Tracks (4 page)

The hunting of the crow was a major expedition; ropes, riding camels and lunches. Kurt assured me that he was an excellent climber and could reach the nest. However, after several attempts, although he could see the four young crows perfectly well, he could not quite reach them. He shimmied down the slippery trunk and announced plan B.

‘But, Kurt, you can’t do that. We don’t want four crows and besides they’ll be killed in the fall.’

‘Nonsense. De nest is light and it vill float. Besides, da branch will cushion da fall. Anyvay, vot’s it matter to you? You vanted a crow, didn’t you?’

There was no dissuading him. He hoisted the rope over the branch, pulled with all his strength and down it came, branch, limb and nest with two dead birds, another which died in my hands and one with a broken leg.

I carried Akhnaton home on Dookie, wrapped in nest feathers and inside my shirt. I rode in front so Kurt wouldn’t see me crying.

Two major developments had occurred by this time that made life a shade less taxing. My sister sent me a tent which I pitched on the other side of a hill from the ranch and which gave me a certain amount of privacy. I had also begun to make friends with our neighbours. They were potters and leather craftsmen — archetypal hippies with attractive desperado overtones, who were friendly, hospitable and who talked to me in a language I had almost forgotten. They lived in the only building in Alice Springs that looked as if it belonged — a dilapidated old stone house called Basso’s Farm, nestled among hills, which I loved as much as its occupants. Polly, Geoff and their small child lived at one end; Dennis, Malina and Dennis’s two small boys lived at the other. Malina was a fair-skinned, red-haired Scottish lass who made superb pots but was covered in tropical ulcers, insect bites and heat rash. Unlike the rest of us, she found it hard to eulogize about the wonderfulness of deserts.

Every spare moment I had I was over there, hanging around doorways in my baker’s outfit, chatting, laughing, or watching Polly stitch and fiddle with leather or change her daughter’s nappies without once raising her voice or looking harassed. She was an excellent craftswoman. The bags she made were untooled, delicate, beautifully designed, fastidiously detailed and she offered to teach me how to do it. I found that I lacked her patience, dexterity and talent, but after much sweat I managed to complete two goat-skin bags that were very pretty but proved to be totally useless on the trip. The lessons, however, came in handy when I eventually began to make my own pack gear, a year later.

My social life was now centred around Basso’s Farm. I would wedge in an hour or two most nights, sitting and drinking with them, waving away the flying insects that suicided around the pressure lamps, belly-aching about Kurt, and meeting small rare handfuls of sympathetic, friendly Alice-Springians. But by this stage I had become emotionally remote from outsiders. I found it hard to relax, especially when I had to face being introduced as someone with a label — something that always instigates an identity crisis. ‘I’d like you to meet Robyn Davidson, she’s taking camels across Australia.’ I didn’t know quite how to deal with that one except to fall in with it. Another trap. It was the inauspicious beginning of the ‘camel lady’ image which I should have nipped in the bud right there.

It was here too, one crisp night, that I experienced my first and only vision — alcohol induced. I had put away half a bottle of tequila during the course of the evening and had stumbled outside to pee. There before me stood three ghostly camels, all saddled and in beautiful Bedouin gear, staring out from the lemon trees. One of them, a white one, slowly ambled towards me. Although prophetic, it was too much for my reeling neurons at the time. I hitched my trousers with trembling fingers and fled the half mile to my tent. On the way I tripped into a ditch and lay like a felled tree, semi-conscious and blanketed in frost for the rest of the night. My headache in the morning was the size and power of a Kenworth truck which continued to change gear inside my skull for the whole of that day. During those long months I found that I was constantly projecting the images of camels on to whatever I looked at for longer than three seconds. Swaying branches became munching camel heads, dust patterns became galloping camels and drifting clouds became camels sitting down. It was a sure sign that my fragile mind was obsessed to the point of dementia and it had me vaguely worried. Whether my new friends were conscious of it or not, they helped me get through that time without too much brain damage because they formed a tenuous link with my past life, and because they made me laugh.

My tent was hardly comfortable, plonked out in the middle of the desert sun, but it was mine — my space. Akhnaton would swagger into it well before dawn, attack Diggity until she crawled protesting out of bed, and then proceed to pull the covers away from my face, peck gently at my ears and nose, and croak until I got up to feed him. He was insatiable. God knows where he put all that meat. When it was time to go to work, he would sit on my shoulder or hat until we three had climbed the hill and could see the ranch spread out below like a fake emerald, then he would gather himself for flight and soar down to the roof-top. It was the closest I have ever come to a vicarious knowledge of flight, and was well worth the rigours of his demanding nature and chronic kleptomania.

After I had made a bucket of sweet milk for the young camels, Diggity would leap six feet in the air to snap at any long neck that was trying to steal what she considered her breakfast, and the crow would dive-bomb all of them. He was an uncontrollable tease and Diggity would have dearly loved to swat him but was forbidden. She learnt eventually to accept him if not actually like him, and even tolerated taking him for rides on her back, something he enjoyed immensely, crooning and talking to himself all the while and egotistically preening his glossy blue-black feathers, and occasionally pecking her to make her hurry up. I found for the first time in my life that I really did enjoy the company of animals better than people. I was shy and confused with my own kind and did not trust them. I did not understand the change, did not realize that I had become isolated, defensive and humourless, did not know that I was lonely.

The demise of my tent was a sad affair. I was sleeping in it one night during a monumental hail-storm. The balls of ice gathered in the roof until it ripped and dumped a ton of frozen water on the occupants. It was back to Kurt’s, and gradually the pressure began to build again. He complained continually that there was no money left so I decided to get a job a few nights a week at a restaurant in town. It was disgusting work but it meant I was once more relating to humans and cracking jokes in the kitchen with real people. It also meant that I was overtired at work the next day. Kurt had become increasingly truculent and lazy, leaving most of the running of the place to me which I now found I could do quite capably. It suited me because I didn’t have him breathing down my neck.

One morning, however, he announced that I was to get up two hours earlier to bring in the camels. I stared at him incredulously and for the second time in my life, and the last, I fought him.

‘You bastard,’ I whispered. ‘You incomparable bastard, how dare you ask me to do that.’

I had been with him for eight months and the day of reckoning when he would have to start helping me was looming ever closer. He had been twisting the knife harder and harder lately, in the hope that I would crack and leave of my own accord. He had performed countless little cruelties that only strengthened my resolve not to let him get at me. But now, because of my tiredness, I could hold my emotions down no longer. Kurt was shocked into stony silence, but when I returned an hour later he was deathly white and his lips had set into a hard line.

‘You vill do exactly vat I tell you or you vill get out,’ he hissed, as he grabbed me and shook me till my teeth rattled.

The next day I left the ranch in a daze. I was never going to get my camels or anything else. I marvelled at whatever blindness it had been that allowed me to stay as long as I did as his dupe. I moped around the neighbours’ house for a few days and cried a lot and beat my chest. Then I was offered a job by that irascible old gentleman Sallay Mahomet who was to become a friend, camel-guru and saviour. He told me that anyone who could put up with Kurt for that long deserved a break, and he promptly produced a signed guarantee that if I came to work for him for a couple of months he would give me two of his wild camels. I felt like covering him in grateful kisses and grovelling at his feet saying thank you thank you thank you, but that was hardly Sallay’s style. We shook hands on the deal and so a whole new era began.

It was absurdly generous on Sallay’s part, as he knew I would be of little assistance in the kind of work he was doing. He had heard of my plight through an acquaintance who arrived from Brisbane — a camel-man also who had crossed Central Australia twice with three of his own, the first person to do so since the early days of exploration. We both worked for Sallay during that awful summer. Perhaps it was the intolerable heat in our work-tent, perhaps it was the poisonous snakes that crawled incessantly from under the flaps across the grass floor, perhaps it was the inch-long mosquitoes who bled you during the night until you were anaemic, perhaps it was simply that all people who deal long enough with camels go slightly troppo. But whatever it was, I managed to alienate Dennis too, who earlier on had been so willing to help me, and our squabbles often thudded out into the soggy, broiling air. I couldn’t work out this new capacity I’d acquired for creating enmity in the hearts of men.

At Kurt’s place, I had learnt the finesses of camel-handling. With Sallay and Dennis I learnt the rough and tumble; the fact that these animals could and would kill if given the opportunity. With the help of Dennis’s nervous ‘Watch outs’ and ‘Be carefuls’, and with Sallay’s instinct to protect what he would always consider the weaker sex, I began to live in an almost permanent state of fear, not helped any by my own performance anxiety in front of these two men. While I was there, I was kicked, struck, stamped on; I fell off a bucking wild camel and had my shin crushed between the iron bar of a saddle and a tree. This was an old camel trick to get rid of unwanted people on their backs: squash them or scrape them off on a limb, or sit down and roll on top of them. I was not a good enough rider, nor did I have the physical strength to deal with this. I began to feel useless and clumsy.

The most important things Sallay taught me were how to use ropes to tie up a camel, how to carve and whittle nose-pegs from white-wood or mulga, how to splice, how to fix saddles, in fact all the myriad little bits of knowledge that would play such an important part in my survival out in the bush. He was an endless mine of such information. He had been with camels all his life, although his relationship to them was anything but sentimental, and he treated them somewhat roughly for my soft-hearted tastes. He knew the animals as well as the back of his own hand, and some of that knowledge seeped into me and came out when I least expected it on my journey. I had met his wife Iris, who had an outrageous and wonderful sense of humour and who helped me to laugh at my predicament. She was a perfect contrast and complement to Sallay. They were two of the nicest people I met in that god-awful hole and I like, admire and respect them to this day. I am also eternally grateful.

One afternoon I was sleeping on my cot in a pool of sweat when I woke with the eerie feeling that somebody was watching me. I thought perhaps some townsfolk had arrived and went to grab my clothes, but there was no one. I lay down again but the feeling persisted. I glanced up and saw through a two-inch hole in the roof of the tent the beady blue eye of Akhnaton, first the right, then the left, staring fixedly at my naked body. I threw a boot at him.

He was also becoming an insufferable pest with his stealing. Just when you were about to clean your teeth, he would fly into a tree with the toothbrush and not drop it until you had given up shouting and shaking your fist at him. The same thing happened with spoons the minute you sat down with the sugar bowl and a cup of tea.

I had a small ancillary sleeping tent, shaped like a cone and lashed to the jutting limb of a tree. Because of the intense heat, I slept half inside this tent and half out of it, with the branch six feet above me. One morning before dawn Ark was beginning to wake me up as usual, but I had grown tired of this procedure; he was perfectly able to feed and fend for himself and should not be relying on his surrogate mother any longer. After he had unsuccessfully tried to rouse me, and after I had sworn at him to go find his own bloody breakfast, he hopped up on to that branch, walked along it, aimed deliberately, and shot a dribbling white present right into the middle of my face.

I had been in the Alice for almost a year now and I was a changed woman. It seemed I had always been there, that anything I may have been before was a dream belonging to someone else. My grip on reality was a little shaky. I wanted to see my friends again because I was beginning to realize how removed from everything but camels and madmen I had become. The time with Kurt had had a weird effect on me — I was self-protective, suspicious and defensive and I was also aggressively ready to pounce on anyone who looked like they might be going to give me a hard time. Though this may sound like a negative quality, it was essential for me to develop beyond the archetypal female creature who from birth had been trained to be sweet, pliable, forgiving, compassionate and door-mattish. I could be grateful to Kurt for that if nothing else. I also had a reinforced concrete strip down my back which successfully hid the yellow one. It wasn’t so much strength I had gained, as tenacity — bulldog tenacity. I decided to fly home to Queensland, to see Nancy, my closest friend. She and I had been confidantes for years, having been through the tedium of Brisbane’s post-1960s doldrums together, and come out of it with a close, tolerant, and loving friendship such as can exist only between two women who have worked hard for it. She was a yardstick against which I could measure what I had learnt and what I had felt. She was ten years older and wiser than me, and could always be depended upon to penetrate what I was thinking and help me put it into perspective. I valued that perspicacity and warmth above all else. And right now I needed a good talk over a kitchen table with her.