Walkabout (2 page)

She found a shallow pool, immediately below a miniature waterfall. Here she slid into the water, watching the ripples lap slowly higher, over her knees, thighs and waist. She was breast deep before her toes touched bottom. Looking down she could see her underwater-self with startling clarity; could even see the bruise on her hip – where she'd crashed
against the side of the plane – standing out darkly against the white of her skin. She ducked down till only her floating hair showed on the surface: her long golden hair, the colour of ripening corn, which she started to swirl around and about her like the muleta of a matador. She laughed and splashed and hand-scooped the water over her face, and forgot she was hungry.

Beside the outcrop of rock, her brother stirred. Half-asleep, half-awake, he heard the plash of water. He sat up, yawning and rubbing the sleepiness out of his eyes. For a moment he couldn't think where he was. Then he caught sight of his sister.

‘Hi, Mary!' he yelled. ‘I'm coming too.'

He scrambled up. Sandals, shorts and shirt were flung aside as he came charging down to the stream. With a reckless belly-flop he arrived beside the girl in a shower of drenching spray.

Mary wasn't pleased. Seizing him under the armpits, she plonked him back on the bank.

‘Peter, you ass. It's too deep. Look, you're full of water.'

‘I'm not. I spat it out. Besides, I can swim.'

He belly-flopped a second time into the pool. But Mary noticed he kept to the shallows now: to the sandy-bottomed shallows where the rivulet widened and the banks flattened out. Watching him, she suddenly became conscious of her nakedness. Quickly she scrambled out of the pool and struggled into her dress.

Peter surveyed her critically.

‘You're all wet,' he said. Tou ought to have dried yourself first.'

‘Stop chattering, Peter. And get dry yoursef.'

She helped him out of the pool, and rubbed him down with his shirt.

‘I'm hungry,' he announced cheerfully. ‘What can we eat?'

‘There's barley sugar in your pocket.'

He pulled out the sticky fragment.

‘It's not much.'

He broke it and dutifully offered her half. But she shook her head.

‘It's all right,' she said. ‘I've had mine.'

She watched him as, cheeks bulging, hands in pockets, he went strolling down by the creek. Thank heavens he didn't seem to be worried: not yet. Whatever happened he must never realize how worried she was; must never lose faith in her ability to look after him.

She watched him exploring their strange surroundings; watched him drop flat on his stomach, and knew he was Davy Crockett, reconnoitring a new frontier. He wriggled along in the sand, cautiously peering across to the farther bank of the stream. Suddenly he leapt to his feet, clutched the seat of his trousers and gave an almighty yell of anguish. Again and again he yelled, as again and again red-hot needles of pain shot through his squirming body.

Mary tumbled and slithered down the rocks; rushed to his aid. For a second she couldn't think what had happened; then she too felt the red-hot needle of
pain, and looking down saw their assailants. Ants. Jumping ants. Three-quarters of an inch long, forty per cent jaw and forty per cent powerful grass-hop-perish legs. She saw their method of attack at once; saw how they hunched themselves up, then catapulted through the air – often several feet – on to their prey. She half-dragged, half-carried Peter away, at the same time hauling off his trousers.

‘It's all right,' she gasped. ‘They're only ants. Look. Hanging on to your trousers. Biting away as if you're still inside.'

His wailing stopped; he looked at his discarded shorts. It was true. The ants were still there; their wispy antennae weaving from side to side like the arms of so many punch-drunk boxers; their mandibles were open wide, eager to bite again. But they weren't given the chance. With a shout of rage Peter elbowed his sister aside and started to jump on the shorts; his feet thudded into the denim, pounding and crushing, pulverizing the ants to death. Or so he thought.

Mary stood aside; relieved; half-amused at the violence of his revenge. She had seen the ants sneaking clear of the shorts. But she said nothing. Not until his pounding feet threatened to damage his trousers. Then she reached for his hand.

‘O.K., Peter. They're all dead now.'

She helped him on with his shorts.

He started to whimper then; the pain of the bites touching off a host of half-formed fears. Mary's arms went round him. He felt small and shivery and thin; she could feel his heart thudding between his ribs.

‘It's all right, Pete,' she whispered. ‘I won't let them bite you again.'

His sobs died; but only momentarily. Then they started again.

‘What is it, Pete?'

‘I don't like this place.'

Now it's coming, she thought. It's coming, and there's nothing I can do about it.

‘I don't like it here, Mary. I wanna go home.'

‘But we can't go home, Peter. We've got nothing to cross the sea in.'

‘Then let's go to Uncle Keith. In Adelaide.'

She was surprised how much he'd remembered. Their plane had been bound for Adelaide.

‘All right,' she said slowly. ‘I'll take you to Uncle Keith.'

Instantly his sobbing stopped.

‘When? Now?'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘now. We'll start to walk to Adelaide.'

S
TURT PLAIN
, where the aircraft had crashed, is in the centre of the Northern Territory. It is roughly the size of England and Wales combined; but instead of some 45,000,000 inhabitants, it has roughly 4,500, and instead of some 200,000 roads, it has two, of which one is a fair-weather stock route. Most of the inhabitants are grouped round three or four small towns – Tennant Creek, Hooker Creek, and Daly Waters – which means that the rest of the area is virtually uninhabited. The Plain is fourteen hundred miles from Adelaide and is not a good place to be lost in.

Had they known enough to weigh up their chances, the children would have realized their only hope was to stay beside the wrecked plane; to rely on rescue from the air. But this never occurred to them. Adelaide was somewhere to the south. So southward they started to walk.

The girl worked things out quietly, sensibly – she wasn't the sort to get into a panic. The sun had risen there: on the left of the gully: so that would be east. South, then, must be straight ahead; down-stream. That was lucky. Perhaps they'd be able to follow the creek all the way to the sea; all the way to Adelaide. She knotted the four corners of Peter's handkerchief,
dipped it in the water, and draped it over his head – for already the sun was uncomfortably hot.

‘Come on, Peter,' she said, ‘let's go.'

She led the way down the gully.

At first the going was easy. Close to the stream, rocks of granite and quartz provided safe footing; and the trees, sprouting from every pocket of clay, were thick enough to give a welcome shade, but not so thick that they hindered progress. Mary pushed steadily on.

Soon the gully became wider, flatter, fanning into an open plain. Another rivulet joined theirs, and together the two of them went looping away down a shallow, sand-fringed valley. In the middle of the valley the undergrowth was thick; luxuriant. Brambles and underscrub slowed down their progress. But Mary didn't want to lose sight of the stream. Determinedly she forced a way through the tangle of vegetation, turning every now and then to give her brother a hand. Ground-vines coiled and snaked and clutched at their feet; the decaying trunks of fallen trees perversely blocked their path; but the girl kept on, sorting out a line of least resistance, holding back the lower branches to protect Peter from their swing back.

For two hours the boy followed her manfully; then he started to lag. Mary noticed at once; she cut across to the stream and sat down on a shelving slab of quartz.

‘We'll rest now,' she said.

Thankfully he collapsed beside her. She smoothed
the hair out of his eyes, plastering it back with its own sweat.

For a long time there was silence; then came the question she had been dreading.

‘I'm hungry, Mary. What we going to eat?'

‘Oh, Peter! It's not lunch-time yet.'

‘When will it be?'

‘I'll tell you when.'

But he wasn't satisfied; not satisfied at all.

‘When it is time, what we going to eat?'

‘I'll find something.'

She didn't tell him that ever since leaving the gully she'd been searching for berries; in vain. But he sensed her anxiety. His mouth started to droop.

‘I'm hungry now,' he said.

Quickly she got up.

‘All right. Let's look for something to eat.'

To start with – at least for the boy – it was an amusing game: part of their Big Adventure. They looked in the stream for fish; but the fish, such as they were, were asleep: invisible in the sediment-mud. They looked in the trees for birds; but the birds had vanished with the dawn. They looked in the bush for animals; but the animals were all asleep, avoiding the heat of the sun in carefully chosen burrow, log or cave. They looked among the riverside rocks for lizards; but the reptiles heard their clumsy approach, and slid soundlessly into crack or crevice. The bush slept: motionless: silent: apparently deserted. Drugged to immobility by the heat of the midday sun.

The game wasn't amusing for very long.

Eventually their search led them away from the stream, into less luxuriant vegetation; into the open bush. They could see farther here; could see to where, a little way ahead, a ridge of low, slab-sided hills were tilted out of the level plain. The children looked at the hills. They looked friendly; familiar; like the foothills of the Alleghenies. The boy reached for his sister's hand.

‘Mary!'

‘Yes, Peter?'

‘Remember when Daddy took us on top of Mount Pleasant. Remember all the lots of sea we could see?'

‘Yes, I remember.'

‘P'raps we could see the sea from the tops of those mountains.'

It took them half an hour to get to the foot of the hills. They rose in a low escarpment, an outcrop of granite and quartz, jutting abruptly out of the level plain. The stream, moat-like, skirted their feet. There seemed at first to be no way up. Then the girl spotted a dark shadow: a gully, cleaving the escarpment like the cut of an axe.

Except that it faced north rather than south, it might have been the gully where they'd spent the night; it had the same smoothly rising sides, and the same rock-fringed tumbling stream. It took them four hours to climb it.

If the stream hadn't provided them with water, and the sides of the gully with shade, they would never have got to the top.

As it was the sun was setting as they clambered on to the rim of the hills, and saw the country to southward stretching away in front of them, bathed in golden light: a magnificent panorama: a scene of primeval desolation: mile after hundred mile of desert, sand and scrub. And in the far distance, pools of silver; pools of glinting, shimmering light; pools which shivered and wavered and contracted, and seemed to hang a fraction above the horizon.

The boy danced with delight.

‘Look, Mary. Look! The sea. The sea. It isn't far to go.'

She caught hold of him and pulled him against her and pressed his face to her breasts.

‘Don't look, Peter,' she whispered. ‘Don't look again. It isn't fair.'

She knew what the pools of silver were: the salt pans of the great Australian desert. She sat down on the thin tufted grass and started to roll and unroll the hem of her frock.

After a long time she got up, and led the protesting Peter back to the gully. At least there was water there. She told him that tomorrow they'd walk down to the sea. Tomorrow they wouldn't be hungry any more.

S
UN-UP
brought the kookaburras, the gang-gangs and the finches. It brought warmth and colour. And hunger.

The girl woke early. She lay on her back, thinking. Outwardly she was calm; but inwardly she was damming back a gathering flood of fear. Always she had protected Peter, had smoothed things out and made them easy for him – molly-coddled him like an anxious hen her father had once said. But how could she protect him now? She knew that soon he'd be awake; awake and demanding to start off for the ‘sea'. It would be too cruel to tell him the sea wasn't there. She'd have to think of something else: have to tell him one of those special sort of lies that Mummy said God didn't mind. Her forehead puckered in concentrated thought.

Too soon Peter was awake.

They spent the morning searching for food. It would be foolish, Mary said, to start walking seaward without having something to eat; without first collecting a stock of food for their journey. The sea might be farther off than it looked.

They searched mainly for fruit, but for a long time found nothing. They examined the tawny leopard-trees,
the sapless mellowbane, the humble-bushes with their frightened collapsing leaves, and the blood-woods with their overflowing crimson sap. They skirted the kurrajungs and the bottlebrushes and the eucalyptus; then they came to a group of trees of another, rarer kind: graceful, symmetrical trees, covered with thick silver foliage and – miracle of miracles – with multicoloured globules of fruit.