John Marsden - Circle of fight

Unless Lee was the Scarlet Pimple. I gulped at that thought. I’d already decided he wasn’t but I could have been wrong. ‘Lee, you’re not the Scarlet Pimple, are you?’

‘No,’ he said, eyes scanning the paddocks, gun resting across his lap.

We kept going, sticking to the track mostly, going off it only when there was a big mob of cattle ahead. They were heavy and lazy. Hard to believe they had stampeded only a short time ago. All the time we were searching but there was nothing to see. At the top I swung right, along the ridge, looking down on the house and the valley. It was a pretty sight. Hard to believe there’d been violence there too. Not the random violence of a stampede sparked by lightning, but cold, planned violence that had pulled my life out by its roots and thrown it up in the air, to fall where the wind blew it.

Nothing out of the ordinary. Feeling frustrated I swung around and went back along the ridge. This time I passed the top of the track we’d come up but now I kept going out towards Providence Gully Road. We were getting into some thicker bush here.

‘Stop the car,’ Lee said suddenly.

I hit the brakes. He got out, looked at his gun, hesitated, then left it there. He slipped across to the edge of the scrub and walked along the track about ten metres. He was trying to act naturally but not doing a very good job. He bent, picked up something, then came back to the car, got in and closed the door. Then he pulled it out of his pocket and showed me. A disposable cigarette lighter. The writing on the side wasn’t in English, wasn’t even in our alphabet. But I recognised that writing. I’d seen enough of it by now.

‘Gee you’ve got good eyesight,’ I said. ‘So they’ve been up here.’

‘What do you reckon? Where would you camp around here that would keep you out of sight?’

‘There’s nowhere that’d give you a view of the homestead.’

‘We might have been wrong about that. Maybe they had a camp up here and just snuck out to spy on the place when it suited them.’

‘OK, well I’d camp through here a bit further. Where the bush starts to clear again and you get to the boundary of Burnt Hut. That’d give you two ways of spying on the buildings.’

I drove on another fifty metres then pulled over so the ute was in a little clearing on the left, out of sight unless you were quite close to it. We bailed out. We’d done this kind of stuff so often that we didn’t need to say anything to each other. We got our weapons and began to walk along the track, one on each side, sticking to the shelter of the trees and scrub, using our eyes like they were swivelling security cameras, using our other senses too, all of them.

I never know how much attention to pay to my senses but sometimes I think we’d be better off if we did take more notice of them. It’s like they don’t get much of a look-in these days. Poor things. Seems like they always get pushed to the back of the queue. In our society anyway. I bet they didn’t in Aboriginal society, or any of those tribes who had to live in harmony with the environment, who didn’t see the environment as something they had to control or defeat. They would have had their senses working pretty well, I reckon. Too bad if they didn’t. Those crocodiles can have your leg off in no time. Sharks can bite pretty hard. And as for dinosaurs, man, they’d have you for afternoon tea and still complain they were hungry. So what are you going to do? You’re going to develop all your senses to the max, till the faintest change in the environment has your skin prickling and your tongue drying and your brain catching up a split second later and saying, ‘Wait a minute, something’s happening here.’

Then gradually we evolved. I’m not sure why, or when. Maybe it was when the scientists and accountants and schoolteachers came along. Somehow our instincts had to make way for our brain and since then it’s all been ‘Better give it a bit more thought’, ‘Don’t rush into it’, ‘But have you really thought about it?’

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, that’s what they tell you.

I remember hearing how, during World War II, the guy in charge of the SS, the worst of the worst, went to see his soldiers executing Jews and anyone else they’d put on their list — gays, gypsies, people who loved peace — and when he saw all these rows of people being shot in the head and pushed into mass graves he collapsed and was sick and had to be helped back to his car. OK, so wouldn’t you think he’d go home and think, ‘Sheez, something’s wrong here… my instincts are trying to tell me something. Wonder what it could be?’

Instead, he goes back to Berlin, sits down at his desk, and lets his mind take charge again. Forget those dumb instincts, what would they know? He thinks, ‘I can’t let our nice young German soldiers be exposed to that kind of nastiness.’ He draws up plans for a new system that allows people to be killed in a clean, organised, scientific way. He establishes death factories. They’re called concentration camps. He didn’t follow his instincts and six million people paid the price.

The war sure developed my instincts. I definitely got better tuned to what was going on around me. My senses operated much more powerfully away from the distractions of TV and iPods and computers. And I suppose the senses feed the instincts, they give them the raw material they need, so I felt like I was operating on a different level a lot of the time. Growing up on a farm didn’t hurt either. I know farming nowadays is meant to be all science, all breeding blood lines and MYOB and crop rotations, but if you can’t tell when there’s rain on the horizon or the tractor doesn’t quite feel right or there could be a snake under the roofing iron you’re about to pick up, then you might as well sell the farm and become an auditor.

Of course sometimes you can’t trust your instincts. You have to override them. You have to know that even if your senses are feeding you the right info, your instincts mightn’t be processing them properly, and your brain better get involved fast or something tragic might happen. That time, not too long ago, when Gavin was stuck on the cliff face and I thought he was going to fall to his death and take me with him, I had to become a skilled rock climber in a hurry, and that meant ignoring my instincts and facing into the cliff, even though I couldn’t see what I was doing or where I was going.

I guess all those sports like parachuting and abseiling and bungee jumping, even going for a ride on the ferris wheel at the show, they all involve the same struggle between the heart and the mind, and the thrill comes from beating down those ancient feelings just by using the power of your brain.

Anyway, I’m glad I’ve got instincts, and I don’t want to lose them any time in the near future. Because suddenly, as we made our way cautiously along the track, after we’d walked a bit over a k, I either got a flock of spiders crawling all over me or my senses were trying to tell me something. Whichever it was, I thought it was a good idea to stop, and I stopped fast.

One of the things about Lee and me is that we’ve been together so long and been through so much that we’re linked by long cotton threads. When we’re out in the bush or in any situation like this, we not only have our senses working at full pitch but we’re tuned into each other as well. I’m not saying this like we were some kind of heroes. It was just survival. Either you do stuff like that or you’re dead. Pretty simple really.

So the moment I stopped, Lee stopped too. The exact moment. Like he was frozen in midstep. He was for a moment too. Then he put his foot down, watching me for a clue as to what was going on, and at the same time eating and drinking and breathing everything that was going on around him. Right away his gun was at his shoulder and I saw his thumb slide the safety forwards and his finger tighten around the trigger. He was ready.