Arthur Upfield - No footprints in the bush

“Ah!” he murmured, and Burning Water glanced round at him and smiled in his solemn manner. “How does the world look to the birds and the ants, and the Illprinka men?”

“It is a fine world and everything in it is peaceful,” the chief replied. “The sun will set in an hour. The land seems empty of Illprinka men, and the sky is empty of their smoke signals. How are the lungs?”

Bony distended his chest before saying:

“They feel as elastic as toy balloons. Phew! It has been a torture, the craving for tobacco smoke. I have tobacco sufficient only to make three cigarettes. If I cannot find friend Rex and obtain tobacco from him, if I have to go without cigarettes for, say, three days, I’ll be either fit for an asylum or able to run a three-mile race. Do you know exactly where we are?”

“Yes. I came this way several years ago on a visit to the Illprinka. There was peace between us then. I should say we are not more than twenty miles from the cane-grass. When day breaks tomorrow we ought to be able to look down on it from one of the greatsandhills bordering it along the south.”

“Should there be much water in the swamp after the wet winter?”

“Not as much as after some wet summers, but there will be plenty of water well inward from the outside. I have given much time to imagining I was Rex McPherson, as you told me to do, and the most likely place for a camp close to where he could hide his aeroplane. I think that where the hills end and the swampcurves to the south will be a likely place. There the cane-grass and lantana is thick and very high, and between it and thesandhills lies a wide claypan flat that would give plenty of room for the aeroplane.”

“Good!” Bony said approvingly. “We’ll have a look at that place as day dawns tomorrow. What’s for dinner? Flapjack? I’m becoming meat hungry. That goanna was all right. It tasted like fish, but I want steak half done, with the blood dripping from it.”

“We eat too much,” Burning Water said unsmilingly. “Our bodies get heavy with fat. It is good sometimes to live on the fat.”

Bony accepted the cup of the quart-pot filled with tea, then broke the flapjack in two and proffered a part to his companion.

“It is as well that we have good teeth,” he said, smilingly, adding: “Otherwise we’d want gizzards like the birds: I knew a man who once suffered fearfully with rheumatism. Do you know how he rid himself of it?”

“By taking a gum-leaf oven bake.”

“No, by fasting. He wasn’t a doctor, of course.”

“What was he?”

“A-Listen! I hear an aeroplane.”

The chief froze. Presently he nodded affirmatively, saying:

“It’s coming this way.”

“We’ll go down the gutter,” Bony said. “It might be Captain Loveacre.”

Crouchingly, they passed out of the shelter and down the winding natural gutter, careful not to raise their hatless heads above the level ground, peering upwards into the ribbon of sky their confined situation permitted. The machine was somewhere to the north-west beyond the edge of the high land towering above them two to three hundred feet. From that quarter they risked observation by Illprinka scouts, and, having gone a hundred yards beyond the fallen tree, they lay and covered themselves with the sand of the gutter floor. Until they saw the machine they could not be sure.

Their problem was first to see possible scouts and not first to be seen by them, hence this clinging to the bed of a water gutter well below ground level. If the plane proved to be Loveacre’s machine, then the problem was to disclose themselves to the airmen without betraying themselves to chance enemy scouts.

“Look!” exclaimed Bony. “It’s Captain Loveacre flying one white streamer which means he wants to communicate to us important news. Lie down and wiggle about, comrade.”

To ask a man like Chief Burning Water to lie and “wiggle” about at the bottom of a gutter would in other circumstances have sounded absurd. Burning Water “wiggled”, and Bony produced a white handkerchief and waved it energetically.

Whyte saw the signal in time to drop a small calico bag filled with sand and containing a message. He made no sign whatever. His message fell within a hundred yards of the gutter. Continuing its course, the plane flew across the valley.

“Mark the position of the bag of sand,” Bony urged, softly, bringing his eyes to the ground level. “We’ll wait till dark before we get it. Now watch for a possible scout who saw the bag and might be tempted to leave his cover.”

They both guardedly watched the calico bag lying white on a grassy bed of everlasting flowers, and at the same time scanned the surrounding country for sign of an enemy. They watched for fifteen minutes before deciding that the message had been dropped unseen by others. The sun was then about to set, and Bony went back to the temporary camp and added dry wood to the small fire for the purpose of baking flapjacks. A few moments later Burning Water joined him.

The flapjacks were baked hard just when the sun had vanished, and, with the quart-pot and the remainder of the flour, they were packed into the sugar sack which the chief would carry slung from his shoulders. With whisks of leafy twigs they smoothed out all signs on the ground betraying their presence there, and then Bony proceeded to put on his pair of the Kurdaitcha boots.

He uttered a sharp exclamation.

Burning Water looked up from lacing his own boots of emu feathers. He saw the saltbush snake fall from Bony’s right foot held high off the ground. He saw the snake glide swiftly away and enter its hole at the base of the gutter wall.

Intrusion

“LIE still,” hissed Burning Water.

His big black body appeared to hover over the slighter man. Seizing the ankle of the bitten foot, he dragged Bony from under the fallen tree and into the clear light of early evening. From his dillybag he snatched his blade razor and opened it with his teeth as his left hand remained fast to the ankle to stop the circulation. He cut twice, deeply. No more than four seconds had passed.

The dusk was deepening, the walls and floor of the gutter becoming a pasty, shadowless grey. Bonylay passive, fear of death submerged by the greater fear of being unable to go on to Flora’s rescue. Burning Water crouched over the foot and sucked and sucked till the muscles of his mouth ached.

“Give me the handkerchief,” he urged. He knotted the handkerchief with his free hand and his teeth, then twisted a stick in it to tighten it. “The snake missed biting a vein by the width of a finger nail. How do you feel?”

“All right. The poison is very rapid.”

“A few minutes at longest if not conquered.”

Slowly he raised himself and peered across the flat expanse of the plain and upward at the land slope. The colour of the world now was the uniform pale purple of the great patches of the tiny creeper-flower. The only living things he saw were two eagles floating like sand-grains in the green sky and the rabbits in the vicinity of their burrow. Then he ducked down into the gutter.

Beyond the nearest angle of the gutter a black head had begun to rise above ground level. Round that corner was at least one Illprinka man. Burning Water bent over Bony to whisper.

“Illprinka man just round the corner. He must have come along the gutter from the middle of the valley. He saw the aeroplane drop the message, or rather he saw something drop from it, and he’s been watching it and waiting for dark to get it. Lie still. You’ve got your pistol. I’m going to see how many there are.”

“All right. No shooting if possible.”

On his hands and knees Burning Water crept along the gutter. When he reached the corner he rose on bent legs and crept slowly forward round the angle. Inch by inch he negotiated that angle until he saw two naked aborigines both standing with bent legs and staring over the ground towards the message in the bag of sand. Beyond them the gutter ran straight for thirty odd yards. There were only the two Illprinka men.