East of Outback (20 page)

Suddenly, without warning, thoughts of God flashed across Colin’s mind. Might God have directed their paths thus far? Colin thought about Otis’s claim to have met God. That didn’t mean Otis couldn’t be mistaken. Besides, even if Otis were right, Colin wasn’t at all ready to attribute every stroke of fortune to Papa’s all-in-all God.

Joe was still ranting on about how Mike and Ray put on such a Yankee act.

Hannah peeked for the third time into the Dutch oven. “Another minute or two.”

“What does your Texan cobber sound like when he talks?” Mike asked.

“Let’s see. I’d talk about a mob of horses and he’d say, ‘tha’s a remuda.’ Or I’d point out a horse tailer and he’d say ‘tha’s a wrangler.’ A mob of cattle rushing were ‘a herd stampeding.’ Muster is a ‘round-up.’ While he’s talking, you keep translating from Yankese to Strine. Uh, ‘caramba, compadre!’ And ‘buenos dias.’ “

“Don’t he speak English?”

“Not good English. Spanish, mostly. He gets along.”

“Now you gunner learn Spanish, Mike?” Joe laughed a hearty “Har, har, har.”

Hannah was smiling at Colin now, with an expression of curiosity and wonder. One more peek and she lifted the oven off the coals. Using towels, she popped the rack out and handed it to Mike to be passed around. Her face fell as she watched the biscuit rack empty. With a sigh she started mixing up another batch.

It took the truck all day long to reach Esperance, about a hundred and ninety miles. They ate restaurant food there, and bought eggs. Colin purchased extra water tanks for the horse. Then, loaded to the gunwales, the old truck rolled northeast.

The land began to flatten out. Trees were shorter, the bush sparse. For hundreds of miles across this ruler-line landscape, the tallest things in sight were the telegraph poles—and a few wild camels Colin saw in the distance on several occasions. Hannah’s nose, unaccustomed to desert sun, fried to a raw red and began to peel.

When he first saw them, Colin would not have given a brass razoo for this whole canty bunch. But as the days passed and he got to know them better, he began to almost enjoy them. They treated Hannah with every courtesy, yet not distant enough to keep her outside their circle of friendship. Wiser this time around, Colin kept a sharper eye for leers or unwelcome attention. None of these men seemed to see her as Brekke had; no one teased or harassed her. He wondered if that would change.

Twice between Balladonia and Cocklebiddy the old truck blew out tires. In Sydney, when Colin’s father had a tire problem, he simply hopped aboard a trolley or bus to complete his trip, then rang up his mechanic to come pick up his car. Here on the flat, endless track, Colin found himself dismantling the whole wheel, scraping the damaged inner tube, cutting a patch and cementing it on, reassembling the wheel, and pumping it up with a tire pump in dire need of lubricant to reduce air leakage.

Why did Colin end up repairing the flats? He was the only person who didn’t drive, and no one bothered to instruct him. Even Hannah drove her share. To Colin therefore, in the scheme of labor division, fell the non-driving tasks of minor and mindless repairs. Besides, it was Colin’s half-ton horse that put so much extra load on the ancient junker.

Cocklebiddy behind them, they followed the telegraph east along the southernmost edge of the continent. Colin had never been anywhere near the Nullarbor, for he had crossed to Broome by the far north route. Australia is basically flat, but this part of the country somehow magnified that sheer flatness. To their right rolled the southern ocean. They could hear the breakers from camp some nights. To the left stretched a gentle ridge paralleling the coast, and beyond it.

When, a hundred miles west of Eucla, a gasket in the water pump gave way, Mike cut a new one from the lining of Hannah’s shoe. Colin noticed her shoes appeared too small for her feet, not to mention how worn they were becoming.

While they were stopped Max caught still another rabbit. Half a dinner. Lunch and dinner were always rabbit. Colin was becoming excessively bored with rabbit, but it was food. And it was free.

Sand, too, became bothersome. Mile after mile the wind sent fine white sand scudding across the track. After days of lying beside them, the ridge now crossed their track. They climbed through a winding gap in the ridge and out onto its top.

They pulled up to the petrol pump in Eucla late on the fourth day. As far as they could see, the white sand drifted up against the trunks of small, dead shrubs. It lay in ripples across the open land and hung poised in dunes along the crest of the rise.

Hannah jumped down out of the back of the truck. “Train travel is so different. You just roll on day and night. You don’t realize what a distance you’ve covered, until you have to cover every inch of it in an open truck.”

Colin fell in beside her. It was such a nice change to walk around and stretch your legs instead of sitting and jiggling, and hanging on to your hat. He pointed into the distance. “The cliffs along the bight. You see pictures of them in books. Here’s the real thing.”

“I remember stories about Edward Eyre coming through these parts,” Hannah added. “Can you imagine traveling this whole bight without so much as a camel? The truck is bad enough, but at least we can make two hundred miles a day. And the telegraph.”

“The telegraph is the only reason Eucla’s here.” Colin ran Max’s Lady off the truck to stretch her legs. With Max jogging fifty feet behind, he led the mare up past the telegraph station. The simple stone building stood amid the blowing white sand, a tiny blip of modern technology in a vast and hostile primal land. The building had stood there forty-eight years. Why hadn’t it been buried in the sand by now?

Hannah stopped to gaze at the structure. “Joe says that before federation, they couldn’t send a telegram between states. So an operator on the Western Australia side of the building copied the message down, then passed it through a window to a fellow on the South Australia side, who in turn sent it on its way. Can you imagine anything so silly?”

Joe says
— Colin’s neck prickled. Was the same thing happening again? Hannah was so naive.

Hannah headed back toward the truck. “And he says there used to be a score of people working here. But now most of it is automatic, and there’s only four or five employees.”

Joe waved toward Colin as they returned to the truck. The burly shearer held out a tennis-racket-sized hand. “Got ten bob, mate? Petrol here costs more than rubies and pearls.”

What price pearls?
The thought from the past jolted Colin. He dug into his pocket. “Got a carpet here. The pot owes me ten.”

“Good enough. Wanna eat more rabbit, or pay an arm and a leg to eat in their roadhouse here? What’s your fancy?”

“The poorhouse is worth it if we can eat something besides rabbit. Anything but rabbit.”

“Hannah?”

“I’ll take the roadhouse,” she said without hesitation.

Joe nodded. “We’re unanimous. See you inside.”

Colin tied the mare on a long lead to the back of the truck, but she would find no grass or browse in this desolate land. She was starting to look nearly as scrawny as when he had first seen her in the paddock above Broome. There wasn’t much choice. She cocked a hind leg and dozed off, with only her tail showing signs of life as it snapped and flailed at the ubiquitous flies.

Hannah followed Joe inside. No doubt the others already sat in the gloom of what had to be the nation’s smallest, poorest roadhouse. Colin found himself walking away from the restaurant, south, out to the crest of the steep bluff. Directly ahead of him the bluff fell away to the flat shelf below. A mile beyond, the sparkling turquoise ocean lapped quietly at the shore. Shoreline and white beach extended as far as he could see to the west. Here at Eucla, the sharp ridge they had been keeping on their left came angling southeast to the water and plunged in. To the east, that ridge, in the form of ragged cliffs, dropped precipitously to the water below. No beach there, no friendly sand. The surf crashed hard against the wall. Colin knew, too, that that vertical wall separating land and sea extended over a hundred miles along the featureless coast.

Black sheep? Perhaps he was. If he weren’t, he could go home again. He’d swallow his pride and telegraph his father for money to whisk Hannah directly home, instead of subjecting her to this torturous, dangerous journey.

But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t. Maybe he was, after all, a black sheep. A prodigal.

He turned his back to the ocean and its perpetual movement. Before him to the north, with the sun in his face, a desolate land rolled away. A whole continent of desert, of blowing sand as pale as death, stretched beyond. For several minutes he stood there between the empty desert and the restless sea, and felt the world’s bitter sadness seep into his soul.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

B
ROUHAHA

“So you see, maybe God made rabbits and maybe He didn’t. Don’t matter. What matters is that stupid people turned them loose on us. Whitefeller know-it-alls brought rabbits in for sporting when there never should have been any rabbits in the land. Now they’re all over the continent. Rabbit fences don’t stop them. I helped build rabbit fences up north on the Murchison and up behind Port Hedland. Had rabbits on both sides of it before we could get the wire up. ‘Scourge of God’ ain’t nearly it. ‘Scourge of fools,’ is more like it.”

Colin watched the grand philosopher, Jackie Jump, wave a roasted rabbit drumstick high. Colin was getting pretty tired of eating rabbit, like everyone else, but he hadn’t yet made the furry creatures a topic of philosophical discussion.

With huge white teeth, Jackie stripped the meat from his rabbit leg. “You saw Eucla, Colin, what it looks like now. Didn’t used to look like that. When I was just a nipper traveling with my uncles, we’d stop at Eucla on the way ‘cross. Green it was then, with trees and birds singing-wrens, willy wagtails, big white cockatoos with tinges of pink. Most beautiful birds in the world, them major mitchells. Don’t ever see them no more ’round there.”

“Why the change?” Colin finished his rabbit forequarter and tossed the bone into the fire.

“Rabbits. Mobs and mobs of rabbits. They ate everything green, then the bark off the trees. They even ate the wood. Then they starved, thousands of them, ‘cause nothing was left to eat. They’re still out there, as you well know. Go out and shoot dinner anytime you get hungry. But not so many now. Not after they ruined the whole face of the land.”

“You mean twenty years ago there wasn’t this loose sand blowing around Eucla?”

“Twenty, thirty. Too right. Always the wind was blowing; the trees all lean away from windward, you notice. But not all this sand. Droughts didn’t mean as much then, ’cause the land came back with the rain. Now the droughts hit harder, and they hit suddenly. We’ve three years of drought right now in Victoria here. You see how the paddocks look.”

“So the desert is man-made.”

“Man-made. ‘Course, now there’s men making a living off it. Killing rabbits is big business. Lot of the larger stations hire blokes full time just to kill rabbits. And there’s other rabbiters who go from station to station, stay maybe a month or six weeks, cut the rabbit population back, and move on—they serve stations too small to hire a rabbiter year ‘round.”

“They shoot them?”

“Poison them. Too ‘spensive to shoot them. You’re talking hundreds. They put out phosphorized wheat, but it’s slow. They suffer for days. There’s stuff called ‘Toxa’ that kills them right away, but it’s expensive. Lotta rabbiters use apples soaked in strychnine. Lay a trail of poisoned apples, come along the next day and gather up the bunnies. They throw away the meat now. In the old days, you wouldn’t do that—throw anything away.”

“What did you eat when you were traveling, if there weren’t any rabbits?” Colin finished the last of his potato.

“Possums, ’roos, wombat now and then, wallabies. Lotsa things. They’re all gone, too, just like the birds. Worse’n the birds. Ain’t none left of some of them.”

“Mmm.”
A desert of man’s own making
, Colin thought. Vacant. Barren. Arid. In a way, it was like the desert Colin felt within himself. Or was he being too pensive, poetic? He pushed the thought aside.

“Let’s go, lads!” Joe’s voice boomed from the veranda of the government house two hundred yards away. Colin lurched to his feet and wiped his greasy hands off on his trousers. He picked up his mare’s reins and led her to the house.

“The shed hands and classer are here, but Clarke’s people are still out mustering, so we’ll start with this mob.” Joe waved an arm. “Let the truck through that gate. Hannah can start them this way with the truck and you run ’em into the pen, Colin.”

Run them into the pen
. It sounded so easy. Never in his life had Colin ever seen a sheep up close, let alone try to bend an ovine will to his own. He mounted the mare with some uncertainty and rode her through the gate.

Eagerly Hannah drove out into the paddock. Much of the dirt had been pounded to soft powder by thousands of little hooves. Fine bulldust boiled up behind the truck.

Just as eager as Hannah, the brainless old mare flung herself forward into her rocking-horse canter. She was sweaty and blowing before they reached the far end.

A mob of wool balls on spindly legs came bursting out of the truck’s drifting dust, creating a dust-wall of their own. Colin reined the mare aside and swung her around beside them. He urged her forward. She set her ears and leaned into the bit, loving every minute of this sheep-run.

It was so easy! As they neared the holding pens Colin would simply crowd the mare in closer, haze the mob right where he wanted them to go. They were near the pen now. Suddenly a suffocating cloud of dust wrapped him tight. He choked; he couldn’t see. When finally he cleared his eyes enough to open them, the mob was clattering down the paddock, behind the truck and back to the far end.

“Gimme the horse!” snarled Pot Dabney. Colin slid down from the saddle barely in time to avoid being yanked out of it. Pot swung aboard and wrenched the mare savagely aside. He galloped her away into the dusty gloom.