Arthur Upfield - The Bone is Pointed

It was almost a freak of nature, this tree growing away from a creek or billabong. Its foliage was brilliant and full, its wood beneath the bark as red as blood. In its symmetry, in its virile life, the bloodwood is the very king of all the gums.

This tree was not difficult to climb, and Bony climbed it till he could climb no higher. Now the fence was dwarfed, and he could see along its cut line the white gate spanning the road, and far away over the tops of the lesser scrub. And there, a mile or two to the east, was rising, in interrupted lengths, a column of brown smoke that swelled into a mushroom-shaped cloud five thousand feet above the world. And Bony’s eyes blazed and his nostrils twitched with the excitement growing in his mind.

It was a perfect day for this ancient method of conveying a signal, and the mind of Napoleon Bonaparte laboured to solve the meaning of this one. That it was merely a signal conveying an idea and not a message, Bony came to be confident. The spacing of the smoke bars was too ragged for the sending of a message which through naturally imposed limits had to be nothing more than a generality. And what the blacks working on the fence would have to tell their own people would be much more involved than a generality such as: “I’m coming home,” or, “You come over here.”

So quiet the day amid these drowsing trees that, when the water in the quart-pot boiled over the rim, Bony heard the hiss of its sputtering on the hot embers of the small and smokeless fire. A crow came from the south, circled about the bloodwood, cawed thrice and alighted in a mulga-tree just beyond the fence, there to watch with its head cocked to one side this strangely behaving animal that could kill with a noise, and throw stones and sticks.

For a little while longer Bony remained on his high bough, alternately gazing eastward along the fence towards the gate and the black fencers’ camp, and away to the north-west where were situated Meena Lake and Meena homestead. He hoped to see a smoke signal rise in that quarter, and when none did he was still more confident of the purpose of the signal made by Jimmy Partner and his friends.

“Drama and a little comedy mixed with the spoon of tranquillity give the cake of life,” he said to the watching crow. “Drama without comedy or comedy without drama produces thesoddy dough of phantasmagoria. First the wager of eating rabbits, fur and all, and now the broadcasting of news by a method forgotten by the world save among the allegedly primitive peoples.”

On reaching the ground he made tea with the water remaining in the quart-pot, and carrying the brew to the shade of a thriving currant bush he reclined on the soft warm earth to sip the black liquid and to smoke a chain of cigarettes. The crow cawed once because the bloodwood hid the man from it, then flew cawing in a giant circle before perching in a tree from which it could watch with only its black head and one beady eye to be seen.

“My dear undertaker, I’m not yet dead,” Bony blithely remarked to it. “In fact, I am more alive than I have been for a long time. This case is beginning to unfold before me as a flower unfolds to be kissed by the new-risen sun. You didn’t know I was a poet, did you? I mayn’t look like one, but then I don’t look like a detective-inspector.

“For the first time, no, the second, in my career I am apparently opposed by aborigines, worthy opponents, opponents who never make the stupid mistakes fatally made by the so clever, so highly civilized white man. I wonder how! Did those blacks signal my passing their camp in a code arranged just to fit the news, or did they signal the announcement that one of them was about to begin a broadcast? And having begun the broadcast, which of them is now seated on the ground with his arms resting on his raised knees and his forehead resting on his arms while he transfers to the mind of another at Meena thought pictures of my arrival at the camp, my statement concerning the discovery of Anderson, my passing on to the road, and possibly my being camped just here?

“Everyone of them was a young man, and therefore the probability is that the signal merely announced that I have arrived on the job.”

The crow cawed, and then realistically gurgled like a man being strangled.

“Be quiet,” Bony said to it. “Now let me go back to that instant when I saw a cut line through the scrub, a line of netted fence along the centre of the cut line, and a white horse and a brown one tethered to a tree either side of the barrier. Those horses were standing not far from this place.”

Bony closed his eyes, and found that before he could concentrate he had first to subdue the excitement created by the smoke signals. Presently he became tranquil, his mind amenable to control. He imagined the roar of the aeroplane engine. Imagination lifted the curtain to show not the last act but the prologue. He saw again the white gate spanning the Karwir track growing larger and larger till it vanished below the machine at the instant he turned his head to gaze along this same cut line. Again he saw the two horses standing motionless in the shade cast by trees. And now he saw beyond and above the white horse the tall, vivid green bloodwood-tree. The white horse was standing in the shade cast by a tree growing nearer to the gate than was the bloodwood.

Bony sighed his satisfaction. He was now sure that he knew the site of the trysting place.

“Great is the mind, my undertaking friend,” he told the crow. “A wonderful servant but a tricky master. Now to establish if my mind has served or tricked me.”

He walked direct to a mulga-tree growing several yards beyond the bloodwood and nearer the road gate. The ground about the base of this tree was smooth and empty of tracks. A centipede would have left its writing on this page of the Book of the Bush. Bony searched the ground about the tree next in the same direction. Here, too, the ground was smooth, but on it lay several long, needle-pointed, curled and dead mulga leaves. There were tracks made by a small bird and a medium sized scorpion. Back again at the first tree, Bony again searched the ground, his eyes pin points of blue as they contracted the better to magnify. No page in the Book of the Bush is entirely devoid of writing. This page had been cleaned, and cleaned within forty-eight hours.

A blowfly buzzed and Bony spun about to search for it. He did not see it in flight, but he saw it when it alighted on the ground some ten or twelve feet out from the tree trunk. The half-caste stepped to the place, went to ground and sniffed. He smelled horse. The white horse ridden by Diana Lacy had stood here in the shade cast by this tree. No evidence of its stand here remained. The ground was smooth-too smooth.

With those all-seeing eyes of his he examined the surrounding scrub. Only along the fence line could he see for any appreciable distance. Either side of the fence line the trees crowded upon him, presenting a mass formation that could be penetrated only for a hundred yards at most. He could not be sure that he was unobserved. He could be watched by a thousand unseen spies.

On the far side of the fence, he established to his entire satisfaction that the brownish bruise on a tree trunk had been produced by the rubbing of a rope-a horse’sneckrope. About this tree, too, the ground was smooth and empty of tracks when surrounding ground was littered with the scrub’s debris and imprinted by the scrub’s life. He could smell no horse at this place, nor could he find any foreign material caught by the barbs of the fence wire. He spent a full hour trotting on his toes around and wide of the bloodwood, and although he found small areas where the ground was too smooth and too clean, he saw not a fractional part of one track left by hoof or boot, or naked foot.