The Roving Party (14 page)

I said hold it.

I’m holdin, I’m holdin.

The snake whipped around.

Oh Jesus, oh dear lord.

He cant get at you. Just keep pushing.

John Batman had jogged up by now bearing his weapon but he would come no closer than a few yards.

What’ll I do? Gould said to him.

Batman shook his head. You’re a goner, mate.

Oh. Oh lord.

I had a dog die of snake bite. Horrible it was.

Gould’s leg juddered. Shoot the blighter, wont you? he said.

Little tike clean bit his tongue off in the convulsions.

Help me, you bastards, I cant hold him.

He’s eight foot if he’s an inch, said Batman.

Biggest I ever saw, said Bill.

Look at that head, would you? All right. Watch yerself there.

Batman levelled the bores of his gun upon the coiled mass
and thumbed back both hammers until they settled on their locks and he was taking some sort of caution about blasting off Gould’s legs when Black Bill placed a wide brown hand on the barrels. He pushed the gun aside.

We dont kill them, he said.

We? I most certainly do, my dusky friend.

But Bill would enter into no more discourse. He crouched near the snake and approached it out of eyesight. He caught the swaying head behind the jaws and then he shoved Gould off with his other hand. The whole sleek black eight feet wound up his arm and he stood with the throttled snake in his fist utterly forestalled. Two bared fangs oozed like dripping stalactites. The snake twisted and wrenched about but it was useless against Bill’s locked fingers. He brought the head around to face Batman who shied off and raised his arm up.

Dont bring it near me, fer Christsake.

Then Bill flung the length of it up and away from himself and it turned a lazy circle, crashing into the speargrass some yards off, where it could be seen breaking for the tussocks nearby. William Gould bowed his head towards Bill in thanks. He came close and put out his hand. It hung between them a few moments before Bill shook it in his own.

I thought meself a dead man.

Check yer legs. To be sure.

Gould rolled up his tattered pants and felt all over his calves.

Who’s we? said Batman.

Bill turned and walked off.

Yer black brothers? Batman called. You aint no part athat no more. Just you remember.

But Bill didn’t look back.

At the mouth of a wooded gorge where blueberry ash shaded an underwood of infant man fern John Batman raised his hat and with it bade them all to halt. In unison the company set down their knapsacks. Each man in turn filled his pannikin from the eddying rockpools then lay about at ease on the banks plucking leeches from their ankles and flicking them into the river. Baxter moved among the men squeezing a wetted head of tobacco over their bite wounds, the dark juice a poison against poison. The river crept along a bed of stone and from it rose a fine brume which dampened their beards and hung dusty in the sun. They ate mutton chops, quiet but for the licking of fingers, and they watched up the slopes of the gorge for blacks until the night took them whole.

I
T WAS
B
ILL WHO LED THE
party through the hills. The only map he possessed was the roll of the land, the bend of the river and the arc of the sun. This was familiar country to him. He led them that morning along St Paul’s River but as it branched away he put into the forest and the party followed. Stands of dollybush and cutting grass and dogwood thrived on the hillsides and grew impenetrable so that the party was made to weave about. As they ascended the shallow incline the Vandemonian soon drew far ahead and the scrub gave around him and his bootsteps sounded out a cadence on the stones. He cooeed the party from the hilltop and when they looked up to call in return he was as featureless as shadow before the pure blue sky.

Come noon the company rested together in a valley while John Batman sought counsel from a battered brass compass. He turned it around, turned himself around, but allowed that he was none the wiser for it. Black Bill nominated a spiny rise of hills as his bearing guide and said it would take them
mainly south. When they moved on again the boy stuck close by Bill’s side and put to him questions concerning the taking of direction from sun or moon. Bill answered patiently and expounded upon the skill of memorising a landscape which a man needed to master if he was to survive in the back countries. On sighting a grove of native cherry he plucked a handful of the currants. They ate and walked and the boy asked his questions, questions such that Bill had been asked time and again. Did he ever eat babies like other blacks? If he took to his skin with soap would the black come off? The boy waited for Bill to answer.

The party pushed on, following the Vandemonian ever deeper into the hills. A wind had tossed the canopy all day and it stiffened slowly over the afternoon and cooled, the first crisp balls of rain hitting their hats like ripe gumnuts loosed in the winds. John Batman called for the finding of shelter and the building of fires and the party men spread outwards for whatever harbour might be found in those scrubwoods. The rain was firing down when Crook showed John Batman the burnt swamp gum, pointing and chattering in the language of his countrymen. Batman ducked inside the cavern. Scorched and stinking of rot, a rubble of bones on the earth, it was indeed a fair sort of place to make an encampment so he called the men inside. Rain battered the tree’s hull as the men spread out their blankets and removed their skin shoes and shook the water from their jerkins. A ring of rocks was set in the centre where Crook made them a fire. The smoke ran away obligingly up
the open trunk and they draped their clothes to dry beside the flames. They were nicely settled when the boy noticed Black Bill stood in the rain a good few yards off.

The boy waved to him. Come on then.

Bill didn’t move.

Batman put his head outside into the rain. What’s your game? he called.

Bill was standing beside another swamp gum of much the same immense proportions, save being unburned. Water poured off his hat brim as he passed a hand down the trunk and the carvings running crossways into the tree’s meat caught the points of his fingers. Bisected circles and halfmoons and spirals. The signs of life. No other tree was burned. Just one amid the many. He surveyed the great charred stump rooted into the soil and the cragged ruined branches and the smoke rising from the hollow and he knew it for what it was. He knew it for a cremation site.

So he trudged away between the gums collecting scraps of bark and branches and he heaped them leewards of a rock mantle as the rain streamed off his limbs. The men watched him work, their mutton upraised on sticks above the cook fire. Bill fashioned a rude breakwind against the ledge with leafy branches of eucalypt then he wedged himself out of the weather. Lightning lit the cloud cover in a series of short argent bursts. The rain had hardened and the death drum of thunder rolled on. The Vandemonian felt its reverberations in the solid earth beneath him.

Pigeon stepped outside into the weather and walked through the rain, bending his head into the breakwind. He grinned at Bill and Black Bill grinned back.

Come eat, old man, he said.

Not in there.

You want grub?

Bill shrugged.

Pigeon crossed through the gale and when he re-emerged he had in one hand the billycan and in the other a portion of damper and he set them before the Vandemonian.

Batman say you bloody mad.

No more than he I should think.

He turned to study the burnt cavern and the fire glow on those bearded faces. He stuffed a crust of damper in his mouth and chewed and Pigeon sat under the shelter with him as the blind storm thrashed wildly into the hillside.

T
HEY PUSHED ON ALL MORNING DOWN
a gorge and coming up the far side, a densely wooded incline, they chanced upon a rock overhang stained with the soot of countless cook fires. Nearby was a midden comprised of possum and wallaby bones and the carapace of crayfish, likely taken from the creek below, as well as hunks of broken glass, a section of shirt, a rotting blanket. The camp had not seen use in months. Batman kicked through the leavings and picked up the blanket on the tip of his knife to examine its construction. Then Crook whistled and raised his hands from the edge of the stone ground where the needlebush opened up and he waved his arms and pointed and clicked his tongue. There was a markener running up to and away from the overhang. It was a wide track, plain as cobble, following the natural movement of the land as it swelled and shrank into swale. The party men looked to John Batman and he in turn looked to Black Bill. The Vandemonian gazed about at the hills and above at the
vacant sun and he studied the markener a while then began along its course. The rovers duly followed.

He led them under the waterlogged scrub which discharged a stream upon their heads as they pushed on and soon they were drenched once more to the skin. They walked out the sunless morning at a slackened pace and stopped often to sip cold tea, shivering in the shadows. The weapons hanging longwise on their backs caught on every protrusion and this more than any other nuisance riled the men to fury as they wrenched the stocks of their pieces around and yanked on their leathers. It was miserable going. They hacked up the damp within their chests and bent over and spat long strings of phlegm. Even the seasoned men of the Parramatta ceased their singing.

Black Bill found the first of the marked trees standing alone in a gully. The bark had been stripped back and the bare flesh exposed and he remained a short distance away gazing up at the mark hacked into the eucalypt as he considered its meanings. What he saw prompted him to bring his rifle off his shoulder. The party men were filed out along the trail behind him and they watched him unsling his weapon and they dropped down and snatched their pieces around likewise. He whistled John Batman over and they stood shoulder to shoulder studying that sigil and looking up and down the
gully but they could make no sense of it. It was an arrow, well shaped and freshly made.

Could be splitters.

Bill pushed his hat back. There wont be clans here if bushmen are walking their roads.

Batman scuffed at the dirt with his boot heel. You think we might be in the wrong country?

If Bill held an opinion on that point he kept it to himself. He felt along the way marker with his fingers tracing over its three lines. Then he walked off down the trail. A dozen yards up they found another arrow notched into a silver wattle denoting the same direction. As the morning aged they trod the markener under them and passed at intervals the newly carved arrows where colonists had overlaid their own guide posts upon that ancestral pathway, a light serration tracing across the hills. The small stone cairns the blacks left as markers had been kicked and scattered and there was everywhere the signs of settler life. Hessian flour sacks and shards of pottery and shoes worn clean through littered the pathway or hung lodged in branches. On a hill crest they rested for a spell beneath a blue gum cloven lengthways by lightning strike, considered a lucky omen by Baxter, and they shared a pipe and watched their back trail like wanted men. What they’d supposed as a clanhold they now saw as contested country, a boundary land where one kind melded with another. They smoked and listened for footsteps.

As evening fell around them they put down a camp in a ring of mallee grown back off the path some distance. The ground was traced with the toeprints of wallabies and the balled hairy scat of devils, and the Parramatta men used the last sun to fashion spears for a hunt. From the choicest of the mallee they whittled the tips by means of Pigeon’s folding knife, gripping the haft with their feet as they worked. The point was then tempered in the fire and when each had a number finished they rose and gathered them up.

You come too, old man, said Pigeon, but Black Bill looked up from the bake hole he was digging and shook his head. So the Dharugs set off into the scrub without him and the blackened points of their spears wavering above the wattle understorey was all to be seen of them.

They weren’t long in pursuit. As the sunlight unwove and the forest shadows swelled the air began to fill with insects. The men slapped at their forearms and necks and someone loaded gum leaves onto the fire which smoked rankly and repelled the mosquitoes somewhat. The incessant buzz put the assignees on edge so that when the Dharugs suddenly reappeared out of the scrub one or two reached for their pieces until they saw it was Pigeon standing in the firelight and they eased their weapons down. He dragged a fresh killed kangaroo carcass up to the fireside. The men stared at him.

Found it in a tree. Them black buggers I reckon.

John Batman stood up. Where?

Not far. Plenty dog tracks down there.

Christ. Well, it’s dark now. Let’s have us a look in the morning.

Crook had a small wallaby that he tossed whole onto the flames. The sparks he raised swirled and turned and he clenched his eyes. He rolled the carcass to singe away the hair from every part then he scored the leg meat and emptied out the guts, smearing the intestines and stomach over the body to slow the cooking, and dumped it back onto the fire. A moon as white and full as a cross section of bone rose in the night sky. They ate the wallaby with their hands and broke the marrow from its ribs between two flat rocks. When they had finished eating they hurled the skin and offal and bones up the scrub for the devils to eat.

It was some time later when Bill awoke in the dark. He rolled out of his blanket. Pigeon and Crook were already on their feet and outlined against the bush, as faded as charcoal figurings on a cave wall, their pieces shouldered and cocked. Bill felt the ground for his own gun and stood with it, listening at the black vacancy beyond the faint cast of the fire. There was a feeble noise pulsing in the distance.

Sounds like cows, said the boy as he threw off his covers. They roused the rest. In the awful stillness the men bent their ears to the bush and strained to make out the noise. John Batman began packing fresh shot down each of his two muzzles and around him the rising and falling hiss of iron rods along barrels played out.

I cant hear nothin, said Batman. Stop it a minute.

They paused at their work.

I reckon it’s possums is all.

No, not them, said Pigeon. You hear?

They raised their heads.

That’s dogs, said Bill.

He’s right.

If there is dogs there is blacks.

Comin closer.

Be ready for em now, said Batman.

Look dere, look dere, said Crook and the rovers swung about in surprise at those recognisable words to see him staring into the sky, and when he pointed the party men as one saw the source of his alarm. The bold disc of moon in that barren sky was shrinking. What dim light there was dissolved as the shadow spread.

What in God’s name? said Batman.

The eclipsed moon’s faint halo glowed but gave no light. All was as lost as if it had never been. Then the howling grew, rising and resounding in that faultless dark, and the party men raised their weapons blindly for the charge they knew was imminent. They lined up together in the throw of light from the coals that died at their feet. Beyond it was a void, so that when the first dogs burst forth they appeared as if from nothing, conjured into existence and bounding, teeth bared, for their throats. Some of the men toppled back and cried
out, with ravening dogs at their arms and faces and still more beasts emerged from the darkness to catch at their rags or their limbs. Others were lost to the panic that followed and broke for the scrub with dogs tearing at them but John Batman went at the hounds with the metal butt plate of his shotgun. In the firelight the blood spewing from broken skulls ran thickly black and he trod through it and whaled into those crazed animals or tore them off his men by their scruffs.

The baying of dogs came so loud it resounded in Bill’s skull as he felt about in the dark. When the first shot was fired his vision clouded and the sulfur burned in his nose. He unhooked his powder horn and dosed up the nozzle as the men called direction to one another and John Batman’s burred voice cursed them on until another blazing report showed the forest briefly in daylight. A dog whimpered nearby. Black Bill crouched in shelter, waiting on the first flight of spears, but as Batman walked over to the whining dog and put one more barrel into its head the spears did not come. Bill fired at the mallee thereabouts and felled a further dog and bent to repack.

You see any? called Batman.

I see dogs.

I aint speared yet. Why aint I speared?

Off in the jetblack night they heard the screams of one man assailed by the pack. Bill went blindly forth, feeling his way with outstretched hands and making towards the shrieking. He stumbled then righted himself and felt around the wattles
and through the musk bush, drawing close enough for the cries to hurt his ears but still he saw nothing. The dank smell of the frenzied dogs was everywhere in that wood as Bill hit at the underbrush and swung again, finally connecting with flesh. Help, help, God help me.

Bill assailed the animals with wild swings, driving his booted feet in until at length the dogs relinquished and he was able to haul the fellow upright and he saw now that it was Horsehead. But the dogs came again and Bill fired his weapon square into the jaws of one that leapt at him. The pan’s flash showed the eye shine of a dozen more dogs around him. He grabbed Horsehead and led him at a flat run through the trees to where the company men had regathered in the coal’s halflight. They were bloodied and wrathful and armed with whatever had come to hand, stew pots, stones, sticks. Dogs stalked in the scrub at the fire’s limits and a good many more lay upon the ground dead or near to. As the moon shed its shadows and the scrub was recast in pallid blues Batman cooeed into the night and it was returned by Gumm. Soon he and Baxter blundered forth from the darkness.

Me hand, said Horsehead.

He had cupped one hand under an armpit, his forearms a mess of blood, and he walked among the men seeking some kind of assistance. He came before Batman, who grabbed his hand and yanked it into the light. Horsehead cried out and cursed him. The forefinger of the left hand was gone
to the knuckle. Batman turned the wound to examine it by the fire, he saw the protrusion of bone splinter and the torn skin, and he let the damaged hand fall.

I cant do nothin for it.

Christ. Me whole arm is burning.

What’s that make it now? said Batman.

Eh?

Three times.

Three? Horsehead wiped his sweat.

That old Bill has delivered you from misery.

Aye. Would be that.

So there wont be no bastard to save you when he comes for payment will there? Batman walked off into the dark.

Pigeon was there and Horsehead held out his hand to him as well. What do you make of it? he said.

The Parramatta man shook his head.

Do somethin for it, wont you? Aint there a native medicine here somewhere?

How would I know? I bloody Parramatta born and raise.

What use are you then?

Shut up, you bastard, you be right.

For a while the men studied the forest. Stood with loaded arms and listened. But if there were clansfolk somewhere out in the darkness they made no sound.

Praps they was rabid. Jimmy Gumm fixed them with his good eye. I’ve heard an eclipse will do it to a dog.

No. They were sent, said Bill.

Rags of flame tore in the silence. In the distance the dog pack contested bones and skin, their low moans the only sound other than the fire. The men took seat around the fire and built it up from the woodheap, built up the light for what little it was, but there wasn’t one among them inclined to sleep.

Come dawn they took breakfast crouched among the dog carcasses. Having little rest, the men were dark about the eyes and the boy nodded off even as he held his tea mug. It tipped forward in his grip as his head lolled and tea spilled upon the bloodfouled earth at his feet. John Batman examined the dead dogs. He found painted on the fur of some the ochre markings of the clans and he called for Bill, who came and bent over the dogs in a similar fashion. He saw in those markings the representations of kangaroo and of wallaby. In some others he saw reference to the great fables shared among the clansfolk, the stories of hunters and the creatures they slew, the designs intended to invoke the spirit of the pursuit the dogs would embark upon. He looked up at Batman.