John Marsden - Circle of fight

Lee, my God he can be cool sometimes. I mean cool as in cold. While it was all happening in front of us, and my mind had stopped working because my senses were getting so much input that everything inside me had to be dedicated to processing it, Lee had been thinking, thinking, thinking.

When it seemed to be over, and the two bodies lay still and broken on the ground, and the bull was still huffing and puffing and snorting and stomping around, Lee turned to me and said, ‘This could work out pretty well.’

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘Don’t you feel anything?’

‘That comes later. And stop doing that “you’re a cold killing machine” routine on me. I’m sick of it.’

‘OK,’ I said meekly. The truth was that I also knew, even while it was happening, that the bull was acting in our best interests. It was just that Lee had taken it further, as he was about to show me.

‘Here’s what we’ve got to do,’ he said. ‘Three things.

Number one, check their bodies and make sure they’ve got no mobile phones or anything else. That way we can be sure they haven’t told their friends that we were chasing them. Number two, take away their rifles. Number three, pick up any empty shells around the place.’

‘Why do we need to pick up the shells?’ I asked slowly.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘in a way we’ve just committed the perfect murders. What happens when the bloke who owns this bull comes to check the paddock? He finds two dead guys, who have obviously been killed by his animal. He’s horrified. He calls the cops. They come out here. They search around and they probably find their campsite, and they realise that they’re members of the gang who kidnapped Gavin, and they’ve been spying on your property. They contact you and say, “We’ve just found two men killed by a wild bull.” And that’s the first you know about it. It’ll never occur to them that we more or less forced the guys into the paddock, or to put it another way, they forced themselves in there. It’ll look like they just went for a nice stroll through the bush and in their ignorance somehow provoked the bull. There’ll be no evidence to suggest anything else. No-one’ll know they’ve just been in a gun battle.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘The only danger is that if they’re found in the next couple of hours, they’ll smell of gunpowder or whatever. But to be brutal about it, once they start rotting, and once the foxes and crows and all the rest of them move in for afternoon tea, that evidence will disappear pretty quickly.’

‘What about the two steers I killed?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, bit of a problem. But they’re out of sight of the bull’s paddock. And again time and foxes’ll help.’

‘Also, they might think the soldiers shot them for food. They’re not going to do major post-mortems on a couple of rotting cattle. The cops are too busy these days.’

‘Exactly.’

I had to admit, it did sound good. And if anyone ever got what they deserved, it was these two. ‘We’d better do your three steps in reverse order,’ I said. ‘Let’s look for shells first. I don’t want to go into that paddock until the bull’s had a good long rest.’

‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ he said. ‘Actually, no, I was hoping you’d volunteer to go in there. But if you’re going to be a wimp about it, we may as well give him five minutes to settle.’

The one thing Lee didn’t have to do was spell out the reasons for covering up our involvement in the deaths of these two men. The way the world worked nowadays, if anyone found out that he and I had been exchanging shots with these guys and they’d been killed as a result of it, we’d be chucked in jail for twelve months while they interrogated us and collected evidence. We wouldn’t be going anywhere. And I’m not exaggerating much. Without knowing a lot about the law, I doubted if we’d be actually locked up, but it was possible, and we’d certainly be spending an awful lot of time talking to lawyers and the police.

We spread out and started looking for empty bullet shells and shotgun cartridges. Some were easy to find. And others we got by diligent searching. Some we found by fluke, others I’m sure we never found. But we figured that if we couldn’t find them, no-one else would either.

What we did find was the campsite. They’d made a clever little shelter, like a cubby, out of sticks and bark and the branches of a low-growing tree, and they’d camouflaged it with more bark and some dead grass. We peered inside. We didn’t want to disturb it in case the cops found it later. But we did see a mobile phone on top of one of the packs. ‘Be funny if it rang,’ Lee said.

Then it was back to the paddock. I was nervous for a couple of reasons, one being that Colin McCann might have come to check on his bull by now. He was a nice guy, but a bit lazy, so he probably only went to the paddock every few days, and even then he might not get up to this boundary. But if we were unlucky, he would be standing there with his own mobile phone, and we would hear the whirring of the police helicopter in the distance.

The other reason I was worried isn’t hard to guess. I didn’t know how long the bull would take to calm down after killing two men, but I figured it could be quite a while. I knew Lee was as nervous as I was, because we kept making jokes to each other as we went back up the slope.

Well, it could have been better and it could have been worse. The bull had moved, but only about a hundred metres. A couple of kilometres would have been more to my liking. He was tearing at the grass, and looking pretty foul tempered. It occurred to me that we had not only caused the deaths of the two men, we had sentenced the bull to death as well. No farmer in the world would keep a bull that had killed people. Not for the first time I had to harden my heart and think ‘One more victim of war’. War discriminates a bit more than a tsunami does, but not by much.

We crept into the paddock, trying to keep a couple of trees between us and the bull. We had our firearms, just in case, but it would have been very complicated if we’d had to shoot the bull. They would have found him with a bullet wound from a gun that didn’t belong to either of the soldiers. Lee started dreaming up some idea about shooting the bull, wiping the weapon clean of our fingerprints, putting the rifle in the hands of one of the dead soldiers and stamping his fingers all over it. I just looked at him. He really was shooting the bull. He must have been watching too many bad American cop shows. No way was I going to let life get that complicated.

It had occurred to me a few times that the guys might not have been dead, but it was a thought I didn’t want to contemplate. My brain said they were dead and my instincts said they were dead. I think I was just trying to scare myself. Anyway, they were dead. One of them had blood from his ears and mouth but no other injuries that I could see. The other had guts hanging out of his stomach where he’d been trampled. It was pretty foul. We took the rifles but we didn’t touch anything else. The magazines were empty, so we were right about their running out of ammunition.

And then back home. We had accomplished nothing. Unless you call the deaths of two people something. Oh yes, I had a grim feeling of revenge, which fitted in nicely with my anger at the people who had committed the kidnapping. I had fantasies about hunting all of them down and killing them one by one, even if it took years. I would be the Avenging Angel. There are horrific crimes and bad crimes and minor crimes, and then there’s overdue library books. Kidnapping Gavin was a terrible thing to do. It could never be justified, never, never, never. So I didn’t shed too many tears over the bodies in the paddock. But at the same time it didn’t get us anywhere. I had been distracted by Lee’s sudden awareness that there must be people spying on the house, and in the excitement of that neither of us had stopped to think that it actually didn’t matter much.