Tracks (24 page)

Right. Don’t panic, D. Hold back that cold sweat that’s trickling down the yellow streak on your spine, and clogging up your eyebrows. Just obtain cover (will a clump of spinifex do?) and shoot to kill.

Right. But the difficult thing is, I like camels. I don’t like to hurt camels. I fired a warning shot, hoping to hell they’d run away in abject terror. They kept coming. OK I’ll have to shoot one. When the others smell blood they’ll leave. I walked up close, knelt down and aimed for the head. But when I pulled the trigger, nothing happened. Nothing. Zip. Gun jammed. Gun no good. Oh dear, I said as I felt the yellow streak leap off my back and run yelling ‘Help, help,’ all the way back to Warburton. Oh dear, oh dear, I said as the camels came closer. I bashed the gun on the ground and shouted at it and tried to fix it with my knife, all to no avail.

I spied the burnt-out stump of a corkwood to tie Bub to, then, as an added precaution, lashed his nose-line to his leg, knowing that if he got a real fright he would snap it like a piece of cotton, uproot the stump and head for home. I had no time to think about Diggity or Goliath because the new camels were now a mere ten feet away and they was
BIG.
Dookie and Zel were getting up and down like yoyos and decidedly touchy. I threw a rock at one of the bulls. He burbled and disgorged his mouth bladder (a hideously repulsive pink, purple and green balloon, covered in slobber and smelling indescribably foul, that female camels perversely find attractive), shook his head at me and we played merry-go-rounds. I threw another rock and threatened him with my iron digging stick. He backed off and looked at me as if I was an idiot. It took half an afternoon of this cat and mouse game and many other crafty anti-camel manoeuvres to get rid of those animals. Much to my relief, they eventually got bored with terrorizing me and stalked off into the glue-like mirage-riddled horizon. None of them had actually attacked — well, I’d be dead if they had — and I thought I had been unnecessarily careful in shooting all the other bulls so far. Then I remembered Dookie’s turn and slapped myself on the wrist.

It was a very long afternoon. One of the longest I’ve ever experienced. But I got through it OK. No damage except a few minor alterations to the brain circuitry, and the ruining of my gun and knife of course. My wits got me through where the gun didn’t.

I pulled into camp that night under the protection of two lovely hills, and I sat down to write letters. They were happy, positive and calm. I kept thinking that I should be quaking with fear. That I should be writing for reassurance, that I should be writing to people because I needed them there to protect me. I kept thinking that I should be wanting to be back there with them where it was safe, and instead I found myself telling them that I wouldn’t swap places with them for anything in the world, that safety was a myth and security a sneaky little devil. I have included one of the letters here, written over a period of days, because letters were the closest thing I kept to a diary. They describe what was happening much more clearly than I could now remember from my poky London flat.

Dear Steve,

Sitting by my lovely fire 150 miles from anyone or anything, billy’s singing tea shanties, camels returning from nightly munch a-jingling, Diggity farting silently but lethally beside me on the swag. I have found myself a magic place, fringed by delicate mulga laces, bottomed by soft red sand and protected by two red and yellow mesas. A little spot of heaven on the lonely desert trail, where I’m staying for a few days to fortify my ‘wā’. This morning before dawn (grey silk sky and Venus) I saw one crow carving up wind currents above the hills. Went hunting with the sun and saw one kanyala and missed. Thank heavens. But we are meat hungry. Came back and cooked a golden crusty damper and then had a wash — the first water, sudsy or otherwise, to touch my skin in weeks. Hooooeeeee. I’m surprised I didn’t find a cluster of mushrooms growing under there somewhere.

I just rushed off for a minute, raving at the camels who were once again raiding the food bags. Cheeky and impertinent beasts. How I love them though.

Now the cold is welling up from the ground and swirling about my be-socked and be-sandalled feet. Cuds are being chewed in rhythm and the bloodwood and sandalwood fire is jujitsuing with the cold. Oh zing zing zing go my heartstrings, it’s good to be alive. And words just can’t tell you what it’s like. Words are the memory twitching after the reality of the dance …

A few days later. Well, a few days ago in your time that is. In my time, I could just as well say I wrote that tomorrow or a thousand years ago. Time ain’t the same out here you know. Maybe I’ve gone through a black hole. But let’s not get involved in time concepts — I could really lose the thread doing that.

Today was a wham-bammer of a day — still is in fact. Although now as I stare out at the glinting gibbers and dead trees … but let me begin at the beginning.

Today began like most others except there were clouds in the sky. Two in fact, just pinkly peeping over the northern horizon. Rain, I think, was the first thing I thought as the first light slithered under my eyelids and blankets. The clouds evaporated in seconds though, and the next thing I thought was, ‘I can’t hear my camel bells.’ You’re right, mountain-man, the camels had evaporated also. Well, two had anyway, and the other one, I was soon to discover, didn’t evaporate because he couldn’t walk.

A very wise friend in Alice once said to me, ‘When things go wrong on the track, rather than panic, boil the billy, sit down and think clearly.’

So I boiled the billy and I sat down and I went through the salient points with Diggity.

1. We are 100 miles from anything.
   
2. We have lost two camels.
   
3. We have one camel who has a hole in his foot so big you could curl up and go to sleep in it.
   
4. We have enough water for six days.
   
5. My busted hip is still intolerably painful.
   
6. This is a god-awful place to spend the rest of our lives, which according to my mathematical calculations will be about a week.
   

So, having tidied all that up, I panicked. Many hours later, I found my lost beasts and brought them back to the fold. They were chastened. That only left the problem of the cripple. Now, Dookie is normally a quiet, reserved, dependable kind of fella. But when he has a hole in his foot, he changes into a raging demon. Well, he struck, he kicked, he twisted, he snarled, he vomited, he rolled, he gawped and he gurgled, and finally I had to truss him up like a turkey to get at his foot, which sounds easy on paper but I swear I lost a gallon of sweat in that struggle. And remember how I was saying before (salient point 5 I think) about my poor old hip, the poor old hip that’s dislocated in about 7 places, well, isn’t it always the way,
that
was the hip Dookie got with his front leg. But, to cut a long grumble short, I got him down, I tied him up, and I gouged four sandhills and six boulders out of that hole in his foot, and I packed it with cotton wool and terramycin, and I covered it with a patch, and I kissed it all better and at last we got under way.

Sweet holy Jesus, mountain-man, there’s a herd of camels coming into my camp
RIGHT NOW
. As I write. There’s absolutely nothing I can do, so I’m writing to still my panic. Why oh why does this happen to me. Looks OK, no bulls with this lot thank heavens. But I have my rifle loaded just in case. You know, the rifle that doesn’t work. Well you never know, miracles can happen. Now, where was I. Got to write because I’m feeling desperate. OK, left camp about midday and then I came to the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen — Mungilli claypan.

Let me try to describe it to you. You come down an incline and suddenly you’re in another country. There is shade everywhere and the sand is soft salmon pink. Giant ghost gums glisten and sway and there are birds tweeting and warbling. On the right, like a tidal estuary that hasn’t seen the sea in aeons, is the claypan. It’s empty and flat and rimming it all round are low swells of dunes and trees and red-berried salt bushes. Some of the trees have smooth pink trunks, like shot silk, which glow crimson in the evening sun, and their leaves are deep deep shining green. Now, I know most people would drive through that three miles of heaven and not even gasp, let alone pull out the prayer mat, but it sent ripples to the pit of my stomach. I wish I could explain it to you. What a piece of country — so moving, so subtly powerful. Didn’t stop long though. Dookie’s foot-hole was growing in my consciousness like a triffid in the tropics.

So now I am here, one ear cocked for the burbling of bull camels (where there are mums there are usually dads, unfortunately).

Funny thing about this trip you know. One day it has me flying through the clouds in ecstasy (although, having been to the clouds, I can honestly say they’re a nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there, the cost of living’s too high) and the next day …

Now, as I stare out at the glinting gibbers and dead trees, if you want me to be perfectly truthful, mountain-man, and this is just between you and me, and I wouldn’t want it getting around, I’m just a weensy bit tired of this adventure. In fact, to be quite honest, fantasies are beginning to worm their way between the spinifex clumps, skeletons and rocks — fantasies pertaining to where I’d like to be right now.

Somewhere where cool clover comes almost to your crutch, where there are no tidal waves, tai-funs, stray meteors, camels, nasty night noises, blaring, thrumming, cancer-producing sun, no heat shimmer and raw rocks, no spinifex, no flies, somewhere where there’s lots of avocados, water, friendly people who bring cups of tea in the morning, pineapples, swaying palms, sea breezes, puffy little clouds and mirrored streamlets. A silk farm perhaps, where you can just sit and listen to the worms spinning money for you as you lazily build wind-chimes for select friends and when you get tired of that you can stroll down to your own huge bath in a little shoji house in your garden and eat frosty pink water-melon cut into exquisite shapes while a six-foot, slim slave slides ice-cubes down your back and …

Sorry, sorry Stevie, I was getting carried away.

But you know what I mean.

Christ, right now I’d give anything for a friendly face. Even an unfriendly face. Even a human noise would be nice. Yes, even the resonating base blart of a human fart from behind that dead salt bush over there would do. I must be crazy, I’m sitting here wondering if I’ll ever get out of this alive, wondering if I’ll ever see Sydney neon and venom again, writing like crazy to people who only exist in the warped recesses of my memory, who could be all dead, and all I can do is laugh and crack pooh jokes. If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it.
LOVING IT.

Finishing a letter’s harder than starting one. Full golden moon just bulged over the eastern tree-line. Worth it all for a moonrise? At this stage, yes. My skin’s as dry as dog-biscuits, my left leg may have seen its day, my lips are cracked and blistered, I’ve run out of toilet paper and have to use spinifex, there’s a skin-cancer trying to take over my nose (how do you keep your cool at
Geographic
cocktail parties when your nose drops off in a martini?), I’m slowly but efficiently going peculiar, I’m so scared of dying that the knocking of my knees wakes me up in the morning and has it all been worth it? Yes, mountain-man, definitely.

I can’t sleep. There’s tea coming out of my ears, eyeballs and hip-pockets, and I’m feeling
SO GOOD
. I could howl at the moon up there (and Arcturus and Aldebaran and Spica and Antares etc.) and I really want to tell somebody. Steve, are you listening? I
FEEL GREAT
. Life’s so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. What’s wrong with me that I feel this good? Have I gone bush-crazy? Am I moon-struck? Probably both and I don’t care. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some.

This writing of letters out in the middle of nowhere may seem a little peculiar, especially since it would be months before I could post them, and I would probably see my friends before I ever got a reply. But it helped in recording events and emotions at the time. My diary was a mishmash of these letters, most of them never sent, and uninteresting sentences like, ‘Is it July or August, anyway, lost camels this morning.’ Then there would be a month with no entries whatsoever.

The jocularity of those letters reflected the pervading mood of that month along the Gunbarrel. It wasn’t that I was becoming reckless, it wasn’t that I had discarded fear, it was simply that I was learning to accept my fate, whatever it might turn out to be.

The incident with the lost camels was slightly more hair-raising than the letter lets on. They had been spooked by wild camels in the night and I had slept through the whole thing. The tracks told me what had happened in the morning. I had been letting them go at night either loosely hobbled, or not hobbled at all. Sallay would have shot me on the spot had he known this. But my reasoning went this way — we were in dry desert country and the camels were working hard — they had to range a fair distance from camp to find the feed they needed. Goliath was always tied up securely and I firmly believed Zeleika would never leave him. (She was to shock me out of my complacency a couple of months later.) And I believed I could now track them over anything.

This business of tracking is a combination of sixth sense, knowledge of the behaviour of camels, keen eyesight and practice. The place we camped that afternoon was gibber country and cement-hard claypan. You could drive a sledge-hammer into that stuff and it would hardly leave a dent. Finding the direction they had gone in therefore required circling away from camp until I found the tracks (which had become mixed up with a couple of other cameloid footprints) and trying to follow this general direction, by searching for the scuff marks, looking for freshly eaten fodder, and keeping an eye open for fresh dung. (I could tell my camels’ dung from any others’.) It required a lot of circular and frustrating walking. As it turned out I found them not too many miles away, stirred up and nervous, heading back to camp. They came straight up to me, like errant children, begging forgiveness. Their friends had left. Rather than putting the fear of god into me, this incident reinforced my confidence in them, and I continued to leave them unhobbled at night. Stupid perhaps, but the camels did gain a little weight that month.