Arthur Upfield - Man of Two Tribes

At one point Millie turned into the cliff and halted at the foot of a landslide years old. This puzzled Bony because there was no mention in the diary of such a place for a trap. He prospected on foot, and found that the rubble contained quartz, and that Lonergan had stopped here to nap some of it for possible gold content. The camels hadn’t forgotten that for them it had been a temporary rest camp.

The same thing happened towards sundown. Both camels stopped on a shallow shelf of white sand footing what appeared as a dangerous rock overhang. Bony wasn’t impressed by the site for a camp, but Curley went down to his knees and yawned, and Millie looked round at her rider and followed suit when Bony delayed ordering her to ‘hoosta’. He would have gone on, but both camels said plainly with their eyes ‘This is where we camped last time. So what?’

Having been unloaded and hobbled on good feed, the camels held conference as usual, and, when agreement had been reached, they turned southward and shuffled away.

“If you don’t settle down,” Bony called after them, “we shall go on until dark.”

They didn’t even look back. Curley did pause now and then to snatch a mouthful of fodder, but Millie went on steadily until she had a lead of a couple of hundred yards. Then Curley realised he was being left behind, and he bellowed and lunged with hobbled feet to catch up with her.

Eventually they disappeared into the mouth of a gully, and because they might reach the upland Bony went after them with the noseline and the halter.

He found them in what was actually a narrow cleft bordered by sheer rock faces. They were facing about, waiting for him with obvious impatience. Then he found the rock-hole covered with rough timber and weighted with rock slabs to prevent wild animals falling in and polluting the water below. It meant a trip back to the camp for the bucket.

Eventually, the camels went to ground and spent a half-hour chewing water-moistened cud, while Bony sipped hot tea and watched the cliff shadows racing away across the Plain. Soon it was dark, and the bells tinkled contentedly that the camels were feeding not more than a hundred yards away. Then the bells rang a different tune, telling that the animals were coming hurriedly to camp, and into the light of the fire appeared their heads on a level as they waited for Bony to cut a crust for the waiting dog to serve to them.

And thus was Bony taken to old Patsy Lonergan’s camps, with no roads to follow, no tracks to lead him. To Lost Bell Camp. To another named in the diary as Menzies’s Delight, although what this bare, unprotected place had to delight Mr. Menzies, Bony could not name. He was taken to the Three Saltbushes camp, where a dingo had dragged a trap away for more than a mile; next day on to Big Claypan which was out of sight of the ‘coast’, and where old Lonergan had noted in his diary that he had seen the helicopter.

Having timed the hours of travel, and multiplied the total by the average walking pace of the camels, Bony estimated that he was now ninety miles north of Mount Singular.

Beware of Ganba

ONall thisgrey and purple world, seemingly completely flat and visually round, there was nothing higher than Bony’s head. All day man and animals had moved across this sea of saltbush, never higher than Curley’s knee and, because of the absence of objects, only by gazing directly downward on the bush did Bony retain the sense of movement.

Shortly after five o’clock, whenall the bush to the west was purple, and that to the east was silver, there appeared ahead a thin dark line, which slowly thickened and eventually widened to disclose a circular depression having a diameter of half a mile, the level floor being some twelve feet below the Plain.

Bony guessed this to be Bumblefoot Hole, and subsequent investigation proved Lonergan’s naming of it when he found the long dead remains of a dingo which had been trapped and had gained freedom. The bones of its left foreleg proved the point, for the extremity was a mere drumstick.

Following days and nights of utter defencelessness on the Plain, Bumblefoot Hole was the ideal camp, appreciated even more by the camels than their master. Lucy piloted the way down the steep cliff-like edge, and later Bony found that this was the only way down or up for the camels. On the floor of the depression, the feed was good, and the diary had mentioned that here was another water supply.

To the right of where they reached the floor were the rain-washed ashes of Lonergan’sfires, and in the face of the cliff nearby were several small caves, one of which was filled with dry brushwood obviously stored by the old trapper.

After the animals had led him to the rock-hole water, and he had set his tea billy against the flames of a fire, Bony explored the caves. There were three on this arc of the circle, and in one he found a ten-gallon oil drum one end of which had been cut away to provide the rocklid, and another that had been used for water storage.

In the first he found tobacco and matches in air-tight tins, tinned meat and fish, boxes of cartridges for the Savage rifle, bottles of strychnine, pain-killer and liver pills, leather for straps and hide for hobbles and thin rope for noselines.

Quite a camp! Proving? Proving that Lonergan’s last trap-line had not been temporary, supported by his well protected water-holes.

Bumblefoot Hole was certainly a hole, a place to hide in, safety from thatSomething from which nothing could be concealed, not even the thoughts running through a man’s mind. To arrive here was not unlike entering a house that is warm and quiet after the door has been slammed against the storm. Once here, a man begins to feel the effect of that bald empty world spinning in space. He remembers how he looked back over a shoulder, subconsciously shrinking from theSomething that was tracking him, stalking him, watching, waiting. He recalls an old fable theabos tell about Ganba, and right now he isn’t in the mood to lift his lip in a sneer at the ignorant, benighted blackfellow.

Were he a new chum who happened to stumble into this hole, he would stay and, having eaten old Lonergan’s reserve store, starve and die in it because he would be too damn frightened to leave it. Old Patsy was hardened against Ganba. He had grown a shell about himself. His bald world did have companions-two camels and a dog-withwhom he could talk, over whom he could exert authority and so retain something of a sense of values. Doubtless he heard Voices, and spoke to them in return, but he wasn’t that mentally off balance as to relax his defence against the Plain.

Old Lonergan had neither exaggerated nor had been inaccurate in anything jotted into his diary, from this Hole right back to Mount Singular; therefore, Bony’s opinion firmed still more that the note concerning the helicopter was based on fact. Although the old man had not mentioned the direction of the aircraft, if taken in conjunction with the disappearance of the woman, it was reasonable to assume it was flying north.

What lay to the north? Only more and more Nullarbor Plain, a wide area of claypan and water-gutter, then the ground rising from the Plain to the Great Inland Desert, so-called, which extends almost to the coast of North Australia.

Next day Bony remained at Bumblefoot Hole. He washed clothes and troubled to cook something resembling an Irish stew. Once he went up the camel pad to the lip of the cliff with the rifle, hoping to see a kangaroo, their fresh tracks having been seen by him in the Hole. He spent two hours with the old diaries and papers within the battered suitcase he had found under Lonergan’s bunk in the homestead hut, but these gave nothing but proof that the trapper had established other trap-lines.