Arthur Upfield - Murder Must Wait

The sun was setting when Chief Wilmot shouted at the horses to stop, when they would have stopped anyway at the merest pressure on the reins. They parked a hundred yards south of the Tree, the men jumping to the ground, stretching bodies and kicking dust with their boots as though they had been on their way for twenty-four hours.

Action normal. No unusual excitement. No hint of urgency. Obviously plenty of time in hand.

The lubra handed the baby down to her husband of one month. She passed to Chief Wilmot a large tucker box, a four-gallon tin of water, the suitcase, the blanket, and finally tossed off the load of firewood. On gaining ground, she demanded the baby and young Wilmot laughingly refused, turning his back to her and telling her to make a fire. She pleaded but failed, and in good humour gathered brushwood and started the camp fire.

Meanwhile, Chief Wilmot drove on for a further fifty yards, where he unharnessed the horses and freed them in hobbles to find sustenance on the herbal rubbish.

There were thus several abnormalities, for Bony all establishing the importance of the great tree in which he lay hidden. It was unusual for the camp fire to be lit so far from the tree which offered companionable shelter. It was unusual to park the vehicle so far from the fire. And the manner in which the baby was fussed over by both the lubra and her husband would have been abnormal even had the baby been their own.

The heated Earth took the Sun. The wind dropped to a faintly cooling southerly, and the smoke of the fire was barely visible. Silence came to the aborigines, and over them and Bony flowed music made by the bells suspended from the necks of the horses.

Young Wilmot crossed to the buckboard and returned with a filled sugar bag, the contents obviously not sugar. And Chief Wilmot removed his shirt and boots, revealing the cicatrices on chest and back, cut with flint and kept open to heal with mud, done to him at his initiation.

The years had neither bent his back nor drained his strength, and the shirt was a tragic disguise, the uniform of a tragic civilisation. Head up, shoulders squared, he came to the Tree, his eyes unmasked, clear beneath the beetling brows lined white. Bony beheld the veneration for the Tree on the calm face as Chief Wilmot paused to regard a living monument to which he was linked in defiance of Time and Death. To the Tree Chief Wilmot revealed himself as never in his life had he done to a white man, and rarely to one of his own race.

Unlike his son, and his son’s generation, Chief Wilmot had known the days when the aborigine possessed the remnant of tribal independence. He could recall when, as a small naked boy, he had watched his father and elders fight with spears and waddies the warriors of invading tribes, forced by drought from their rightful country. He could remember his father being speared to death in one such battle.

His father had died like a man; he had lived on to be robbed of his birthright by the white man, and shackled by the white man’s laws and taboos. His own son and his son’s generation felt not the shackles, cared little for the lost birthright, and even less for the tales of history handed down by generation to generation for five thousand years.

This lonely representative of a race remarkable for its morality, its justice, its freedom from greed was now gazing upon the repository of the faith and the beliefs of the generations who had sunk into the graveyards of Time. It was not just another tree, an oddity because of its age. It was The Tree smitten by a Devil that had jumped from a cloud, burned by another Devil who had come running across the world to gouge a cave in its belly, and yet preserved by Altjerra to go on living for ever and ever. Altjerra himself had once slept at the foot of the Tree. For centuries The Tree had been the Sacred Storehouse of the people living in this country. It was here that famedOrinana had come to meet her lover of a forbidden totem, here that her brothers had caught her and slain both her and her lover.

As Bony expected, Chief Wilmot espied the tracks left by Alice andhimself, and instantly became alert and shouted in his own tongue, so long in disuse that his son failed to understand and shouted in reply:

“What’s up?”

The old man’s urgency, however, brought Tracker Wilmot at the run, and together they examined the tracks, agreeing on when they were made, that a white man and a white woman had come from the road to the tree and had returned. They were wrong, of course, in one detail. Bony had walked like a white man, angling his feet at twenty-five minutes to five, and he had been careful to leave no evidence of having climbed the tree.

“Came here yesterday?” Chief Wilmot said.

“Yair,” agreed the son, who now had springs in his feet.“White people all right. Could be old man Jenks from Wayering Station. He brought a white woman here to see the tree. I better look-see, though. Be dark soon.”

The Police Tracker faultlessly followed the tracks to the distant road where Bony had stopped the borrowed car. Watching, Bony could see by his actions that he was satisfied.

The Chief returned to the camp fire and stood with his back to the blaze as Man has always done. Dusk was sweeping in from the east, impatient because the day wasn’t dying fast enough, and the furnace glare of the sun’s couch stained red the returning young man, the lubra nursing the baby, the aloof man at the fire. And upon the warmth of the colourful sky reclined the slender maiden moon.

Chief Wilmot spoke to the lubra and she put the infant down into a nest she made of the blanket and strode gracefully to the buckboard. Taking a large hessian sack she gathered dead roly-poly, light as air, which quickly filled the sack and puffed it to its fullest. Having returned the filled sack to the buckboard, she was given the task of gathering brushwood on a site selected twenty feet beyond the tree cavern. Her husband set wood upon the kindling, and the old man brought a bottle and liberally splashed the heap with kerosene.

The kerosene intrigued Bony, for the brushwood was tinder-dry. Still carrying the bottle, the old man took a stand ten feet from the tree cavern and marked the place with a boot-heel.

“You lie there,” he said to the lubra.

“All right,” she assented, adding: “But not on the three-cornered-jacks.”

“I’ll fix itgood,” her husband volunteered, and with a branch-tip swept the place clean of the skin-piercing burrs.

They returned to the camp fire without igniting the one just prepared, and there they squatted to eat. Laughter had sped away from them, the fire-flames moulded to a tall candle vying with the purple dusk.

Bony ate and drank prudently, and afterwards managed to get a cigarette going by thrusting his head and shoulders into the hole excavated by the lightning bolt. He marked the change in himself brought about by the events since he had jumped from Yoti’s car, analysed it and was not ashamed that the subtle spirit of this vast land could sway him through his maternal ancestry.

The maiden moon restedherself languorously on the tree-spiked horizon. The spikes cruelly took and devoured her, and cold rage took possession of the sky. The Southern Cross was low to the south-east and not worth looking at, but the Three Sisters, perfectly spaced and aligned, each the exact counterpart of the others, were faithfully following the path of the Sun and able to tell Bony it was eleven o’clock. It was then that the lubra built a little fire near the buckboard and there squatted, rocking the child.

She kept her back to the main fire, for it is not lawful for a woman to witness what followed.

Tracker Wilmot slipped off his clothes and donned the pubic tassel fashioned from the dove-grey skin of the Queensland duck. From his neck he suspended with string of human hair the dilly-bag of the initiated man, made of kangaroo hide and containing his personal treasures. With white ochre the old man painted wide lines longitudinally round his body, and horizontally up his legs and down his arms. The effect was to give likeness to the week-old emu chick, and the final touch was the band of woven human hair about his head which bunched his sleek black hair to a solid plume.