Flight of the Eagle (2 page)

PROLOGUE

Colony of Queensland

I
t was a land as hostile as any the white man knew.

Vast spaces of lonely scrub and sand where the world's deadliest snake sheltered in the cracks of the clay pans during the blistering heat of the day and hunted the marsupial creatures by night. A land where a solitary Aboriginal hunter roamed in a tenuous existence with nature.

But Wallarie did not feel alone in this land. For he walked with the spirits of his people and the fact that he lived proved their existence. His life was indelibly marked by the waiting for the storm that would come to the world of men and change the unborn years ahead.

The warrior was now in his middle years and his long beard was shot with grey. His body was scarred and his eyes were fading with the progress of time. But despite his years he was still a warrior to be feared by the tribesmen he met in his long wanderings across the length and breadth of the Colony of Queensland. Nor was his reputation as a killer of white men forgotten on the frontier by the European settlers.

For Wallarie was now shrouded in the mythology of the frontier. He was now remembered as a spirit man who would come to snatch away little children – should they be naughty, nannies chided.

But this night he would sit cross-legged before his campfire and chant the songs of his people. The spirits of the land would listen as his fire crackled softly in the night and the ageing warrior would fall into a deep sleep. The spirits would come to him on the hush of the night wind to tell him things of the future as he slept by his fire. They would tell him of strange events unfolding: that the ancestor spirits had been disturbed from their long sleep and a vengeful storm was rising from the earth to lash the world of die white man. They told him that he must travel north to the lands of the fierce Kalkadoon warriors where he would meet once again with the blood of his past. He did not know what this meant but knew he must listen to the voices.

Wallarie – the last of his tribe – continued to dream his visions as the dingo howled mournfully in the desert night and the deadly taipan rose from the cracks of the clay pans to slither in search of prey.

When the sun came to the brigalow plains of central Queensland Wallarie left the cooling shelter of the ancient cave to trek once more north to the lands of the Kalkadoon tribesmen.

THE
STORM RISING
1884

ONE

A
young man of the Queensland Native Mounted Police squatted in the red dust of the plains. He was examining the faint outline of footprints as his colleagues sat uneasily astride their big mounts. His opinion was critical to the lives of the eight mounted troopers who had patrolled deep into the country of the greatly feared Kalkadoon warriors.

The police patrol had come a long way from their barracks near the frontier town of Cloncurry. To their front rose the craggy, dry hills of the Godkin Range whilst behind them the sparse bush and prickly trees of the termite nest dotted red plains. Only the buzzing of the pestilent flies and the swish of horses' tails disturbed the silence of the ever-present dry heat of the semi-arid lands of northern Australia.

Trooper Peter Duffy was a man living between two worlds. Half-Irish half-Aboriginal, he was the son of the bushranger Tom Duffy and Mondo, a woman of the Nerambura clan. He was in his early twenties and had inherited his father's well-formed physique and his mother's skin tone. He had the dark good looks that attracted coy glances from European women in the frontier towns while at the same time malevolent stares from their men. Despite his excellent grades at school and being raised in a European culture, he was forever reminded that he was a half-caste nigger by the whites around him.

When he had joined the Native Mounted Police in Townsville with his best friend Gordon James he was automatically designated as the tracker for the patrol whereas Gordon was able to acquire a commission as an officer. Gordon was, after all, the son of the famed Sergeant Henry James who had many years earlier helped disperse the tribes of the Fitzroy region.

That a contingent of the Native Mounted Police had killed his mother and father sixteen years earlier in Burkesland had initially troubled Peter. But loyalty to a best friend had overcome something that was a distant and very dim memory in the present reality of his youthful desire for adventure.

Peter gazed up at the distant line of ridges and had no doubt that the tracks led to the sanctuary of the hills. He did not like the situation. Every instinct told him the shimmering heat haze dancing on the craggy rocks of the ancient hills held death; it was in the very air itself. The silence was ominous – as if the spirits of the rocks had fallen silent to listen to the sounds of horses snorting and saddle metal jangling. Death was a buzzing sound in the young police trooper's ears.

‘Well, Trooper Duffy, what do you see?’ Sub Inspector Potter queried irritably from atop his mount. The long patrol in the saddle had played havoc with his haemorrhoids and the so far fruitless hunt for the elusive warriors made him sour around his men.

‘Nothing good, Mahmy,’ Peter replied thoughtfully, adding, ‘I think the Kalkadoons want us to go in after them.’

‘Rot!’ the sub inspector snorted. ‘Darkies don't have the white man's ability to plan a military strategy. I think you are being over cautious.’

Peter turned his face away so that the police officer could not see his expression of contempt for him. If only Gordon James, his boyhood friend, was commanding the patrol and not this pompous idiot. ‘I think we should not go in, Mahmy,’ Peter reiterated quietly. ‘I think they are waiting for us.’

Peter knew full well that the police officer did not like him for what he was – a half-caste, the progeny of an abominable sin in the Lord's eyes.

The inspector had vigorously objected to his posting to his troop.
No, he wanted a full-blooded tracker … not some half-caste darkie!
But the half-caste had friends in the Mounted Police who insisted he be given the job as the patrol's tracker. They were now stuck with each other.

The European troopers cast nervous glances at their commander. They respected the young tracker who they jokingly said was ‘almost a white man’. So when Peter advised not to go into the narrow, scrub covered gullies of the hills they listened. Like Peter Duffy, they had little respect for their arrogant commander who had until recently served with the British army in India.

The Aboriginal troopers of the patrol
knew
Peter was right and nervously fidgeted with their Snider carbines as they gazed at the slopes and hill tops searching for the dreaded Kalkadoon warriors.
This was not going to be a good dispersal!

Inspector Potter swiped at the clouds of flies vying for the sweat on his face. He had already decided to ignore his tracker. The pesky Kalkadoons were badly in need of being taught a lesson and had speared their last white man. The troopers would go in.

If the Kalkadoons were waiting for them they were in for an unpleasant surprise up against the guns of the patrol. Their heavy wooden shields would not stop a Snider round from Queen Victoria's dispensers of justice in Queensland.

‘Advance!’

Inspector Potter's order was delivered with a lazy disdain for the all that smacked of commonsense.

Peter swung into the saddle and slid the police carbine from its scabbard. He rested the butt against his thigh. The hills seemed to scream a deadly silence. As loud as a scream from a dying man, he thought.

They rode in silence.

There was no nervous banter as they followed the tracks that Peter's keen eyesight could discern in the dry earth and the numerous footprints led them into a narrow gully bordered by rock strewn slopes.

Rocks big enough to conceal a man, Peter thought with mounting apprehension for what he could visualise unfolding. Rocks and scrub to conceal crouching men who had been trained as warriors from birth. Behind him the patrol followed reluctantly – except for Sub Inspector Potter, smug in his ignorance.

The sunburnt and sweating police officer shook his head. The bloody half-caste nigger was as gutless as he had suspected, he thought. No backbone when it came to dealing with primitive blacks armed with little more than sticks and stones. The matter of the man's timid behaviour was noted and would be duly reported upon return to the barracks at Cloncurry. In the mean …

He never did finish his monologue of censuring thoughts as he became vaguely aware of a strange swishing sound in the hot, still air of the narrow gully. A searing pain sliced through his groin and his mount suddenly reared in terrified agony as the barbed spears thudded into its flank. At the same time the seemingly deserted slopes of the hills were rent with die blood-curdling war cries from hundreds of Kalkadoon throats.

With a desperate yank on the reins, Potter vainly attempted to keep his mount on its feet, but the mortally wounded horse went down with a bone splitting crash, pinning him to the ground.

The men who showered the police patrol with rocks and the long hardwood spears were well over six feet tall and the plumage of emu and eaglehawk feathers piled on their heads gave them terrifying added height. Their faces were marked with bands of white feathers attached with their own blood and feathers also adorned their arms and legs. To the ambushed police troopers their surreal appearance seemed no less than an image of the demons of hell coming to claim their lives.

Potter clutched frantically at the spear in his groin. But the barbs of the spear were so designed that the spear could neither be pushed nor pulled once it had lodged. The Kalkadoon warriors whom he had sneered at only minutes before had lured him into the narrow gorge where they held the tactical high ground. The police patrol was trapped in a narrow dead-end gully without any chance to manoeuvre.

A spear-wielding warrior loomed above Potter who had lost his revolver. ‘Die you white bastard!’ the grizzled warrior spat and Potter was mildly surprised to hear his killer speak English as he clawed frantically at a spear impaled in his chest. Potter's eyes rolled in despair as he stared up at his killer. He had lost his patrol and now he was losing his life.

The warrior savagely yanked the spear from the dying inspector's chest while the last surviving troopers desperately attempted to disentangle themselves from their thrashing mounts and seek escape. But everywhere their terrified eyes fell they saw only waves of plumage-adorned bodies charging down the slopes from behind their rock and scrub cover.

Screaming taunts, the Kalkadoon warriors were on the troopers with lance-like spears to impale them to the red earth. With despairing screams for mercy, the troopers died under the blows of nullas and stone axes.

Razor-sharp stone knives slit open the bellies of the dead troopers as the warriors eagerly sought the kidneys of the men. They would eat the covering fat as a gallant gesture to the fallen warriors.

Wallarie turned his attention from the inspector at his feet to the last survivor – a trooper who stood alone and defiant, wielding his rifle like a club. The man had no chance, Wallarie thought, as a circle of Kalkadoon warriors taunted him with jeers.