Arthur Upfield - The Bone is Pointed

Young Lacy passed back to her a hastily scrawled note:

Too many eagles for my liking. They’re following the rabbit migration. Rabbits must be running into the Green Swamp fence angle. If the prop, isn’t smashed by an eagle you are going to see something that Hollywood can’t put on the screen.

The machine was now following one of the depressions. Like a main track it unwound to pass under them, and then Diana wanted to stand up the better to see that which opened her eyes to their widest. There was the fence angle up from which was rising a thick grey mist. The wings of the angle appeared to run into a dun-coloured quarter-circle. Then she saw the fence leaving the timber to cross the depression to the corner, and the river of fur flanking it, a river that poured like sluggishly moving mud towards and into a dun-coloured quarter-circle.

She saw the utility truck standing beside the campfire, and the men waving up to them. She saw John Gordon, and noted no one of the other three, before the world spun round and they were landing bumpily, rushing along the depression towards what appeared to be a great brown rock. Between this rock and the truck the plane stopped for a few seconds, while the pilot searched for a safe position in which to tie the machine. He taxied to the timber edge near the truck, close before a fallen box trunk to which a light line could be fastened to prevent awhirlie wrecking the machine.

In the silence so pronounced after the roar of the engine, Gordon’s voice was very small. He was looking up at Diana.

“Good day! Come to have a look at our rabbit drive?”

“Yes. It seems to be quite a successful one,” said Young Lacy. “Must be more than a dozen brace in the bag.”

“It-it’s terrific, John,” Diana exclaimed. “Why, look at the corner! They are piled in a solid mass!”

“A few birds about, too,” remarked the pilot.

“They have only just begun to arrive,” Gordon said, assisting the girl to the ground. “I brought Jimmy Partner and Malluc over with me, and the rabbits were then falling over the dead into Karwir like a waterfall. We’ve put up one line of netting above the fence netting, and it looks as though we’ll have to put a third line.”

Diana was so entranced by the spectacle that she failed to note the strained expression in her lover’s eyes. Speechless, as he seldom was, Young Lacy stood with the mooring rope in his hands, staring at the massed rodents and the mound surmounted by a frieze of living animals frenziedly searching for escape through the wire.

The task of mooring the machine was hastily accomplished, but Diana could not wait. She walked over the flat bottom of the channel to the fence, there to stand and stare and marvel. She heard Young Lacy talking to Bony and Gordon, but she was unable to turn to greet the detective so mastered was she by this drama of life gone mad.

There at Diana’s feet passed one of the endless streams of animals, hurrying, jostling, biting for space. They were flung from one kind of death to rush into another-the two arms of netted barrier. Farther out, tens of thousands milled and flowed like eddies in a steamer’s backwash. They completely covered the ground. They formed a cloth of fur, ridged here, humped there, reaching to the foot of the gigantic mound, crushed and suffocated at the apex of the angle where the topmost living layer was already nine feet from the earth.

Countless eyes glared upward at the girl and the two men standing on either side of her. Teeth worried at the wire. Teeth bit rumps and the bitten squealed. Mercilessly the sun beat down and heat generated by the massed bodies killed and killed. Like the plopping mud in the mud-lakes of New Zealand, units of the mass leapt high, screamed, and fell dead with heat apoplexy, to sink into the mass like stones. Death was busy among these animals so passionately desirous of life, and Diana felt strongly the urge to tear down the barrier, to give life with both hands.

“We’ll have to put up more topping, John,” Diana heard her brother say. “D’younotice any difference in the tide?”

“No,” replied Gordon.

“I don’t think the last of ’emhave left Meena Lake yet, according to the dust haze we could see from up above,” Young Lacy said. “That topping will have to go higher and be brought farther out on both sides of the corner post. Is there enough netting on the job?”

“I think not. We’d better get busy. Even if only half the rabbits from Meena run into this angle…”

Diana was conscious that the men left her, save one, but she did not look round. Something of the hypnotic condition of the rabbits seemed to be controlling her. There were other sounds besides the death shrieks of sunstruck rabbits. The whirring of giant wings was increasing. The excited cawing of countless crows created pandemonium. Even the wires of the fence on which she leaned vibrated from the constant shock of alighting birds.

The birds appeared to have no fear. Great eagles planed low to ground, their legs extended. Others stood upon the ground and thrust forward their cruel beaks at rabbits running past them. Others flew labouringly, low to the ground, their talons sunk deep into living rodents and chased by a brigade of crows blaring out their massed caws. The fence top was lined with birds. They strutted outside the angle, eagles surrounded by crows, eagles gorging, crows fighting in black masses for the crumbs left by the eagles.

The sky was etched in whirls, by the heavy bombers and the funeral-black fighters. And from the north-west still further fleets were coming to plane in great circles lower and lower to join the groundlings. When the utility truck was moved from pole to pole the sound of its engine did not reach the girl and Bony who stood beside her. Bony spoke and she did not hear him. He had to raise his voice.

“One would never think that Australia could stage such a marvel,” he said.

“No one would believe it unless he saw it. I wouldn’t.” Diana became aware of Bony, and her eyes tightened a little when she added: “Hullo, Inspector! Are you feeling better?”

“I am a little better, thank you, Miss Lacy,” he replied. “I am expecting Sergeant Blake at any hour, when I shall ask him to take me to Karwir for my things and to thank your father for his great kindness to me.”

The girl’s eyes did not so much as flicker.

“You are leaving? I think you are wise. Away from the bush you will be able to have proper treatment.”

“I have been receiving treatment from Dr Malluc,” Bony told her. “He has worked wonders with me. I am really going because there is no longer reason to stay. You see, I have completed my investigation.”

She stared at him, and in her violet eyes he saw tears. She spoke one word so softly that the birds’ uproar banished its sound.

“Indeed!”

Then she saw the aeroplane. She was standing westward of Bony and she saw it over his shoulder, a big twin-enginedmachine flying straight to land on the depression beyond the corner post. So loud were the birds that the noise of the engines did not reach them. Bony turned to gaze in the direction of her outflung hand. The machine rocked badly when about to make a landing, but the landing was effected with hardly a bump.

Now with their backs to the fence, they watched two men climb down its fuselage, and over Bony’s thin features spread a soft smile when he recognized the first as Sergeant Blake and the second as Superintendent Browne. There could be no mistaking either. A third man appeared, small and dapper, whose movements on the ground were sprightly. Bony recognized him. Captain Loveacre, one of Australia’s leading aces, had been associated with him on the Diamantina River.

The slight figure of Napoleon Bonaparte appeared to become a little more upright, a little taller. From watching the newcomers cross to the men at work with the netting, Diana turned to look at Bony. She was aroused by the look on his face, the look of a man seeing a vision.