Chapter Forty-eight – Feelings

WILD DOG RIVER BY GREG BARRON

Strange how feelings sometimes strike a bloke at the weirdest times. Like walking along a plantation track in Tan Ru, when I suddenly missed my Mum, Dad, and brother so bad that I had to stop walking, and close my eyes until I could see them in my mind. I remember how the corporal walking behind me picked up a handful of small stones and threw them at my back. A few times, out fishing as a youth, I stopped casting and got goosebumps from the beauty of the hills behind the next bend, and the way the reeds grew out from the banks into the water, finally swallowed by the depths, or when the surface lay like glass over a mirror, with snags poking through like the claws of underwater creatures.

Feelings, though, are funny, tricky things. They can turn, and they can test you. Sometimes they are not as real as you think they are. Sometimes you don’t even know you had them ‘til they’ve gone stale and old and don’t kick you in the spine like they used to.

Right now, leaning against a rock on a stark and useless hill, with Kat fast asleep, her head pillowed on my shoulder, I felt a surge of feelings. I didn’t yet know their shape or form; I just knew that they were there. This was not a time to analyse anything. I was beyond buggered – I felt like I’d been kicked, over and over, by a team of soccer players, and my hands were blistered from gripping a digging stick: useless hours of chasing phantom hoards, and old Chinese graves that I scarcely believed existed anymore. We’d done what we could, but by two or three in the morning the enormity of the task had settled on us. Kat had a pain in the gut and a headache – probably just from exhaustion. She had, after all, worked a night shift before joining me on this mad journey.

 The sun was still below the horizon, but already Kat’s black hair was taking on the earthy colours of dawn. I reached down with a finger and moved a strand away from her ear, and she didn’t move a muscle. I guess I stared at her for a minute or two, my senses seeming to have a heightened sensitivity.

The sound of two-stroke engines out towards the river did not surprise me – I’d seen a couple of bikes leaning against trees on my first visit to the camp. I also had an idea of just how badly Nolan, Green and the others must want me. I had, after all, rammed their Zodiac, and grounded the police boat. They wanted my blood, and they wanted the charts I carried in a rolled tube.

 Under my breath I cursed myself for carrying on this fool’s errand, when we could have been heading for the hills. I pushed these thoughts away. There would be time for regrets later. I squeezed Kat’s shoulder.

‘Hey. Wake up. We have to go.’

Her eyes blinked open, and I could see the confusion there. She was a nurse for God’s sake. She should have been coming off her shift back in Cooktown, not sitting on the side of a stony hill – a fugitive – with a dead man walking for company.

Standing, and slinging the rifle, I waited while Kat collected her bag of things. I helped her up with one hand, trying not to rush or panic her. Yet, the screaming engine of a two-stroke bike reaching powerband was familiar to me. I knew the sound well from my youthful adventures on bikes. I also had a pretty good idea of how quickly those machines were heading our way.

Kat said nothing as I took her hand and urged her into a run.  A hundred thoughts jostled in my mind. Which way? We had to get off this exposed position, and to do that we had to come down off the ridge.

We came around the base of the hill, and started to head down the next slope at a run, our feet scrabbling on loose rock. The bikes were closer now. I heard a skid as a rider pushed his machine too hard around a corner, a rattling chain, then climbing through the gears again.

To my surprise, I saw the figure of a boy standing in the dawn light in front of me. In one hand he carried an old potato sack, stuffed full of something that must have been very light.

I stopped moving, rooted to the spot. I’d seen the face of that kid so many times in my dreams that I recognised him instantly. His hair was longer than it had been, and his shorts more ragged. Now he also wore a threadbare Western shirt. He was thin, half-starved, like a runaway dog that had been surviving on the margins.

Nine hard months fell away from me in a moment. Nine months of prison, escape, persecution and being hunted. Before me now stood the boy who had sold me that damned medal that night, a lifetime ago. There were many things that I wished I had asked him at the time, but now I was near dumb with shock.

He crooked a finger, ‘Come with me. I’m gunna help youse.’

Kat touched my shoulder and shot me a look that clearly asked if we could trust him.

I shook my head and shrugged as if to say that I didn’t know.

Yet, the screaming bike engines were now echoing from the face of the Fifth Hill, along with voices and the bark of dogs.

‘Hurry up mate,’ the kid yelled. ‘You know what’s gunna happen if them mob catch you here? Nolan will cut your throat, and let the dogs drink your blood. I heard the old bastard say it. Follow me. Along this way.’

Kat and I followed, initially, at a hesitant pace, and he yelled again. ‘Faster.’

He led us past the hill’s northward face, then changed direction, through the middle of a cracked boulder, and then onto a steep descent off the ridge.

Trying to hurry, feet scrabbling and twisting – we came down off the slope. At the base the boy told us to stop, and there he upended the potato sack. A number of sheaves of hard-pressed grass pads fell out, along with a ball of twine.

‘Tie ‘em to yer feet,’ he said, demonstrating. ‘It’s the only way to stop them bloody dogs from getting the scent.’

We sat on rocks and did as he asked. We had no choice. Even once we had fastened the pads of grass around our shoes he came around, checking and tightening, using his pocket knife to trim the twine so it didn’t get in our way.

‘Let’s go,’ he said at last, and we headed cross-country into a plain in which dry spear grass grew to the waist, interspersed with messmate, beefwood and pandanus. Red-brown termite mounds rose from the ground at intervals. It was only light cover, but better than nothing.

After a while the boy stopped us, broke a branch of green leaves off from a tree, and hurried back to sweep any remnant of tracks that the grass pads had left behind. Swivelling my head back I could see the tops of the hills, but not around the bases. I could still hear the bikes, circling and looking, and the bark of dogs. I reached out for Kat’s hand and squeezed it, hard.

Soon we were running again, heading for another line of hills. By then my old wounds were aching around the stitches, and Kat’s face was coloured beetroot. It seemed to me that the engines were fainter, but we did not let up.

Even on those grasslands, we passed places where Nolan and his crew had dug holes – up around the hills we had seen hundreds of these excavations – and I was beginning to understand the Wild Doggers’ desperation to find the mythical gold. It was an obsession with them.

We reached a small creek, and the boy sloshed through first. I could see that it was only knee-deep, but I stopped and could not, at first, bring myself to go in. It was only when Kat went through, came back and took my hand that I committed to cross. I felt like a fearful child.

On the far bank our guide allowed us to stop, catch our breath and change the near ruined grass pads on our feet to new ones. Needing to drink, but still fearful of things lurking, I found shallows where the water was only inches deep, and there I sipped from cupped hands, before retreating. Kat and I watched as the boy moved to the edge, extended himself at full length, and leaned face-down to drink directly from the surface.

Then, wiping his lips, he came up the bank towards us, moving close to Kat, as if examining her closely.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Kat, what’s yours?’

‘Tommy,’ he said, then shifted his attention to me. ‘I know your name’s Pete. That mob back there never stop talking about ya. They reckoned you was dead then came back to life.’ He chuckled to himself, then, ‘From now we can slow down a bit.’

Moving at a fast walk, it didn’t take long to reach the next line of hills. Tommy led us over the crest, at which point we turned south towards the river again. We followed a ridge with a vast expanse of salt flats out to the west, leading to the bases of taller hills. I could see the upper reaches of the Wild Dog River lost in a chaos of ox-bows and billabongs, marshes and flat salt plain. The sun shone down on it all, making it glow white like a snowfield.

After half an hour or more, we came down off the ridge, and headed into a valley that looked nondescript at first, but soon we were walking under the spreading boughs of giant paperbark trees, and the grass was replaced by a matt of fine root-hairs that were soft to walk on.

Ground-hawks rustled in the fox-tail palms and pandanus. Black cockatoos gnawed and nibbled, and cried their distinctive, raucous cries in the casuarina-tops. There was no longer any sound or sign of pursuit, and Tommy led us deeper into the enclosing boughs of the trees, so thick now that it became surreal, with shafts of light streaking down from the sun.   

A couple of quail burst abruptly from the ground near to our feet and Kat gave a shriek. She stopped, gripped my shoulder for a moment, then looked at me for reassurance. Being in that environment must have been strange to her.

The sides of the track became so tight that I unslung the rifle and carried it in my right hand. Another minute or two, and we came to a clearing that sloped gently down to a very still pool of black water. On the higher ground stood a rough-as-guts lean-to, with a roof of sticks reinforced with chicken wire and a scrap of canvas.

The boy stopped walking, and turned. ‘This is my camp. I found that medal I sold to you here.’

 This surprised me. ‘It hasn’t been dug up, like everywhere else. Did you tell Nolan where you found it?’

‘Nah. I ran off away from them, that night. Someone saw me sell that thing to you, and they hurt me tryin’ to find out what it was.’

‘How have you survived, alone out here?’ Kat asked.

Tommy collected a handful of dry sticks from under a tree trunk, and kneeled down at the hearth, placing the sticks carefully on the coals, then blowing so the embers glowed red

‘I eat fish, mussels ‘n’ crabs – wallaby when I can get one. I steal from their camp at night.’ He lifted his shirt to show a scar that was surely from a bullet graze. ‘One night they almost got me. Stung proper-way that one. Nolan an’ them others they dug up everything all around – but they don’t know about this place.’ He pointed to the south. ‘The river just that way, little bit. This little creek empties in there – good fishing place, that one.’

When the fire was hot, Tommy put a billy of water on to boil. He made tea, and Kat rummaged in her bag of stolen goods for a cardboard packet of Nabisco biscuits. Tommy only had two enamel mugs and so I shared with Kat.

‘I’ll steal another one,’ grinned Tommy. ‘Those camp people got more of everything than they need.’

We drank tea and ate biscuits, the fire smoke curling lazily between us and the trees, but Tommy never sat. He helped us to remove the grass pads from our feet, then roamed the fireside, his eyes flicking in every direction. Scarcely ten minutes would have passed since his arrival when he announced that he was heading off again.

‘I’m headin’ back to see what’s going on. Check they aren’t coming this way. Back soon. As long as you stay here, you’ll be safe.’

Tommy gave me the thumbs up, and walked away before we could comment or protest.

At first, warm with tea, and relieved with the escape from danger, I gave myself up to enjoying the warm hearth and Kat coming to life beside me.

After a while though, a bunch of new, tricky feelings started to bother me.

I wanted to trust Tommy – and he’d certainly led us out of trouble – but something my dad used to say came to me; Once a shonk always a shonk – they get the taste, and never stop looking for the next deal.

Hadn’t Tommy been the one to sell me the dragon medal? He’d found an item of value and sold it.

Did he now have something new to sell? Were Kat and I the items of value? Was he, right now, cutting a deal with Nolan?

‘Maybe,’ I said to Kat, after pondering this for a while, ‘we should get out of here.’

©2024 Greg Barron

Read previous chapters here.

Continued next Saturday.

#wilddogriver #serialstory #booklover

More books and stories are available from the Ozbookstore