I lay there a
lot longer, too tired to move. When I did move it was only to slide
back into the sun, as it got cold too quickly in the shade. I
propped myself against a tree and sat, looking in frustration at my
swollen knee. Apart from soaking my hanky in cold water and tying
it on, there wasn’t much I could do. I wished I had some Aboriginal
friends: they would have found a bush remedy in the nearest tree
and fixed me up in no time. Or they might have had a packet of
Panadol in their pocket. I would have settled for either.

I tried to walk on but letting my knee get
cold had been its kiss of death: it just wouldn’t function at all.
I started to realise that it might be better to spend the night
there. It wasn’t a very interesting place, or an attractive one,
but it would do. I put my little remaining energy into making
myself comfortable. I used a sharp rock to gouge out a hollow that
I could lie in, and collected a heap of creeper that I could crawl
under for a bit of warmth. I don’t know what kind of creeper it
was, but there was plenty of it around, and I could pull it down
from the trees fairly easily. The trees were probably grateful – a
lot of them looked like they were close to choking with the stuff.
I just hoped I wasn’t allergic to it.

There was a creek flowing fast about a hundred
metres away, so I waddled over there and had a drink. Growing in it
was some green stuff that we’d always called water lettuce at home.
It looked harmless so I ate a few leaves, deciding that if I didn’t
die of it during the night I’d try a bit more in the morning. It
didn’t have much flavour: it tasted like lettuce that had been
soaked in water so long the flavour had been leeched out of it,
which is probably exactly what it was.

Already it was getting dark; no daylight
saving here. I went back to my bush bed and sat on the pile of
creeper, thinking deep thoughts about life, and trying not to get
depressed. ‘You have so much to be proud of,’ I lectured myself.
‘You’ve destroyed a huge container ship, and probably the jetty as
well, judging by the size of the explosion. You wiped out one
helicopter and indirectly accounted for another. I’ll bet the plane
was sent to check out the blast at Cobbler’s, and it was because of
you the chopper was sitting on the ground. So that was a bonus.
You’ve done more fighting than anyone could have thought or hoped
or expected. You shouldn’t feel so bad.’

But none of that stopped me sinking slowly but
surely into depression. I missed everyone so much. Homer, with his
strength and leadership and planning; Fi, with her courage and
grace; Kevin, with the new energy he’d brought to our little group;
Robyn with her wisdom and goodness; Lee with his sexy body ...
‘Whoops, where did that come from?’ I wondered. I thought I was off
Lee for life. Still, he was a good looking guy ...

Most of all, though, I missed my mum and dad.
Deep down inside, Ellie, the tough jungle fighter, was a baby, a
five-year-old wanting to be tucked into bed, read a story, kissed
good night. The nicest times I’d had with Dad when I was little was
when he read me bedtime stories. He’d lie on the bed and start a
book, then fall asleep beside me, more often than not. Of course,
we worked together on the farm a lot, but he always seemed stressed
then. If a calf got out of the cattle yards or a dog scattered a
mob of sheep or it rained during shearing he’d get so mad. There’d
be a flood of swear words; he’d be red in the face and cursing the
stock and the dog and the government and the whole farming industry
and the heavens above, and me too if I was stupid enough to get in
the way. Then Mum would upset me sometimes by telling me how
worried she was about his blood pressure and how his father had
dropped dead in the middle of changing a tyre on a tractor, at the
age of forty-five, and she was scared Dad would go the same way. I
never really wanted her to talk to me about things like that – and
yet I sort of liked it in a way. I felt like an adult, like we were
talking on equal terms.

It’s one good thing about being an only child,
I guess. Your parents do treat you like you’re on the same level.
Sometimes, anyway. Sometimes Dad treated me like I really was five
years old. Once I left the gate on Cooper’s (that’s our biggest
paddock) open, and the joined ewes that were in there wandered into
One Tree (another paddock) and got mixed up with the unjoined ewes.
Dad went birko that time. I thought he was going to hit me. Mum had
to get between us, to save me. I don’t blame him; it was an
extremely dumb thing to do, but he always acted like he’d never
made a mistake in his life. After all, it wasn’t me who sprayed
Round-up on Mum’s raspberries when she wanted them given some
fertiliser.

Sometime in their marriage, Mum decided that
she would stay sane by not getting caught up in Dad’s moods. She
did all the things that farmers’ wives do in our part of the world
– in fact she did them better than most – but she didn’t give the
impression that there was nothing else in her life, the way Mrs
Mackenzie and Mrs Brogan did. Mum seemed able to step away from it
all. She often looked a bit amused by the things she found herself
doing. When Mrs Mackenzie won the jam section at the Show for
instance, she’d get very excited and talk about it for weeks. When
Mum won the Best Sponge Cake she just gave a little sly smile and
didn’t say anything in public. But when we got home she’d laugh and
celebrate. One year she even danced me around the kitchen.

She had mixed feelings about it all; I guess
that’s what it boils down to. Maybe it was to do with her being a
city girl originally. Her father was an accountant and she’d never
been out of the city in her life, until a friend talked her into
going to the Motteram B & S. The friend had a ute, and they
took that because they thought it would look more rural. Some time
during the B & S, Dad, who must have been legless, staggered
out of the hall looking for a place to sleep. Of course he never
admitted to being legless; he said he’d had a long hard day marking
lambs. Anyway, he curled up in the back of Mum’s friend’s ute,
under the tarp, and had a good nap. When he woke up it was ten
o’clock in the morning and he was still in the ute, 300 k’s from
Motteram and doing 100 k’s an hour. He had to bang on the back of
the window to get the girls’ attention – it was the first they knew
that they had a passenger. I can imagine the shock when they heard
the banging and turned around to see a pair of bloodshot eyes
staring at them through the glass.

Four months later they were married. Dad was
twenty-three; Mum was three weeks away from her nineteenth
birthday.

I didn’t arrive till eight years later. I
think they had a bit of trouble having me, but I never asked them
about that. There are some things about your parents you really
don’t want to know.

From the first I loved the land. I don’t know
whether Dad wanted a son – most places around Wirrawee are run by
men, and handed on from father to son – but he never gave me any
sign of that. One time when a bloke at the Wirrawee Saleyards was
talking to us he said to Dad, right in front of me, ‘If I had
daughters I wouldn’t let them do stockwork.’ Dad just looked at me
for a minute while I waited to see what he would say. Finally he
said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without her.’ I went red with
pleasure. It was the best compliment he ever paid me. I was nine
years old.

I’m not saying I enjoyed everything about my
life. When Dad was in one of his moods it was no fun being at home.
I didn’t like some of the jobs, like mulesing – well, you’d have to
be sick to like that. But I also didn’t like feeding poddies on
cold mornings, chopping kindling and lighting the Aga, putting the
dogs back on their chains after they’d been for a run, finding mice
in my bed during mouse plagues, and finding spiders in my gum boots
a few minutes after I’d put them on.

The best time of the year was definitely
shearing. We only had a small shed, two stands, and as the economy
got worse Dad did a lot of the shearing himself. It was more fun
when contractors came in, but I didn’t mind either way. As soon as
I was old enough I became the roustabout. That was a big moment in
my life, being able to do that. Another big moment was being strong
enough to throw a fleece onto the table for the classer. Again, Dad
had been doing his own classing lately. It was something I wanted
to learn; I’d been planning to do a course when I finished
school.

I loved the activity in the shearing shed. The
sheep milling in the pens. The dogs lying in the shadows panting,
their bright eyes watching the sheep, hoping they’d be called up
again to run across their backs and shift them to the next yard or
back to the paddock. I loved the oily feel of the classing table,
the soft whiteness of the fleeces, the quiet bleating of the
waiting sheep. I was proud to see our bales, with our brands on
them, on the back of a truck heading for the sales. I knew they
were going halfway around the world to be made into wonderful warm
clothes that would be worn by city people, people I’d never meet.
Even the really hard-bitten farmers, the ones you’d think had as
much poetry in them as a sedimentary rock, got a bit emotional
about shearing. Dad used to look at photos of models wearing wool,
in Mum’s fashion magazines, with a kind of wonder in his face, like
he could hardly believe that our great heavy fleeces could travel
so far and be turned into things of such beauty. It was a long way
from Wirrawee to Paris and Rome and Tokyo.

But I don’t want to give the impression that
Dad was a rural redneck, like some of the men in our district. When
Mum decided she wanted to do things that would extend her mind, he
backed her all the way. She did a course in Art Appreciation, then
one in Medieval History, then one in Mandarin Chinese. And she
joined a public speaking group in town. Dad was really proud of her
and boasted to everyone about how smart she was. Some farmers
didn’t like their wives going to town more than once a week. When
Mrs Salter got offered a job as a part-time debt counsellor with
Community Services her husband wouldn’t let her take it. So it was
pretty gutsy of my dad to stand up in front of his mates and take
their jokes about his feminist wife.

I have to admit, we are a few decades behind
in Wirrawee sometimes.

But despite all that, Mum was happiest in her
kitchen. It was the warm heart of our house, and I think she felt
comfortable in it. It was her territory and she was in control. She
was a good cook, a creative one, who never followed a recipe
exactly. She’d add a touch of basil here, a dash of Tabasco there,
and a large swig of wine just about every time. Somehow it always
seemed to work out. I can’t remember any disasters, except when she
sprinkled salt instead of castor sugar on my twelfth birthday cake.
She was so good in the kitchen that she intimidated me a bit; I
kept to the simplest cooking: scrambled eggs, lamb chops, pasta,
anzac biscuits.

There was never much doubt in my mind that I’d
run the farm one day. We never talked about it, but I think we took
it for granted. All I worried about was how I’d get Dad to give it
up without him hanging round for twenty years afterwards telling me
what to do.

All of that seemed like a movie to me that
night, though, lying under my mat of creepers, waiting for the long
lonely hours to tick away. I could call up these images of life as
it used to be, but they seemed to be things that happened to other
people, happy-looking people in an artificial world, on a big
screen. It seemed unreal. I cried myself to sleep, but it wasn’t
much of a sleep anyway. I was just lonely and scared and lost, and
the morning seemed a long way away.

Chapter
Seventeen

In the morning the hunger had come back. I
felt dizzy and light-headed. When I sat up I thought I would faint.
I ached all over: my knee was bad, but it was just one of many
pains, mostly from sleeping on a cold uncomfortable bed.

But I was still terrified of being tracked and
caught, so I made myself get up. I hobbled into the clearing and
looked up at the hills. I’d worked out my tactics as I’d lain there
in the dark – I had to get to the highest point and see where I
was. Once I knew where I was, I could get to where I was going, if
that makes sense.

Of course I now had the extra worry of not
knowing if the others would be there. They could have been captured
or killed, or they could have given up and gone. Stupidly we hadn’t
made all the alternative arrangements we normally made for a
rendezvous; I suppose we’d thought Homer and I would swim straight
to the creek and wade up it to meet Robyn and the rest. We hadn’t
counted on all the distractions. Plus there’d been so many things
to think about, and we’d done everything in such a rush.

The people who kept popping up in my mind were
Burke and Wills, from the history books. They’d struggled back to
Coopers Creek, sick and starving after crossing the continent, and
found their support party had given up and left seven hours before.
That had been a death sentence for Burke and his mate. I was scared
I might follow their example.

I kept hobbling round till my body was in some
sort of working order. The sun still wasn’t up, which meant that
the ground was very cold, and that made it even harder to get
myself going. Eventually I shoved my arms into my armpits and,
hugging myself to try to get warm, I set off, head down, eyes half
closed against the cruel sharp breeze.

Once I got started it wasn’t too bad for a
while. The hunger pains left me again and the slope wasn’t too
steep. It was annoying having to keep a lookout as well as walk; I
hoped that I’d hear any soldiers before they heard me, but I
couldn’t count on that. Navigation wasn’t such a problem: I knew
that as long as I went uphill it had to be the right direction.

The big problem soon became obvious. The
higher I got, the less cover was available. The trees thinned out
and there was more and more rock, outcrops so hard to climb and so
bare that I was afraid I could be seen from k’s away. I had little
enough energy for climbing, let alone for trying to stay concealed
at the same time. But it was no good avoiding it; with a groan and
a few curses, and a feeble push of my hair out of my eyes, I worked
my way around to the right where there were more trees. It probably
added twenty minutes to the climb.

I was sweating hard by the time I got to the
top. It was a couple of hours after sunrise. There wasn’t much heat
in the day but I was creating my own heat by this slow hard stagger
up the hill. I resented having to keep worrying about aircraft and
ground troops, and although I kept looking for them, it was by a
sort of reflex: I could hardly remember what I was looking for.

Someone had built a little cairn of rocks at
the top. There was no obvious reason for it, but at least when I
saw it I knew I must be at the summit. I skirted around it and went
back further into the shade of some trees. Then at last I was able
to turn and look at the view.

There was Cobbler’s Bay spread out before me.
And away in the distance, beyond the heads, was the blue and
beautiful ocean. I longed to be on it, sailing away. As much as I
loved my country, it was not a happy place to be these days. I
didn’t know whose fault it was that it was so stuffed – the
invaders, our politicians, or we ordinary people who hadn’t taken
enough interest – but right now I was too weary from the strain of
surviving to enjoy it any longer. I could still admire the beauty
of the coastline but I wanted a holiday from it.

My eyes swivelled a bit to the right. When I
saw what was there I sat up fast and made a little ‘Oh’ noise out
loud. I was looking at the wharf, or what was left of it. It was
the first time I’d seen the results of one of our attacks so soon
after it happened. The only other one I’d seen was the Wirrawee
bridge, but that was ages later, and it was hard to think of it as
something we’d done. By then it looked more like an archaeological
ruin.

The Cobbler’s wharf was a bloody mess. The
ship Homer and I had been on had disappeared completely. The wharf
itself had lost all its middle section and the rest of it was black
and charred; there was no part wide enough to drive even a car
along. It seemed like it had caught fire and burned fiercely. Two
cranes had collapsed and were lying on their sides like stick
insects. Another big ship was still moored at the wrecked wharf but
it was burnt all along its deck and half sunk; it was virtually a
floating hull. It didn’t look like it would be going anywhere for a
long time.

Beyond the wharf, a couple of hectares of bush
had been demolished and burnt. It looked like someone had gone
through it with a giant whipper-snipper.

No wonder the New Zealand jet was able to fly
around as much as it wanted. There was nothing left there worth
defending.

It was the most exciting view I’d ever seen.
It gave me new energy, wonderful energy. I wanted to dance and
scream and shout. If we did nothing else for the whole of this
horrible war we could at least say now that we had made a major
difference. We hadn’t just damaged the enemy in our own little area
of Wirrawee; we’d damaged him in a way that would make a real
difference to his ability to take over our country.

I turned my gaze to the left, searching. Sure
enough I soon saw what I was looking for: another blackened patch
of burnt bush, the crowns of trees brown and scorched. In the
middle of it was the twisted wrecked metal of the helicopter, a
black skeleton. Looking at it I gave a savage grin, a wild grin. I
could take some credit for the chopper too, I reminded myself
again. By God, we had made a difference.

I sat there smirking. For a few moments I felt
free to enjoy what we’d achieved. I forgot the hunger, the fear,
the aches and pains. For a few moments I don’t think I’d have cared
if I’d been caught. I knew we’d been lucky a lot of times – we’d
been lucky we weren’t caught in the first place, when they invaded
– but we’d made the most of our luck and we hadn’t let our families
and friends down. We’d done a lot with the freedom we had.

Back to the right I at last saw Baloney Creek,
where we’d agreed to meet. I could see no sign of life, but of
course I didn’t expect to. All I knew was that it was still a long
way off. I worked out my bearings. There was the logging track, a
dirt road that cut through the bush and crossed the creek about a k
from its mouth.

I was too tired to resist the temptation of
the track. There was no evidence of any pursuers, anyone looking
for us. I think the Kiwi bird had scared them off. So I figured
that if I made for the track and walked along beside it, in the
bush, I should be safe, and that way I wouldn’t get lost.

I made the big effort to get going, standing
with a big sigh. At least the first part was downhill, and so would
be the last part.

At that moment, as though it had been waiting
for me to show myself, a helicopter came over the rise behind me. I
squatted fast and covered my head. It swept across the hill,
travelling fast and low. Just as I hadn’t expected the earlier one
to see me, and it had, so I expected this one to see me, and it
didn’t. Murphy’s Law. I felt a cold dark shiver as its shadow
crossed me, but it continued down into the valley. It was searching
all right, combing the valley in long passes just metres from the
treetops. I bet its crew was nervous, being able to see the wreck
of the other one.

I waited till it had its back to me, searching
nearer the coast, and I put my head down and ran like a rabbit. Not
till I was well into the treeline did I stop again and stand there
hugging a tree – well, leaning against it, anyway. My calves and
lower legs were shaking, trembling, and it took a long time to stop
them. Now that I was deep in the bush, the chopper was just a faint
humming sound, and that made me feel a bit safer.

My hunger was making my stomach cramp and I
had to bend over for a while to make the pain go away. So it was
ten or fifteen minutes before I felt well enough to start out for
the dirt road. I’d thought the downhill would be easy, but before
long I was wishing for some uphill. It hurt my calves too much
going downhill; I had to use them to brake myself on the steep
slope. But when I did hit an uphill section I wasn’t happy with
that either. It was hard on my knees, the good one and the bad one,
and soon the backs of my legs were hurting like crazy, too. It got
to the point where any slight slope seemed like the Swiss Alps. I’d
start trudging up it and after a while I’d lift my head, expecting
to see that I was almost at the top, and find to my anguish that I
wasn’t even halfway. That happened with every hill and was very
frustrating.

When I came to the road I’d almost given up
hope that I’d find it. I had convinced myself that I’d made some
terrible mistake in navigation. The only reason I kept going was
because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, didn’t have the
energy to stop and reconsider. I’d thought I heard a vehicle at one
time, but it was either a very quiet vehicle or it was a long way
off – or else I imagined it. Occasionally the buzzing of the
helicopter would send me stumbling under the trees, but I never
actually saw it again.

But suddenly there was the brown dirt strip
under my feet and I was on the edge of the track.

I turned right automatically and, with a faint
feeling of relief – forgetting that I’d planned to stay in the bush
– started to tramp along it. Now that I was there I could see what
a rough old track it was. Long grass grew in its centre, so it was
obvious from that alone that it hadn’t seen a lot of recent
traffic. As I walked I did notice one thing though: that the grass
was freshly bent over and bruised in quite a few places. Sometimes
you could even see it slowly standing again as you walked past.
Seemed like that vehicle I thought I’d heard mightn’t have been an
illusion. I started getting nervous all over again.

The roar of the helicopter came loud in my
ears and I ducked into the trees and waited. This time it sounded
like it was heading straight towards Cobbler’s Bay. It had
abandoned its searching pattern. Perhaps they were going home for
lunch. I came out and kept walking.

Round a long bend, a bend that curved and
curved long after I thought it should have straightened out again,
I found the vehicle. It was a fawn-coloured Holden Jackaroo, quite
a new one, but with the look of a car that wasn’t going to live to
a ripe old age. It was very dirty and had lots of scratches and
marks, including a smashed tail light and a broken side window. Not
that I stood there studying it for a long time. I got such a shock
that I felt like I’d been woken from a long sleep by someone
putting ice blocks down my back.

I did a double take, then dived into the bush
again, my heart thudding hard. But there wasn’t any movement from
the car. I stood there watching for several minutes. Gradually I
realised that something was very wrong. The Jackaroo was in fact at
our rendezvous spot. I could just see the track drop down to the
gravelly river crossing in among the trees. It was Baloney Creek.
There was a vague possibility that Lee and the others had stolen a
vehicle, but if they had they’d never park it in the open like
this. No, there was only one reason there’d be a car parked
here.

I started creeping along to get closer to the
vehicle. There was no sign of life in it at all. I kept going,
waiting for some warning sign that would make me stop but, as there
wasn’t one, I kept going till I was level with it. I crouched
furtively behind a gorse bush, wondering what I should do, looking
for a cue. Then I got one. A shot rang out behind me; a single
shot, though not sounding like the shots I was used to. It was
followed immediately by a girl’s scream: a girl who sounded awfully
like Fi.

I’d been so scared already that the sound of
the shot frightened me out of my boots. I burst out of the bush,
running away from the shot, thinking for a crazy moment that
someone was firing at me. Of course this meant that I practically
crashed into the Jackaroo. That little fact, the fact that I went
onto the road instead of in another direction, changed all our
lives. Because as I stood, shaking, next to the car, having no idea
where to go or what to do, but realising that no one seemed to be
chasing me, two things happened. One was that I heard Homer’s
voice, unmistakeably, call out something like ‘No way!’ I got
instant goosebumps on the back of my neck to hear that voice. He
could so easily have been shot or drowned or blown up, but he had
survived. He had survived! It was wonderful to hear those two
words, even in these conditions.

There was some shouting then, that I couldn’t
pick up. But at the same moment, the other vital thing happened: I
saw a revolver sitting on the driver’s seat of the Holden. I
reached through the window and grabbed it without hesitation. It
was an ugly black thing, all hard edges, no curves or smooth
surfaces. I checked it quickly. It seemed to work on the same
principles as every other gun I’d fired. A switch under the trigger
guard released the magazine. I slipped it out. The little holes
showed two bullets but, when I pulled back the slide, I found
another one in the chamber.

All that took just three or four seconds. I
flicked the safety catch up to ‘on’, and walked through the trees
towards the voices.