Walkabout (4 page)

It was Peter who made the decision. In the bush boy's laughter he'd found something he liked: a lifeline he didn't intend to lose.

‘Hey, Mary!' he gasped. ‘Come on. After him!'

He went crashing into the bush. Slowly, doubtfully, his sister followed.

‘Hey darkie!' Peter's reedy treble echoed down the valley. ‘We wanna come too. Wait for us!'

‘Hey, darkie!' the rocks re-echoed. ‘Wait for us. Wait for us. Wait for us.'

T
HE
bush boy turned. He knew what the call meant: the strangers were coming after him, were following him down the valley; already he could hear them crashing and lumbering through the scrub.

He waited; relaxed both physically and mentally: one hand passed behind his back and closed round the opposite elbow; one foot, ostrich-like, resting on the calf of the opposite leg. He wasn't frightened, for he knew instinctively that the strangers were harmless as a pair of tail-less kangaroos; but he was mildly surprised, for he had thought them both, especially the larger, impatient, eager to be on their way. As the children came racing towards him, he dropped his foot to the ground; became suddenly all attention; full of curiosity to know what they wanted to say and how they were going to say it.

Peter launched into a breathless appeal.

‘Hey, don't leave us, darkie! We're lost. We want food, an' drink. And we wanna know how we get to Adelaide.'

Mary looked at the bush boy, and saw in his eyes a gleam of amusement. It angered her, for she knew the cause; Peter's high-pitched, corncrakey voice. All the tenets of progressive society and racial superiority
combined inside her to form a deep-rooted core of resentment. It was wrong, cruelly wrong, that she and her brother should be forced to run for help to a Negro; and a naked Negro at that. She clutched Peter's hand, half drawing him away.

But Peter was obsessed by none of his sister's scruples. To him their problem was simple, uncomplicated: they wanted help, and here was someone who could, his instinct told him, provide it. The fact that his appeal had failed to register first time nonplussed him for a moment. But he wasn't put off; he stuck to his guns. Breath and composure regained, he now spoke slowly, in a lower, less excited key.

‘Look, darkie, we're lost. We want water. You sabby water? War-tur. War-tur.'

He cupped his hands together, drew them up to his lips, and went through the motions of swallowing.

The bush boy nodded.

‘
Arkooloola
.”

His eyes were serious now. Understanding. Sympathetic. He knew what it meant to be thirsty.

‘
Arkooloola
.”

He said the word again. Softly, musically, like the rippling of water over rock. He pursed up his lips and moved them as though he, too, were drinking.

Peter hopped delightedly from foot to foot.

‘That's it, darkie. You've got it.
Arkooloolya
. That's the stuff we want. And food too. You sabby food? Foo-ood. Foo-ood.'

He went through the motions of cutting with knife and fork, then started to champ his jaws.

The cutting meant nothing to the bush boy; but the jaw champing did. Again his eyes were sympathetic.

‘
Yeemara
.'

His teeth, in unison with Peter's, clicked in understanding.

The white boy was jubilant.

‘You've got it, darkie. Got it first time.
Yeemara
an'
Arkooloolya.
That's the stuff we want. Now where do we get'em?'

The bush boy turned, moved away at right angles, into the scrub. He paused, glanced over his shoulder, then moved away again.

‘
Kurura
,' he said.

There was no mistaking his meaning.

‘Come on, Mary,' the boy hissed excitedly.
‘Kurura,
that means “follow me”.'

He trotted eagerly after the bush boy.

Slowly, reluctantly, the girl followed.

After a while they came to a forest of heartleaves. Beneath the thick, closely-woven foliage the shade was deep: a striking contrast to the glare of the bush. Beneath the close-packed trees the white children moved uncertainly, stumblingly: their sun-narrowed pupils slow to adjust themselves to the sudden darkness. But the bush boy, his eyes refocussing almost at once, pushed rapidly on. The others, stumbling and tripping over ground roots, were hard put to keep up with him.

It was cool beneath the heartleaves; cool and quiet and motionless as a sylvan stage set. Hour after hour
the bush boy led on, gliding like a bar of well-oiled shadow among the giant trees. He moved without apparent effort, yet quickly enough for Peter to be forced to jog-trot. Soon the small boy was panting. In spite of the shade, sweat plastered back his hair; trickled round his eyes and into his mouth. He started to lag behind. Seeing him in trouble, Mary also dropped back; and Peter reached for her hand.

The girl was pleased: gratified that in his difficulties he'd turned to her. Subconscious twinges of jealousy had been tormenting her. She had been hurt, deeply hurt, at his so quickly transferring his sense of reliance from her to an uncivilized and naked black. But now things were returning to normal; now he was coming back to the sisterly fold.

‘All right, Peter,' she whispered, ‘we won't leave you behind.'

She knew that he must – like her – be suffering cruelly from thirst, hunger, and physical exhaustion: knew that his mouth, like hers, must feel as if it were crammed with red-hot cotton wool. But there was nothing they could do about it: or would it, she wondered, help if they acted like dogs – lolled out their tongues and panted?

Ahead of them the heartleaves ended abruptly. One moment they were groping forward in deep shade, the next they were looking out across an expanse of glaring sand: mile after shimmering mile of ridge and dune, salt-pan and iron-rock: the Sturt Desert: heat-hazed, sun-drenched, waterless.

‘Kurura,'
the bush boy said.

He started to walk into the desert.

Mary held back. She didn't exactly mistrust the bush boy, didn't doubt that if he wished he could – eventually – lead them to food and water. But how far away would the food and water be? Too far, most likely, for them ever to reach it. She sank to her knees in the shade of the last of the heartleaves. Peter collapsed beside her; the sweat from his hair ran damply into the lap of her dress.

The bush boy came back. He spoke softly, urgently, the pitch of his words rising and falling like the murmur of wavelets on a sandy shore. The words themselves were meaningless; but his gestures spoke plainly enough. If they stayed where they were they would die: the bush boy fell to the sand, his fingers scrabbling the dry earth; soon the evil spirits would come to molest their bodies; the bush boy's eyes rolled in terror. But if they followed him he would take them to water; the bush boy swallowed and gulped. They hadn't far to go: only as far as the hill-that-had-fallen-out-of-the-moon; his finger pointed to a strange outcrop of rock that rose like a gargantuan cairn out of the desert, a cairn the base of which was circled by a dark, never-moving shadow.

It looked very far away.

The girl wiped the sweat out of her eyes. In the shade of the heartleaves it was mercifully cool; far cooler than it would be in the desert. It would be so much easier, she thought, to give the struggle up, simply to stay where they were. She looked at the
cairn critically. How could the bush boy know there was water there? Whoever heard of finding water on top of a pile of rock in the middle of a desert?

‘Arkooloola,'
the bush boy insisted. He said it again and again, pointing to the base of the cairn.

The girl looked more closely, shading her eyes against the glare of the sun. She noticed that there was something strange about the shadow at the foot of the cairn. As far as she could see, it went all the way round. It couldn't, then, be ordinary shadow, caused by the sun. What else, she wondered, could create such a circle of shade? The answer came suddenly, in a flood of wonder and disbelief. It must be vegetation. Trees and bushes: thick, luxuriant, verdant, and lush. And such vegetation, she knew, could only spring from continually-watered roots. She struggled to her feet.

It seemed a long way to the hill-that-had-fallen-out-of-the-moon. By the time they got there the sun was setting.

They came to the humble-bushes first, the twitching, quivering leaves tumbling to the sand as they approached. Then came the straw-like mellowbane, and growing amongst them a grass of a very different kind: sturdy reed-thick grass, each blade tipped with a black, bean-shaped nodule: rustling death-rattle, astir in the sunset wind. The bush boy snapped off one of the reeds. He drove it into the sand. Its head, when he pulled it out, was damp. He smiled encouragement.

‘
Arkooloola,'
he said, and hurried on.

The base of the cairn rose steeply, strata upon strata of terraced iron-rock rising sheer from the desert floor; and the bottom belt of strata was moss-coated and glistening damp, with lacy maidenhair and filigree spider-fern trailing from every crevice. The children stumbled on, brushing aside the umbrella ferns, spurred forward now by the plash of water and by a sudden freshness in the air.

Peter had been lagging behind – for the last mile Mary had been half-carrying, half-dragging him. But now, like an iron filing drawn to a magnet, he broke loose and went scurrying ahead. He disappeared into the shade of the umbrella ferns, and a second later Mary heard his hoarse, excited shout.

‘It's water, Mary!
Water.'

‘Arkooloola,' the bush boy grinned.

Together black boy and white girl pushed through the tangle of fern until they came to a tiny pear-shaped basin carved out of solid rock by the ceaseless drip of water. Beside the basin Peter was flat on his face, his head, almost up to his ears, dunked in the clear translucent pool. In a second Mary was flat out beside him. Both children drank, and drank, and drank.

The water was luke-warm; for though the sun was no longer shining on it directly, the all-pervading heat had found it out: had warmed it almost to the temperature of blood. As the girl drank she saw, out of the corner of her eye, the bush boy settle down beside her. She noticed that he didn't drink from the
surface, but reached down, with his fingers outspread, to scoop water from the bottom of the pool. Quick to learn, she too reached down to the rocky bottom. At once the warm surface water was replaced by a current of surprising coolness: a delicious eddy from depths that the rays of the sun had never plumbed. Nectar, with a coolness doubly stimulating: doubly good.

The bush boy drank only a little. Soon he got to his feet, climbed a short way up the cairn, and settled himself on a ledge of rock. Warm in the rays of the setting sun, he watched the strangers with growing curiosity. Not only, he decided, were they freakish in appearance and clumsy in movement, they were also amazingly helpless: untaught; unskilled, utterly incapable of fending for themselves: perhaps the last survivors of some peculiarly backward tribe. Unless he looked after them, they would die. That was certain. He looked at the children critically; but there was in his appraisal no suggestion of scorn. It was his peoples' way to accept individuals as they were: to help, not to criticize, the sick, the blind, and the maimed.

He noticed that the smaller of the pair had finished drinking now, and was climbing awkwardly towards him. He leant down, and hauled him on to the ledge of rock.

The water had revived a good deal of Peter's vitality. He was coming now to do something that his sister couldn't bring herself to do: to beg for food. His eyes were on the baby wallaby, still held in the
bush boy's hand. He reached out and touched it; tentatively; questioningly.

‘Eat?' he said.
‘Yeemara?'

The sun was setting as the boys clambered down from the rock. Twilight, in the Northern Territory, is short. In half an hour it would be quite dark.

The bush boy moved quickly. Skirting the outcrop of rock, he came to a place where a chain of billabongs went looping into the desert: baby poollets, fed from the main pool's overflowing breast. Beside the last of the billabongs was an area of soft sandstone rock: flat, featureless, devoid of vegetation. Here, the bush boy decided, was the site for their fire. He started to clear the area of leaves, twigs, and grass; everything inflammable he swept aside; so that the evil spirits of the bush fire should have nothing to feed on.

Peter watched him. Inquisitive. Imitative. Soon he too started to brush away the leaves and pluck out the blades of grass. And as he worked he fired off questions; his chirpy falsetto echoing shrilly among the rocks.

‘What you reckonin' to do, darkie? What you sweepin' the rock like it was a carpet for?'

The bush boy grinned; he'd guessed what the small one wanted to know. On the palm of his hand he placed a dried leaf and a fragment of resin-soaked yacca-yacca; then he blew on them gently, carefully, as though he were coaxing a reluctant flame.