Arthur Upfield - Sands of Windee

Even in sandycountry on which grow sturdy pines, these clay-pans are to be found. An exceedingly heavy downpour of rain-probably occurring but once in twenty years-overcomes the sand’s power of absorption and collects in pools. The water eventually evaporates, leaving a perfectly level surface of mud which dries to iron hardness, and thereafter the wind is able to sweep it continually free of the omnipresent sand.

In the centre of this particular clay-pan a colony of dark red ants with black legs had excavated their marvellous palace, whilst here and there along the edge of the clay-pan another species of ant, wholly black and about an inch in length, had founded colonies. These latter were notso ferocious as the red ants, nor were they so quick and purposeful in movement. The entrance to each nest was protected against flying sand, and presumably water as well, by a circular rampart, six inches high, which in turn was protected by a mass of pine-needles intricately woven together.

The clay-pan interested Bony. On the soft sand there was but little hope of discovering anything, but the clay-pan might be revealing. He examined its surface with bent back, and sometimes also with bent knees. One particular spot held him for some time. He regarded it from several different angles, and from several varying altitudes, finally convincing himself that two lines almost invisible to him, and quite invisible to a white man, crossed the clay-pan and ended close beside a nest of the larger black ant. Those lines were made by car-wheels two months before. He had discovered the exact position of the abandoned car.

The sign made by the aboriginal-or aboriginals-next claimed his attention. Like all nomads the Australian native is profuse in his sign language, and the sign language is known to a far greater number of people than any one spoken tongue. It is evident that the sign language has been enriched by the coming of the white man, for to-day often the white man’s beer-bottles, his discarded motor-tyres, and the bones of the white man’s sheep and cattle, are used in conveying a message to be read by a black who possibly cannot understand a word of the sender’s spoken language.

The half-caste stood before and a little below the sign that had brought him from Sydney, eight hundred miles to the east. Nine fairly straight sticks, each about one foot in length, were fastened at one end by a piece of old pliable fencing wire, which was so interlaced that each stick was forced away from its neighbours in the form of a fan. He knew that this arrangement was one of five signs of death, and his gaze, moving downward two feet, dwelt on the sheep’s thigh-bone suspended from the fan-sticks by the same length of wire.

Now had it been a blackfellow who had died there, the bone would have come from the animal or bird representing the dead man’s tribal totem. If his tribal totem had been the emu, then a bone from that bird would have been used. But this bone was a sheep’s bone, and the sheep is entirely the white man’s animal. Had it been a bullock’s bone the meaning would have been the same, and for the same reason.

Bony went back to the clay-pan and seated himself midway between the almost invisible wheel-tracks, with the low bank for a comfortable back-rest, and at his side one of the black ants’ nests; and there he rolled a cigarette and settled himself comfortably to enjoy it after he had carefully deposited the used match in a pocket. He had not been there three seconds when a piece of living black and white fluff settled on one of his sheepskin sandals and began an eternal dance. To this fairy bird Bony addressed his thoughts in a low voice:

“Quite a number of people in this very wicked world scoff at luck. They jeer also at coincidence. Yet both luck andcoincidence play a most important part in human history. Without a mixture of both, life would be of no interest to me, for the lines of human destiny would be so clearly laid down that there would be no little surprises, no freshness, no-yes, no gamble in life.

“Now it was quite a piece of luck that I saw Sergeant Morris’s snapshot, and quite a coincidence that I happened to be in Sydney to see it. Through both luck and coincidence I’m here this warm afternoon engaged on what promises to be an unusual case.

“Mr Marks leaves Windee at two-thirty alone in the car he drives, and is slightly intoxicated. Did he, however, reach the road junction alone in his car? There is a probability that he did not go to sleep at the wheel, that he was stopped between the homestead and the junction, where he was incapacitated and brought to this identical spot to be disposed of. The sign states that he was killed here. If he was killed anywhere else the sign would not be just where it is.

“Presently I must go into the matter of the business about which Marks went to see Mr Stanton-I should have said Jeff Stanton. Everything in its order. Let us first decide, if possible, whether Marks was killed by a white man aided by a blackfellow, or observed by a blackfellow unobserved by him, or if he was killed by a blackfellow or fellows who left that sign to warn their countrymen.

“As it is assumed that Marks had a lot of money on him at the time, we may, I think, dismiss the blacks as the actual murderers. They would have little use for banknotes and no use for negotiable securities. This, of course, Mr Dancing Billy Wagtail, is all conjecture. Somewhere about here Marks was killed. The odds are that he was not killed without a struggle, and wherever that struggle took place, there the ground will have received some evidence of it. By this time the sand will doubtless have buried it, but all the same it will be there-a spot or two of blood, a coin, even a hair or wisp of cloth, or a dozen other things that can be detached from human beings through carelessness or violence.

“I must proceed along two distinct lines. First, to find out what has become of Marks’s body, and second, to find what living person benefited by Marks’s death. We must go into the history of Marks. Mr ChiefCommissioner, that is your job. Anyway, Marks was one of your satellites. In the meantime I must study the Windee people, both black and white-especially black; because the black who put up the sign can tell me what happened here. Now, what…”

Bony’s attention was drawn to the ants’ nest at his side. From the corner of his eye he had seen a sparkle of blue light, but when he looked directly at the nest it had vanished. The large circular hole within the rampart was alive with the black ants. Watching them, he observed that they were bringing up out of the nest small stones about half the size of a field pea. These they deposited on the inside slope of the rampart. The man observed that each ant laid down its tiny load on the west side of the hole, where the surrounding rampart cast a shade, thence to hurry round to the east side, which was in full sunlight, and from there pick up another small stone and with it hurry below.

The lesser problem immediately absorbed Bony. Why did the ants bring up out of the nest one stone and take another down? And whence had they collected the small smooth stones in all that great expanse of sand, fine almost as a speck of whirling dust in a sunbeam?

The ants worked on, unheeding him. They all appeared possessed of but one idea. There came to Bony memory of reading of the punishments meted out to prisoners in the old convict days, when a man was compelled to carry a heavy shot up an incline, there to let it roll back, then to return and again carry it up.

But that was all insensate stupidity and cruelty. There is certainly no stupidity of that order among ants. They were not carrying stones up and down for mere exercise, and they were not so developed as to impose such work as a punishment.

“Bony, you read too much,” he said aloud. “You read so much that you forget ninety per cent of what you have read. Somewhere, some time, you’ve read about ants carrying stones.” For many minutes he sat, leaning back on his elbow, his mind’s eye so active that his physical eyes were without vision. Almost fifteen minutes expired before he sighed with satisfaction. He had remembered. The ants were taking down sun-heated stones to keep the eggs warm, and were bringing up cold stones to be heated by the early rays of the sun when next it rose. “That’s it!” he murmured. “They do nothing without a logical cause. Ah! Why, here comes one with a piece of blue glass. Evidently glass does not retain heat as rock will. I must inquire into that.”