Arthur Upfield - The Bone is Pointed

Still unable to mount his horse from the ground, Bony led her to the tree stump. Breakfasted, he was indeed a vastly improved man compared with the tortured wreck from whom Dr Malluc had sucked six little pointed bones and two eagle’s claws. His new-found mind was hungry to feed on the impressions offered by this extraordinary manifestation of life. His dogs did not attempt to climb the fence again. They trotted behind the horse, evincing lordly disdain of the scurry of rodents barred back by the netting.

As Bony advanced southward over the depressions, the risen sun striking hotly on his left side, the stream of rodents beyond the fence widened. Every second, dozens of rabbits coming direct from Meena Lake swelled it more. From a trickle at the northern fence post, the flow of fur became a stream when horse and man and dogs began to cross the last depression in the centre of which stood the southern corner post. Into this angle flowed the stream accompanying Bony. Into it, too, flowed a greater stream along the fence coming eastward from the main road gate.

The V of the angle presented an astonishing sight. Like wind-driven snow, rabbits were piled in a solid mass against the barrier for fifty yards back from the corner post. The mass had been suffocated, and now up this mound of fur ran living rodents to reach the top of the netting and to jump down into Karwir. They were like a brown waterfall, the lip of which extended along the two sides of the V for ten or twelve feet. Once over the fence they streamed on and away to the south-east, raising a wide ribbon of greyish dust upon which the sunlight of early morning thickened to hide the animals running below it.

Within the angle itself the mound sloped down to a moving sea of fur covering several acres, a sea in which were many eddies and cross currents. Here and there the sea was ridged and humped by the living rodents on top of those that had died of exhaustion. And into the sea footing the mound poured the two streams coming from the west and the north along the fence.

Bony could observe no slackening in the tide of fur sweeping towards Karwir, but he did observe that among the rodents was a goodly proportion of does. There were no half-grown rabbits; all were adult and strong. The number of those already arrived could not be estimated; their weight in tons could not be guessed. There was never a break in the procession coming directly to the angle or in the streams coming along the fence.

It was shortly after ten o’clock when Bony heard the hum of a motor engine, and he noted the time by the sun’s position, thinking that it was early for Sergeant Blake’s visit. The car was coming along the branch track from the Karwir-Opal Town road, and, expecting to see a Karwir car or truck bringing him horse feed and probably fresh meat and bread, Bony was surprised to see a yellow utility truck appear on the road where it began to skirt the south edge of the depression. The truck left the road there and came directly towards him. He saw Gordon driving it and two aboriginals perched on top of a load of wire netting.

Welcomed by the dogs, Gordon and the blacks reached ground, and the aboriginals at once began to unload the rolls of netting while Gordon walked towards Bony. Bony slid from his horse to meet the Meena squatter, now wearing khaki drill trousers, open-neck shirt and a wide-brimmed felt hat. He looked hard. He walked with the mincing step of the horseman. A smile was upon his face but not in his eyes.

“Good day, Inspector!” he said, in greeting. “I hope you are better to-day after Malluc’s services yesterday. He seems quite confident that his beastly medicine will have effected a cure.”

“Good morning Mr Gordon,” Bony returned, smiling. “Yes, Dr Malluc is a great medico and something of a surgeon, too. He operated on me successfully, removing from my insides six little pointed bones and two eagle’s claws.”

“Hewould have to go through with his picturesque performance,” complained the young man. “Well, I am very pleased to know you are better. It’s a dickens of a mess here, isn’t it? The migration moved faster than I anticipated. Didn’t expect it to arrive here before this evening, but we knew last night it was headed into this angle and so brought the netting to top the fence. We’ll have to cut poles to string it on, and you’ll excuse me for not talking more just now.”

“Of course. Perhaps if you left your billies and water and the tucker box over there in the shade of that leopardwood I could act as camp cook. You’ll want plenty of tea, and I’m useless for hard work.”

“That’s decent of you. We’ll do that. It’s going to be a snorter to-day and we’ll want all the drink we can get. Malluc says you ought have another dose of his medicine. He can get the fire going for you and brew the stuff while Jimmy Partner and I go off for a load of poles.”

Bony laughed, saying:

“I’m a willing patient, and Dr Malluc’s medicine doesn’t taste so badly.”

“Righto!”

Gordon hurried back to the now unloaded utility and, with the blacks beside him on the running-boards, he drove to the tall leafy tree standing where the road began to skirt the depression less than a quarter of a mile from the comer post.

Within the shade of another tree Bony neck-roped his horse, and then joined Malluc who had made a fire and was filling the billies with water from several four-gallon petrol tins.

“Yougoodoh, boss?” he inquired cheerfully.

“Much better, Malluc. You fine feller medicine man all right,” Bony said, flatteringly. “Are those the herbs in that billy?”

“Herbs?” Malluc questioned.

“Med’cine.”

Malluc laughed, saying:

“Herb feller no belong Kalchut.” Then he remembered the rabbits and pointed to the mound of fur at the point of the V. “Bimeby plenty stink, eh? All no good feller. Skin-em-feller no good. Now no fish in Meena and now no rabbit feller at Meena. Blackfeller him do a perish.”

This appeared to be a joke, for he laughed uproariously, both hands pressed to his flat stomach. It was a joke with a lasting savour, for he continued to laugh while he attended to the brewing of his medicine and afterwards when he stood with the billy in one hand and tested the falling temperature of the liquid with the point of a dusty finger.

“You drink-em-down,” he urged when satisfied.

Bony drank without hesitation, and again he experienced that ecstatic glow spreading throughout his entire body.

A large billy of tea had been made when the utility returned with a load of poles, and Malluc and Bony carried the tea and pannikins and a loaf of brownie to the scene of the coming work.

“Get it down your necks quick,” Gordon ordered the men. “We have got to stop that leak as soon as possible. What a shot for a movie camera! Nothing like that down in Brisbane and Sydney, is there, Mr Bonaparte?”

“No, not even in the zoos,” agreed Bony. “It is the first migration I’ve ever seen and I shall never forget it. Have you seen one before?”

“Never. But my father and mother did years ago. Mother says that the rabbits then were not so numerous, but they left the lake country as suddenly and they came this way, too. This fence wasn’t up in those days, and when it was and this angle was created, the dad predicted this mess if another migration happened along. Now then, you chaps, let’s to it. You take the truck for another load of poles, Jimmy Partner. Come on, Malluc, you give me a hand wire-twitching poles to the posts.”

Bony felt regret that his physical condition barred him from taking a share in the labour. Gordon and Malluc lashed a twenty-foot pole to each fence post back from the corner for a hundred yards. With a brace and bit, Gordon bored a hole in every post to take one of the supporting wires, and, when Jimmy Partner returned, he stood on a case on the tray of the truck and was driven from pole to pole to bore holes in them at higher levels.