Arthur Upfield - Man of Two Tribes

For Bony this day had a Sunday atmosphere, for mostbushmen wash clothes on Sunday morning, and read the racing journals during the afternoon. When the sun retired, he went again to hunt for kangaroos, and to his satisfaction saw four does, two sizable joeys, and two young bucks all feeding some two hundred yards distant.

Already the light was failing. There was no wind. The surface of the Plain appeared to be sinking into a fast-deepening green, and the sky into a fast-brightening dome of matt ivory. Having settled himself, Bony whistled shrilly to bring the ’roosto upright attention.

The report was followed by no echoes, being just one mighty whip-crack, and, placing the rifle carefully beside a boulder, Bony walked from the Hole to the carcass of the young buck.

He removed the skin and left the fore-quarters, and then, when beginning the return to Bumblefoot Hole, discovered that it had vanished into the now universally black surface of the Plain.

He found himself walking in a vast chamber having no walls, and a ceiling of arching blue. The chamber was padded not only to stop sound from getting out, but to prevent it from getting in. Sound was a mirage for the ears, and silence was real and menacing, pressing against the ears so that the heart could be heard working like the engine it is.

On reaching the lip of the Hole, he paused to welcome the red star of his camp fire and the relief to his ears brought by the sound of the hobble chains affixed to the camels’ feet. The recent impressions were still influencing him when the ghost of a sound stopped his foot from beginning the descent.

It wasn’t caused by the dog, for she was lying beside the fire. The sound appeared to originate from one of the stars pointing the Southern Cross. It was moving now to the Three Sisters, just a whispered threat…oo-a-i…ar-r-a-i…oo-oo…ish -ah. The sound grew. It came over the edge of the now invisible world. It sped towards Bumblefoot Hole and the man standing at its verge. Abruptly it halted, then veered to the north and ran away under the ground where it ‘hoomped’ and ‘grumphed’. Up it came to race about the Plain with gathering speed, to draw close, to halt. Where? You couldn’t tell. Then it whispered, and the whisper grew to become a rumble which rolled fast towards Bony, finally to sigh with infinite glee right at his back.

The hobble chains continued to clink musically, and the dog continued to lie sleeping by the fire. Turning about, Bony bowed to the Nullarbor Plain, saying:

“Greetings, Ganba! Some other time. Goodnight!”

(Imagination! This is a report, not a fantasy.)

The night was kind, and Bony slept until the hobble chains told of the camels getting up for breakfast. He ate grilled ’roo chops and he grilled meat for Lucy, and as the sun was firing the horizon he led the camels up from the Hole.

He urged Millie to her knees, and when mounted merely relaxed in the saddle and waited. Lucy ran a little way to the southward, and he shook his head and called; then she ran to the northward and Millie turned to follow her.

When the sun said it was a few minutes after eleven, Lucy raised the first rabbit Bony had seen since leaving the station homestead. The dog’s chance was Buckley’s. Millie turned her ears back towards her rider, turned them front again and minded her own business for ten minutes, then stopped and asked a question. Curley strained to walk on to the right, where could be seen a ribbon of bluebush growing in a wide gutter.

This was Bluebush Dip mentioned in the diary, and proved when Bony found the place where the trap had been set, and the carcass of the dog whose capture also was recorded in the diary.

As the camels insisted that this was a rest camp, Bony brewed tea and ate lunch of tinned fish and bread.

Early afternoon, the camels evinced slight nervousness, appearing to place their big feet with caution. The ground was littered with limestone chips, and here and there bare rock created naked patches on the saltbush covering. The way twisted a great deal although the overall direction continued to the north. They took two hours to pass over this wide area of subterranean caverns and passages and blow-holes. And at five o’clock they came to Nightmare Gutter.

Nightmare Gutter was azig-zagging crack twenty feet wide and some ten feet deep, an obvious barrier to the traveller northward bound, for old Lonergan had with the shovel cut a road down and up the far side. Here he had camped, and here Bony camped.

The next night, camp was at Dead Oak Stump, and, as noted in the diary, the camel feed was poor. Dead Oak Stump! The name indicated a tree, and there wasn’t a tree for hundreds of miles. He found the carcass of the half-grown dog Lonergan had recorded, but not for some time did he locate the stump.

It was less than eighteen inches high and told of a tree, old when it died, a tree that must have lived before William One upset the Saxons. The stump was so dry-rotted that Bony could have knocked it out with the axe, and refrained, thinking that this old stump must have had sentimental value for Patsy Lonergan.

A man mentally unbalanced is incapable of sentiment. That stump would make a snug fire on a cold night, where all the fuel was brushwood, which burned barely long enough to boil water. Old Lonergan probably loved this Plain, every mile of it, although each mile was exactly like every other mile. He came to this place at long intervals, and would, as Bony now did, stand and gaze at a tree stump because it was rare and therefore precious. It had been his stump, as this was his camp, like the other camps he had made and called his own. Likely enough he greeted it, fare-welled it, remembered it often and wondered how it fared during his absence.

And thus Bony’s faith in the dead man’s mental integrity was strengthened.

Time by the stars was eleven-thirty, and he had been asleep for two hours when he dreamed he heard Ganba and woke to hear Lucy muttering in alarm. Sitting up in his blankets beside the now dead fire, he detected the far-off noise of an engine, coming to them from the south-west. The sound was not the rhythmical tune of an aeroplane flying at great height, and in volume it increased but slowly. Eventually it passed to the north-east, and several miles eastward of Bony’s camp and, although Bony knew little of aircraft engines, he was sure that this machine was not an aeroplane.

He heard it again shortly before three o’clock, returning on the same course.

When day broke he was ready for it, but he gave the camels another hour to feed. He was feeling gleeful, as any man would whose hunch was being proved by fact. Before the sun rose to blur distance with its colour-loaded brush, he could see a red-brown stain above the northern horizon; and beyond the edge of the world that way, perhaps thirty or forty miles, was the limit of the Nullarbor Plain, for that red mark was sand, the sand of the Central Desert which, following a great rain, will bloom like Eden. And at some pin-point on that vast map the aircraft had touched down, remained a little while, then taken off to return to base. That pin-point had to be found.

A change had taken place in this man of two races, a change begun by the angry threat of Ganba when at Bumblefoot Hole, and carried forward by the sound of that aircraft. Ever the inherited influences of the two races warred for the soul of Napoleon Bonaparte, and it was the very continuity of this warfare which had created Detective Inspector Bonaparte, and which time and again prevented him from sinking back into the more primitive of the two races. When Constable Easter and his wife met him he was suave, outwardly arrogant, inwardly humble, conscious, and justifiably so, of his long succession of triumphs, not only over criminals but over that half of himself he feared. Now the Easters might not have recognised him.