Burning for Revenge (3 page)

We left pretty soon after that. We'd done our packing. Lee took the radio, wrapping it in plastic in the little emergency pack that he carried around his waist. I watched him, half smiling. He was so organised, so thorough. Sometimes it annoyed me, maybe because I knew I wasn't like that myself. This time I couldn't help making a comment. "You're like a girl, you're so neat," I said.

Lee shrugged. He didn't seem upset. "You might thank me one day," was all he said. I knew he was right, and I knew my comment had been unusually dumb—even for me—so I shut up.

We threaded our way along Tailor's Stitch. Oh, "threaded our way"—I think I just made a joke. Well, it's what we did. I mean I exaggerate a bit when I write about Tailor's Stitch. It's not like a razor blade, where if one of the boys fell with a leg on either side he'd have a nasty accident. For most of the way you can walk quite easily, sometimes even two people side by side. At other points though it really is narrow and you have to be a bit careful. I mean if you did fall you wouldn't plunge a thousand metres to your death. You'd just roll down the slope a way. If you fell awkwardly you might break a leg, but you can do that anywhere of course.

There is a track, worn by the boots of bushwalkers over the years. It's always been quite a popular area for bushwalking. Some weeks we'd get a dozen people coming through our place on their way up to Tailor's Stitch. Other times, especially in winter, we'd go a couple of months without seeing anybody.

The track wasn't just made by humans. I was leading, followed by Homer, then Fi, then Lee, with Kevin quite a way back—surprise, surprise. But I had to slow clown when I found myself behind the fat backside of a wombat, waddling along at his own pace. Wombats are a law unto themselves. When I was little, I had a friend out from town for the weekend: Annie Abrahams. She'd never been on a farm before, and the first night, just after dark, we were coming back from putting the chooks away—a little later than we should have—and she saw a wombat. Before I could say anything Annie ran up and gave it a hug. I guess she thought it was some kind of cute cuddly bear. Well, the wombat didn't hesitate. He turned around and buried his teeth in Annie's leg. She screeched like a cockatoo at twilight. I tried to pull the wombat off, but it was impossible. They're so strong. I was screaming for Dad, and Annie was screaming nonstop and the wombat was grunting louder than a bulldozer on a slope. It was scary. I didn't know how much damage it might do to Annie. I thought her leg might be mangled to pieces. Eventually Dad came running out. He tried to pull the wombat off too and failed, and finally he gave it a hell of a kick in the guts. The wombat let go and staggered away into the darkness. Then I didn't know whether to be more upset about the health of the wombat or the state of Annie's leg. But her leg wasn't too bad. Although it was bruised, the skin wasn't broken—I think it was more the shock and fear that had her screaming her head off.

I never found out what happened to the wombat.

Another time a wombat got trapped in a small toilet at the end of the shearing shed. I don't know how it got in and I sure as hell don't know why it got in. Looking for food maybe. Maybe it wanted to use the toilet. Anyway no one found it till morning. I wasn't there when they got it out, but I know it took forever. I saw what damage it did though. Unbelievable. If you'd gone in with a sledgie and spent the night swinging it round at full strength you couldn't have done more damage. It was a wooden dunny lined with fibro, but there was no fibro left intact. It was in fragments all over the floor. The only bits still on the walls were the little pieces nailed to the timber. But much of the timber had been splintered and broken. It was like the wombat spent the whole night headbutting the place. I guess that's exactly what he had done.

So, when I realised we were following this wombat's big bum I slowed down. There wasn't much room on the track, and I wasn't looking for a fight just yet.

"Oh look," said Fi, from behind me, "a wombat. Isn't it cute."

I had an immediate fear that this would be a repeat of the Annie Abrahams story.

"Yeah, real cute," I said. "Just keep a safe distance."

Fi paused and we watched the wombat as it waddled on ahead. We were getting close to the turnoff where the four-wheel-drive track went down the mountain to the farm, and the wombat started to veer to the left. I thought I'd grab the chance to show Fi a party trick that I'd never tried myself but had heard Dad talk about. With no knowledge of whether it would work, and not much confidence, I said to Fi: "Did you know that they'll follow a torchlight?"

Fi had been teased by us so often, been the victim of so many practical jokes, that she wouldn't believe me this time. "Oh sure," she said doubtfully.

"No, really, I promise."

I swung my pack down and opened the side pocket, pulling out my torch. Leaving the pack, I went forward ten metres and flicked on the torch. We were down below the tree line, so there was no danger from enemy soldiers. I focused the beam of light on the ground in front of the wombat and then moved it away to his side. To my surprise he turned as soon as I did it, and followed the light obediently. Of course I didn't let the others know I was surprised. I just acted cool, like this was exactly what I'd expected.

I took the wombat for a little walk by moving the light around. I felt like a choreographer. The others were all cracking up. "Oh my God," Fi kept saying, in her light little voice that sounded sometimes as if it'd float away, "that's amazing."

There still wasn't much room around me, because Tailor's Stitch was just behind and we were surrounded by thick bush. So I swung the light one more time and made the wombat come towards me. I felt totally confident, totally in control. I planned to walk backwards slowly as the wombat came in my direction. The wombat hadn't read my script though. For no apparent reason he started charging, overrunning the spot of light on the ground. Maybe he saw me, but I really don't think so. Wombats give you the feeling they're just about blind. But they could be tricking of course.

At first I thought it was a joke, and I started going backwards a bit, getting faster as the wombat accelerated. Then suddenly I decided I was in trouble. It didn't seem to matter any more what I did with the torch. The wombat had torn up the rule-book. He'd stopped following the rules and he'd definitely stopped following the light. The whole situation was out of control. I forgot about my dignity and began to panic. A wombat at full gallop is'surprisingly scary. Considering that they look like stuffed cushions on four little legs they actually get up to quite a speed. So I accelerated a bit myself. Ignoring the wild laughter of the other four, I swung around so I could make a high-speed getaway up the wall of Tailor's Stitch.

And I fell over my own pack.

I fell quite hard. The others were pissing themselves. I have to admit I was genuinely scared. I thought I was about to get torn apart by a wild wombat. The way he was grunting sounded seriously unfriendly. And I'd landed on my bad knee, which hurt. For a moment I expected the wombat to leap on top of me and tear my head off.

But he didn't. He swerved off his line and disappeared deep into the bush, having had enough of humans for one night. I struggled up again, with no help from anyone. They were still all falling around laughing. They can be pretty stupid and juvenile sometimes. I brushed myself down, put my pack back on, and started walking. I left it to them to decide whether to follow or not.

The weird thing was that Kevin seemed to feel better about me after that. He was laughing more and talking more and including me in his conversation. I don't know why he apparently decided I was an OK person again, but it seems like he did, and I thought that made the close encounter with the wombat almost worthwhile. Almost, but not quite.

In the morning Kevin was in a sulk again. We stopped just before 5 a.m. and had a bit of a rest. We didn't put up tents or flies, but we spread out the bedrolls for a snooze. I think I slept for maybe an hour. I woke just in time to hear the first blowie of the day buzzing around. You know the night's over when you hear the first blowie. As you get into summer the earlier they come, and the more there are.

So I got up and pulled out a few things for breakfast. Nothing exciting, just dried apricots, fruit roll-ups and scroggin. We'd stopped about three hundred metres from a creek. It was something Ursula taught me: never camp right next to a creek, because the noise of the water will stop you hearing anyone sneaking up on you.

By the time I'd finished fiddling with the food and moving a few more things in my pack—I was always trying for the perfect arrangement of stuff in my pack; it had become a major hobby—the others were up too. None of us was much good'in the morning, except Fi. She seemed to wake up and start functioning straight away. Not like a diesel four-wheel drive. She'd get up and immediately be moving and thinking and talking at normal speed. Lee was the next best but he wasn't in Fi's class. Kevin and I were the worst.

So I grouched around, mumbling occasional comments to the others, as we each threw together our bizarre variations of breakfast.

We hadn't bothered with a sentry, because we were still in deep bush, though we were quite close to the Wirrawee-Holloway road. But while they were eating I went for a walk, to see what I could see. Despite the blowies it was a nice morning. It still had that fresh coolness you get early in the day, before the sun dries everything and bakes the air, and even the blowies have to give up and find shade for themselves. I had a good little stroll and managed to wake myself up at least, although the only interesting thing I saw was a trout breaking the world high jump record with a leap out of a pool to grab a passing insect. Talk about Cazaly. This fish was a metre out of the water. Well, almost a metre.

When I got back, a full-scale argument was raging. I could hear them from a hundred metres away, which worried me. We'd trained ourselves to speak pretty softly these days. In fact I didn't recognise their voices for a minute, they were so loud. I had a terrible spasm of fear that we'd been found. Once I realised it was only them I went on in to the campsite, but not very willingly. I'd just had my nice walk and I didn't want to get involved with something bad. I could hear Homer yelling at Kevin: "Christ you're pathetic Kevin. You never want to do anything."

"You'd better not make so much noise," I said as I arrived. "They'll hear you in Wirrawee."

Lee was standing against a tree. I've never seen him look so ugly. He had his arms folded and was staring with a terrible expression of contempt at Kevin. Fi was sitting at the creek, trailing her bowl in the water as though she were washing it, but not moving her hands at all. Homer and Kevin were standing facing each other like two bad-tempered dogs meeting for the first time. If they'd had hair down their backs it would have been bristling. Come to think of it, Homer does have quite a lot of hair down his back, but I couldn't see if it was bristling.

Anyway, I shouldn't make jokes about it. It was all too serious.

"What's the problem?" I asked, when no one answered my comment about the noise.

"Kevin's got cold feet," Lee said. "Again."

I was a bit startled. Seemed like it was OK for the boys to say that to Kevin, but it hadn't been OK for me.

"I haven't got bloody cold feet," Kevin shouted. "I've done everything you guys have done and more. I'm being realistic, that's all. Just because of what happened with Lee's parents he wants to rush off and kill anyone he can find. Well, that's fine for him, but I'm not in a hurry to commit suicide."

"We're not that stupid, Kev," Homer said angrily. "We've outsmarted them just about every time."

"Oh sure," Kevin said. "That last trip to Wirrawee was a huge success wasn't it? We did nothing, we achieved nothing, it's a bloody miracle we survived at all."

"You can go back to Hell if you want," Lee said, "but I'm not going back. Whatever we find out there, we'll deal with it. I hope we find Ellie's mother, of course, but I hope we find some targets we can attack too."

"Oh you're such a bloody hero," Kevin sneered. "Listen, Lee, things have changed. The invasion is successful. It's complete. They've won. It doesn't matter where we go, they're going to see us, chase us, catch us. And kill us. Don't you understand that? There's no point any more. Hell is the only safe place left. Everywhere else we go they'll sniff us out. I tell you, in six months they'll have bushwalkers coming through these mountains the same as we used to do, and you'd better pray Colonel Finley has sent a chopper by then, because that's the only hope we've got."

Even Fi flared up at that speech. "It's not over yet," she said, without looking up. "I still think we can win. The New Zealanders think so too."

"I don't think we'll ever win it all back," Homer said. "Our best chance is that some day there'll be a cease-fire, and they'll split it up and we'll get some back. And the way Colonel Finley explained it to me, the more land we're holding when that happens, and the more we've got them on the backfoot, the more land we'll get in the big carve-up."

"Colonel Finley—fat lot he knows," Kevin said. "He just says what we want to hear. Whatever he thinks will get us to do what he wants. It's like your mother saying 'Eat your vegetables so you'll grow up big and strong.' Doesn't mean anything."

"It worked for you," I said, trying in my usual tactful way to lighten the atmosphere. I might as well not have spoken for all the notice anyone paid.

"Kevin, can't you get it into your thick head that we don't have a choice?" Lee said, speaking through gritted teeth. His mouth was pressed together so his lips were just one thin line. I'd never seen him so angry. "If we don't do anything, if we just wait to be taken back to New Zealand, we're pathetic. We're worse than pathetic. And if we never get taken back, then we're dead. Dead meat. Sometimes there aren't any questions any more. Sometimes there's nothing to debate. If we have any choice at all, it might be as simple as this: to die fighting or to die as cowards. Not much of a choice,
I agree, but if that's the way it is, I know which I prefer."