The Ellie Chronicles (51 page)

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.

So was I, even though I didn’t know what we were ready for. I turned a little but the signals weren’t strong behind me. Something was in front of us, something that had those spiders tickling my skin so badly I wanted to scratch myself. The problem was to move forwards in a way that wouldn’t expose us too much and yet would give us a chance to go quietly. The further off the track and into the bush we were, the more we’d be walking on twigs and leaves and bark and noisy stuff. It was all about finding a middle way, as always. I shuffled a bit to the left and started to creep down the road. Across from me Lee was doing the same. We were coming into a little dip. Beyond that the road rose, then levelled and ran in a straight line for about fifty metres before coming to a cattle grid. This was the boundary between One Tree and Burnt Hut.

One Tree had probably been a paddock with only one tree a long time ago. Maybe when my great-grandfather was razing the place with crosscut saws and axes, and when my grandfather joined in with tractors and bulldozers. But then my father came along with his airy-fairy arty-farty greenie ideas and not only let the bush grow back in quite a few places but actually planted trees and restored the lagoon. And so One Tree didn’t really deserve that name any more, but was stuck with it anyway.

Burnt Hut was a nice paddock that at the moment was heavily stocked with Mr Young’s cattle, which I had on agistment. It was my eastern boundary. Next door was Colin McCann’s place. It was my only border with him and I didn’t see much of him but he was a decent bloke and a good neighbour.

I knew that to the left of the dip, on Lee’s side, ahead of us, was a bit of a gully that occasionally ran with water during a wet winter. I realised that if these guys were anywhere around here, this was the place they’d be camping.

I waved to Lee to get him to stay where he was, then I cut back through the bush and went quite a way forwards. I came out near the gate into Burnt Hut, on the other side of the dip, and looked back down the track to pick up Lee again. There he was, a thin dark figure in among the thin dark saplings. I pointed into the gully, to show him what I wanted to do, to have the two of us sneak in there and see what we could see. Then I squatted a little to peer through the trees.

At that moment my head was nearly blasted off my shoulders. My God there is nothing like a rifle shot fired at you from not far away to totally pulverise you, to turn you into mush. And I’m talking about the shots that miss you. Everything turns to liquid. I guess if it had hit me I would have shed quite a lot of liquid too, but either way it’s pretty effective. I froze in mid-crouch. At the same time I realised that the crouch had saved my life. I’d bent just as he fired.

At least my brain started working again, after that moment of paralysis. I dropped further and did a quick slithering crawl into some bracken and grass, hoping no snakes were waking up in the immediate vicinity. My heart was going like an empty jerry can in the back of a ute, a ute being driven on a dirt road at a hundred and twenty k’s. And when I say dirt road, I’m talking a fire trail. I didn’t know if my chest would be able to contain it. I wondered where Lee was, and if the gunman knew he was hanging around. A second shot slammed into a tree behind me, but missed by quite a way compared to the first one. I bolted deeper into the undergrowth then immediately started working my way around to the right in the hope that I’d get a shot at him or them.

I left my safety on because dragging the rifle along in the grass was just too dangerous. Someone started firing pretty much at random, but I thought there was at least a bit of a pattern in where the shots were going, which meant that I could flatten myself as they got closer. I was completely deaf by the time they got to me. One bullet went to my left and another to my right. I’d say the closer one was less than two metres away. By that time I was so flat that you could have put a spirit level on me and the bubble wouldn’t have gone anywhere. I did the echidna thing and writhed myself into the ground, trying to make a depression where no depression existed. But the moment the shots passed me I went at a speed no echidna has ever achieved, heading for the fence line into Burnt Hut.

I knew that the scrub was much lighter there and I’d have a better view. Of course they’d have a better view of me too, but I had to get a look at him or them and see what I was up against.

The shots stopped abruptly. As far as I could tell with my ringing ears there was a complete silence. I could bet that every bird for a couple of k’s would be keeping its beak shut and heading for the hills. The familiar
thump thump thump
of kangaroos moving at speed could not be heard. No moaning mooing cattle either. Chances were that it was just down to me and Lee and an unknown number of gunmen who wanted to kill us.

I tried to move as quietly as possible, considering that I wouldn’t have heard much noise I made anyway. If I’d screamed at the top of my voice while at the same time jumping up and down on large dead branches . . . well, I might have heard that, just. But, still on all fours, I wove a way through more bracken and grass, trying to ignore the blackberries I occasionally plonked my hand on, until at last I got to a position where I thought I could risk a peep.

I peeped but I didn’t see anything. I slowly swivelled my head and peeped some more, quite a lot more, still with no result. Again I wondered where Lee was. Then, suddenly, shockingly, as I peeped again, I got a good view of them. Two men, both young, both dressed in camouflage. They were moving slowly down the sides of the road, the exact way Lee and I had been doing. Guess we’d read the same handbook on guerrilla warfare. They had their rifles ready for action and they looked pretty professional. They peered as I peeped.

I carefully moved my rifle up to my shoulder, still trying to make no sound. It occurred to me that they might be pretty deaf themselves after the barrage. I lined them up, but didn’t know what I was going to do. Could I shoot them in cold blood? I didn’t have much compunction about that, seeing how hard they were trying to kill me, but I didn’t know if it was a good tactical move. Could I take them prisoner? I was scared to do that. I know it’s so easy in the movies when they take a prisoner, but in real life all I could see were problems. What if I told them to walk along the road in a certain direction and they just refused? Would I, could I, shoot them?

Damn Lee, where was he? I needed his advice. Someone’s advice, anyone’s advice, but I’d take Lee or Homer above most people, especially in a situation like this.

Then it seemed that they saw Lee, even if I couldn’t. While I was still trying to decide whether to pull the trigger, and if so which one I’d shoot first, they both suddenly tensed. One went a couple of steps to the left, the other to the right. Now they were both out of my sight. But they both fired, in such quick succession that it almost seemed like one shot. There was an answering blast from Lee. He must have had himself fairly well positioned, because he gave them a hot time. He fired again, then a couple more times. He must have reloaded. I could see branches whipping back with the force of shells hitting them. Leaves flew. He forced the men back, I think, because I could hear them well enough now, shouting to each other in their own language. It sounded like they were already twenty metres down the road, nearly at the gate.

I ran around to get a better position. I knew where I could get a view of the fence line. If I could catch them as they went across the cattle grid I’d have them off guard for a couple of moments. It’s difficult to get across those things, especially if you’re trying to concentrate on shooting people at the same time.

By the time I saw them again they were already across it though. That was pretty slick work. They were haring towards a small clump of trees, swerving a bit as they went. Yes, they were professionals all right. Lee came running down the road, panting like he’d just done ten k’s. I came down the fence line taking giant steps to get over logs and rocks and ditches. We met at the gate and without needing to speak raced across the cattle grid. Lee dropped to one knee and lined up a shot, but I could have told him he was wasting his time. When you’ve been running like that and it’s a hot day and you’re in a state of panic, you can’t get your gun steady, you can’t aim properly, sweat gets in your eyes and your hand trembles and the shot goes wide or high or short or whatever. Lee should have known.

It would have been pretty funny if he’d hit one of them after my saying that, but he didn’t. I couldn’t see where the shot went, even though I’d had to pause and wait for him while he took it. I wasn’t going to run on ahead while he amused himself with pot shots from behind me.

‘Come on,’ I said, and he got back to his feet and started out after me.

I realised we were running into a problem. When these guys got into the clump of trees – and nothing we could do was going to stop them – the tables would suddenly be reversed. We were in a big bare part of the paddock. Absolutely no cover. To my left, beyond a dozen very restless and unhappy-looking beasts, was more bush, but it was a long way from us. We would be exposed to withering fire from a couple of professional soldiers who’d be well hidden in good cover. To my right were more cattle and the crest of the hill, my boundary fence with Colin McCann running along the crest of it.

I glanced behind and if I hadn’t been sweating before I did some serious sweating now. Sheez, we’d come a long way. Too far. We were too fast for our own good. The PE department at Wirrawee High School would be proud of us. They could have a ceremony to honour us. Too bad it was going to be posthumous.

‘This way!’ I yelled at Lee. He seemed to be realising the problem at the same time because he was slowing down and looking kind of doubtful. I swung left, ran ten metres at the most, then it was my turn to drop to one knee and raise my rifle. God, my father, Mr Young, forgive me for what I am about to do. As a farmer, this was the worst moment of my career. This was the absolute pits.

It’s impossible to hit a fox when he’s running and you’re out of breath and shaking from the hunt. It’s probably impossible to hit a human being in the same circumstances, although I haven’t had a lot of practice. But it’s all too easy to shoot a couple of steers, especially when they’re standing still and watching you with the gravest suspicion. I got them both through the head and they both dropped pretty much straightaway. The first one fell on his front knees and stayed there for a moment, then slowly rolled over to his left side. The second fell to his side, again to the left. The other cattle bolted.

We sprinted for the nearest dead one. Turned out when we got there that he wasn’t dead, but equally he wasn’t going anywhere. We got there just in time though, as the shooting from the trees started up when we were still a dozen steps away. I don’t think I took those dozen steps, I think I flew them. I seem to remember a long dive that brought me thudding into the heaving side of the dying steer.

God, sometimes you get emotional overload. I lay there feeling (a) terror from being shot at; (b) fury at these guys and a mad desire to kill them; (c)horror at the terrible gasping of the beast who sheltered me, along with; (d) guilt that I’d just shot two beautiful healthy cattle; and (e) thankfulness that I was with Lee, because he and Homer were about the only two people I knew who could help me get out of this alive. If there’d been time I would have had a few feelings about Gavin too, but for this brief period he was completely out of my mind.

‘Barbequed beef for tea tonight,’ Lee said, panting. I immediately added another emotion to my list: hatred of Lee. We were down to (f ) now.

‘There won’t be any tea if we’re dead,’ I snarled back.

Half-a-dozen bullets smacked into the great beast and he died without another murmur. The impact of the bullets was frightening. Luckily these cattle were in good condition. A scrawny beast mightn’t have been much protection. Now he was just a carcass though, chopped up as though the world’s roughest butcher had hacked into him with a blunt axe. Chunks of flesh were scattered over a wide area. Lee had blood all down his front and, glancing down, I realised that I was in the same condition. Already a couple of flies were starting to appear.

‘What are we going to do now, genius?’ Lee asked. To be fair to him it wasn’t said in a bad way. He gave me a little crooked smile. I knew deep down that Lee respected the fact that I’d saved his skin a few times. Just as I respected the fact that he’d saved mine.

It was time for the brain to take over. Instinct might help as a back-up, but this was a job for the brain. ‘Why do you think I shot two beasts?’ I asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. The firing had stopped. I wondered if they were running low on ammunition. ‘Cover me,’ I said quickly to Lee and took off for the second of the cattle.