Walkabout

JAMES VANCE MARSHALL

PUFFIN BOOKS

PUFFIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published as
The Children
by Michael Joseph 1959

Published in Peacock Books 1963

Reissued in Puffin Books 1979

45

Copyright © James Vance Marshall, 1959

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-192981-1

I
T
was silent and dark, and the children were afraid. They huddled together, their backs to an outcrop of rock. Far below them, in the bed of the gully, a little stream flowed inland – soon to peter out in the vastness of the Australian desert. Above them the walls of the gully climbed smoothly to a moonless sky.

The little boy nestled more closely against his sister. He was trembling.

She felt for his hand, and held it, very tightly.

‘All right, Peter,' she whispered. ‘I'm here.'

She felt the tension ebb slowly out of him, the trembling die gradually away. When a boy is only eight a big sister of thirteen can be wonderfully comforting.

‘Mary,' he whispered, ‘I'm hungry. Let's have something to eat.'

The girl sighed. She felt in the pocket of her frock, and pulled out a paper-covered stick of barley sugar. It was their last one. She broke it, gave him half, and slipped the other half back in her pocket.

‘Don't bite,' she whispered. ‘Suck.'

Why they were whispering they didn't know. Perhaps because everything was so very silent: like a church. Or was it because they were afraid; afraid of being heard?

For a while the only sounds were the distant rippling of water over stone, and the sucking of lips round a diminishing stick of barley sugar. Then the boy started to fidget, moving restlessly from one foot to another. Again the girl reached for his hand.

‘Aren't you comfy, Pete?'

‘No.'

‘What is it?'

‘My leg's bleeding again. I can feel the wet.'

She bent down. The handkerchief that she had tied round his thigh was now draped like a recalcitrant garter over his ankle. She refastened it, and they huddled together, holding hands, looking into the powdery blackness of the Australian night.

They could see nothing. They could hear nothing – apart from the lilt of the rivulet – for it was still too early for the stirring of bush life. Later there'd be other sounds; the hoot of the mopoke, the mating howl of the dingo, and the leathery flip-flap-flip of the wings of flying foxes. But now, an hour after sunset, the bush was silent: frighteningly still: full, to the children, of terrors all the greater for being unknown. It was a far cry from here to their comfortable home in Charleston, South Carolina.

The hours meandered past like slow, unhurrying snails. At last the boy's head dropped to his sister's lap. He snuggled closer. His breathing became slower, deeper. He slept.

But the girl didn't sleep; that would never have done; for she had to keep guard. She was the elder. The responsibility was hers. That was the way it had
always been, as far back as she could remember. Always she had been the big sister who had stuck plaster on Peter's knees, had taught him to tie his shoe laces, and had taken the lead in their games of Indians and cowboys. Now that they were lost – somewhere in the middle of an unknown continent – the weight of her responsibility was greater than ever. A wave of tenderness welled up inside her. Always she had big-sistered him; now she must mother him as well.

For a while she sat staring into the darkness; the darkness that was warm, thick and almost tangible; soon her mind became utterly blank. The day's events had been too overwhelming; had drawn on her too heavily. The rhythmic beat of the small boy's slumber came to her lullingly now. Gradually her breathing fell in step with his. The whisper of the creek came to her like the croon of a lullaby. Her eyelids drooped and closed, fluttered and closed again. Soon she too was fast asleep.

In the darkness beyond the gully, the bush came slowly to life.

A lumbering wombat came creeping out of his ground den. His short stumpy body forced a way through the underscrub; his long food-foraging snout ploughing through the sandy earth in search of his favourite roots. Suddenly he stopped: sniffed: his nostrils dilated. He followed the strange new scent. Soon he came to the gully. He looked the children over; thoughtfully, not hungrily, for he was a vegetarian,
an eater of roots. His curiosity satisfied, he shambled slowly away.

Random fireflies zigzagged by; their nightlights flickering like sparklets from a roving toy-sized forge.

Soon, creeping along the edge of darkness, came another creature: a marsupial tiger-cat, her eyes widened by the night to glowing oriflammes of fire. She too had scented the children; she too clambered into the gully and looked them over. They smelt young and tender and tempting; but they were large; too bulky, she decided, to drag back to her mewling litter. On velvet paws she slunk away.

A night mist tried to gather: failed – for the air in the gully was too warm – and dissipated into pre-dawn dew. The dampness settled on the children, pressing down their clothes, tracing the outline of their bodies in tiny globules of pearl. They stirred but didn't wake. They were lost in their dreams.

In her sleep the girl moved uneasily. She was in the aeroplane again, and she knew that something was wrong. She and Peter were the only passengers, sandwiched between the crates of vegetables and the frozen carcasses of beef, and she was watching the port engine, waiting for the flames she knew would come. Too soon they were there; the tiny tongues of red licking out of the cowling. In her sleep she twisted and moaned; then mercifully, her mind went blank – nature's safety valve that protects, even in dreams, those who have been shocked beyond endurance – and the next thing she dreamt was that she and Peter were staggering away from the blazing plane, she pulling
him frantically because one of his legs was numb and his feet kept sinking into the soft, yielding sand. ‘Quick, Peter,' she gasped. ‘Quick, before it explodes.' She heard a dull pulsating roar, and looking back saw the figure of the Navigating Officer carrying the pilot and clambering out of the wreckage. In the heat of the explosion he glowed white-hot, disintegrating. Again her mind went numb, but in her sleep she clutched her brother's hand; clutched it and squeezed it so tight that he half-woke and slid awkwardly off her lap.

The nightlights of the fireflies became pale and anaemic. Out of the east crept a permeating greyness; a pearly opaqueness in the sky; the sun-up of another day.

T
HE
advance guard of sunlight filtered into the gully, turning the night to powdery opaqueness. The warmth of the rays drew this opaqueness up: drew it together into little spirals of mist – random smoke rings from a giant's pipe, that floated lazily above the course of the stream.

As the light gained in intensity, the bush beyond the gully took on new colours: vivid colours: jade and emerald, white and reseda, crimson, scarlet and gold. Here was something very different from the desert of popular imagination; a flowering wilderness of eucalyptus, lantana, brigalow and iron bark. First to take colour were the tops of the eucalyptus: great two-hundred-foot relics of the forests of antiquity, their trunks skeleton white, their oil-laden leaves already twisting edge-on to dodge the shrivelling rays of the sun. The golden light moved lower, gilding the flowered lantana and the straggling brigalow as they intertwined in age-old rivalry; then it came lower still, warming the ridged and furrowed iron bark, the tree that is as hard as studded rhinoceros hide, the tree that never dies (so the Aboriginals say) and is scented more sweetly than orange blossom. At last the golden rays flooded past the outcrop of rock and over the still sleeping children.

The girl lay against the rock, bolstered up by its support. But the boy had moved in the night; he lay sprawled on his back now, arms and legs akimbo. Both slept soundly, unconscious of the growing beauty of the Australian dawn.

On the topmost branch of a gum tree that overhung the gully, there alighted a bird: a large, grey-backed bird, with tufted poll and outsized beak. Its eyes, swivelling separately, searched the gully for food; but instead of the hoped-for frog or snake sunning itself on the rock, it saw the children. The kookaburra was puzzled. The presence of these strange interlopers, it decided, deserved to be announced. It opened wide its beak, and a continuous flow of grating, unmelodious notes shattered the calm of the gully.

The girl leapt to her feet. Her heart pounded. The sweat broke out on the palms of her hands. Terrified, she stared round the sunlit gully.

High above, the kookaburra noted her reactions. Its curiosity was piqued. With another ear-splitting shriek it came swooping down. The girl relaxed. It was only a bird. Its scream was nothing to be frightened of; more to be laughed at really.

She turned to Peter. The kookaburra hadn't disturbed his sleep. Lying beneath the great slab of rock, he looked small and helpless, dwarfed by the immensity of his surroundings. Once again pity and tenderness welled up inside her; brought a pricking feeling to the back of her eyes. How utterly he depended on her now. When he wakes, she thought, he'll be hungry; as hungry as I am. Feeling in the pocket of
her frock, she took out the last half-stick of barley sugar; gently she slipped it into her brother's pocket.

Food, she realized, was their immediate problem. Water they could get from the stream, but what could they eat? She knew that people who didn't eat died. She'd read about an explorer once … it didn't take many days. She looked at the kookaburra. As if sensing her thoughts, he gave a great piercing shriek and went winging down the gully.

But other birds soon took his place: big, black-bodied cockatoos with yellow tails, ripping bark off the eucalyptus in search of grubs; gang-gangs dangling upside-down from the flowers of the Ian tana; and iridescent painted-finches, splashing merrily in the shallow waters of the creek. The girl watched them. She envied the finches. Already the sun was warm; her dress was dirty and clammy with dew; and the water looked cool and crystal-dear: cool and crystal-dear and tempting. She looked carefully around. Peter was asleep; there was probably no one else within a hundred miles. Impulsively she kicked off her sandals, pulled her frock over her head, stepped out of her panties and ran naked down to the water. The finches darted away. She had the creek to herself.