Arthur Upfield - The bushman who came back

Often he expected the water to flow around them, and as often was fooled by the mirage, so complete was this trickery played by Lake Eyre. Four crows came from the east, mocking them as they passed. That morning he had noticed three flying to the east, and as he laboured onward, he speculated about the additional bird.

When the sun went down, the wind was furnace-hot, the sky a flaming fire, and the surface of the lake was a red-gold sea. Far ahead tall masts towered to the sky, and from tip to tip of these masts sped something resembling nothing. Abruptly there appeared an object looking like a crab walking on the edge of its shell.

“That’s them,” shouted Meena, and Bony turned to say:

“Could be. But how far away?”

The question baffled her. The shadows of the voyagers magically lengthened and were barely the width of a hair. The flame of the sky darkened to crimson, and the mirage turned to green and swiftly from green to steel. Overhead the crimson pall quivered, became ribs of blood veined by black valleys and moving ever to the east before the wind; the mirrored surface of real water to the north enflamed by the setting sun.

They could see the gradual darkening as the sun passed over the rim, and swiftly all the colours under the sky faded into drab brown oblivion. Quite suddenly they saw, barely two hundred yards distant, a low wall of reddish sand, topped with tussock grass. And a man and a child!

“Down,” shouted Bony, as he sprawled forward on his chest, wriggled slightly to pull the rifle off his back and bring it to the ready.

Facing the glare of the western sky, the man and child sighted the voyagers moments after they themselves were seen. Yorky, for it must be he, flung himself down behind the robust tussock grass, but the child continued to stand on a miniature hummock of sand.

The moments were those between the magic hours of day and the shrouding hours of night, when this country is revealed in true perspective, and this evening, stereoscopic clarity. Over the barrel of his rifle, Bony watched the movements behind the grass, and actually witnessed the muzzle of Yorky’s Winchester being pushed through the fringe.

A swift glance backward showed him Meena still standing, and he called to her to go down. She shook her head and shrilly shouted to Linda:

“It’s me! Meena! Tell Yorky, Linda. Tell Yorky!”

Meena provided a perfect target. Bony, who was better than average, could see the tip of Yorky’s rifle and knew precisely where the man’s head was in relation to it. The range was only about two hundred yards. The light held. Perspiration ran like rain down his face to wet the stock of his rifle against which his cheek was pressed. If Yorky fired first, Meena or himself would die. If he fired first, curtains for Yorky. Instinct drove him to pull the trigger; training commanded him to wait.

A Mixed Reception

A lesser man might not have hesitated before speeding a bullet into Yorky’s brain. He would act on the impulse of survival of the swiftest, and subsequently would be commended for preventing the possible murder of the woman so rashly exposing herself to danger.

Great men are natural gamblers. Bony gambled that Yorky wouldn’t shoot his own daughter; and that Yorky wouldn’t shoot him, not yet. He believed that Yorky thought himself behind full cover, and therefore safe from destruction and in command of the situation. And, like all great gamblers, Bony won. Linda shouted:

“Come on, Meena. Tell that man to stay there.”

Above his sigh of relief, he heard Meena sliding along the pad, and when the sound stopped and he heard her panting, he said:

“You will have to step over on me. Do it quickly.”

“That Yorky!” she exclaimed, almost crying. “That ole fool of a Yorky! I thought you’d shoot first. Why didn’t you? Why? He could have killed you easy. I’ll fix him.”

He felt the board press lightly on the small of his back, its toe-tip dig into his neck as she stepped over, regained her poise and stayed to look back at him.

“I’m all right, Meena,” he told her. “Go on and pacify Yorky. Get his rifle if you can, but don’t try fighting for it.”

Obediently, she went on along the pad, and Bony continued to hold his rifle sights at a point one inch above Yorky’s rifle muzzle. That muzzle wavered not at all, informing Bony that it was aimed at him, and not the girl.

Even though concentrating on Yorky, Bony could see Linda dancing in her excitement as Meena slowly neared the sandbank. He heard the child’s cries of joy, and the girl’s rapid questions and command to Yorky to point the rifle elsewhere. Then she was on the narrow hard crust dividing sandbank from mud, and the child was in her arms. After a few moments, the child was running to Yorky, and Meena was removing her mud shoes. Obviously, Yorky issued an order, for Linda screamed:

“You man over there! You come here. Yorky won’t shoot.”

Bony walked to the solid land with taut expectancy. On sliding to land he had an impression of fluffed water beyond the dune, and mud extending into blue-tinged darkness. Meena and the child came close to him, and nearby a man chuckled mirthlessly, and said:

“Linda! Take the rifle from that feller.”

The little girl’s brown eyes stared up at Bony as she held out her hands, and Bony smiled.

“Thank you, Linda. I want to take off these silly boards. My word, I shall be glad to be rid of them.”

“Bring the rifle to me, Linda,” commanded the hidden Yorky, and Meena said sharply:

“Cut it out, Yorky. You’re not on the films.”

“I’m a desperate man,” snarled Yorky, and Meena retorted:

“You will be if I get at you. Point that gun some other place. We haven’t come to shoot you. You are all right, Linda darling? That Yorky! Wait till Sarah gets at him.”

Yorky stood at the edge of the sandbank, a small, wizened, sun-blackened man in working trousers and shirt so repeatedly washed as to be negative. His greying hair was over-long, and the grey moustache suspended long tails to the tip of his pointed chin. His eyes were light blue, small, and red-rimmed. The Winchester still pointed at Bony.

The culminating surprise of this day was the contrast between the hunted and the hunters. Both Yorky and the little girl were clean and tidy. Yorky had certainly shaved that morning. Bony could not forbear gazing from them to Meena and himself, then back to Linda, and laughing.

“Linda, who looks the dirtiest? Meena or me?”

“You do, lying out there in the mud like that,” replied Linda severely. “But we have a private lake, you know. We can have a bath whenever we like, can’t we, Yorky?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” agreed Yorky, and a further surprise was the faint whine in his voice. “Comin’ barging in like this. How’m I to know you didn’t come to get me? Anyhow, who are you? Ruddy stranger to me.”

“I am a person of little importance,” countered Bony. “Linda mentioned a lake, and that indicates water. We have been severely rationed. Where is this lake?”

“Over there,” shrilled Linda. “I’ll show you. Come on.”

Following her pointing finger, they saw the steely sheen of water seemingly close enough to step into, and Bony, with Meena, who was being dragged along by the eager Linda, heard Yorky say:

“Now look-see, Linda. You’ve been in there all of two hours already. Don’t you be going in again, or you’ll be getting a cold or something.”

There was the water, inviting, alluring, limitless now in the deep dusk. Linda shouted. Meena shouted. Bony shouted. Meena stepped down from the sandbank to the bordering hard ground, stepped into the water and, finding the bottom hard, went farther in, splashing as the water rose to her waist. Bony followed her. Behind them the little girl and the man were silhouetted against the pink sunset sky.