Tracks (29 page)

The feed situation for the camels during that time was worse than I had expected. It didn’t matter too much with Rick around. He was marvellous. He must have driven a thousand extra miles, relaying bales of oats or lucerne to me from Meekatharra.

He had been extremely upset over the death of the dog. I don’t think he had ever had a pet and this was the closest relationship to an animal he’d experienced. They had been nauseatingly in love with one another. I had never seen Diggity take to a person like that before. A couple of weeks out from Wiluna, Rick returned to camp late one night, after having driven a few hundred wretched miles of mercy run to pick up feed — he was extremely tired and he was not feeling well. He woke me up from a particularly disturbing dream in which Diggity was circling camp, whining, but would not come when I called her. Rick was quite out of it with exhaustion, and when he and danced. I danced he said, ‘Hey, what’s Diggity doing over there — I nearly ran over her when I came into camp.’ He had forgotten. I don’t know how to explain that one — won’t even try to, but it was not the only incident of its kind that happened in those weeks.

By now we were taking turns in leading the camels. Or rather, I grudgingly and nervously allowed Rick to lead them sometimes. He managed very well except that Dookie hated him with a jealously burning passion. Oh how I snickered. If Rick tried to do anything at all with him, Dookie would roll his eyes, lift his head, swell out his neck and mock-burble threateningly the way he dimly remembered bulls do. It amounted to, ‘You’re not my boss and if you touch me I’ll snap you in half like a twig, you pipsqueak.’ I knew Dookie would not really hurt Rick — well, I was 99 per cent sure — but Rick much preferred leaving the handling of Dookie to me. It really was funny. I’d stand near Rick and ask him to try to put the nose-line on him, and Dook would go into his act and then put his head down to me and snuffle and nibble and go all gooey with love, just to show this upstart where his affections lay.

I can’t say enough good things about camels. And they did eventually win over the honey. Rick and I had driven back to a station to send a message to
Geographic
and when we returned the whole camp was upturned and there were copious amounts of honey spread over everything — pack, sleeping bags, camels’ lips, camel eyelashes, camel rumps, everything. They knew exactly what they had done and took off as soon as they saw me.

The station people I met all through that area were incredibly kind. Once again you wouldn’t know by their faces that the drought was ruining them. They fed us and the camels until we rolled along like little puddings. And they told me that there would doubtless be a welcoming committee in Carnarvon, the town I planned to reach on the coast. Oops. Revision of plans. I had met some people on the road months before, one of the few groups I immediately liked. They owned a sheep station a couple of hundred miles south of Carnarvon and close to the sea and they had asked me to drop in on them. I decided to do exactly that. And if they were prepared to take the camels, that would be one of my major problems solved.

I
HAD LESS THAN
a couple of hundred miles to go when the final disaster occurred. With Rick around I had been lulled into a false sense of security. Surely nothing could go wrong now, we had been through so much and come so far and the rest was going to be a piece of cake. We were travelling through the stations along the Gascoyne River, the feed seemed to be picking up a little, Rick was there, all seemed well. Then Zeleika began to bleed internally.

I couldn’t tell whether the blood was coming from the vagina or the urethra. I made a tentative diagnosis of urinary tract infection and dosed her up with forty of my pills a day. These I concealed in an orange. I also injected her with huge doses of terramycin and hoped for the best. She had fed Goliath all the way and was now nothing but skin and bone. Rick drove to the next station, Dalgety Downs, to see if he could get some hand-feed and medicines. Zeleika was refusing to eat — I thought she was certainly going to die.

The people at Dalgety sent Rick back laden with supplies and driving a cattle truck to load Zelly on so she could be taken to the station in comfort, where she could rest properly and be hand-fed. Station hospitality.

The stubborn old cow refused to have anything to do with that truck. We tried everything. We shovelled a ramp for her — nothing. We ran ropes behind her, bribed her, cajoled her, and beat her, she would not set foot on that thing for love nor money. I decided to saddle up and walk to Dalgety, letting Zelly go free so she could follow us. And it was then she surprised me. Goliath or no Goliath, she was heading back for Alice Springs. Twice I tried it, and twice she made a bee-line due east, for home. I tied her on behind and walked slowly to Dalgety.

We camped that first evening by a water-hole, and heard the roar of a light aircraft overhead. It circled over us a few times, dipped its wings, then, much to our amazement, landed on the corrugated dirt track. Rick drove up to see who the brave maniac pilot was. He returned ten minutes later with a ten-gallon-hatted, riding-booted and bespurred man sitting on the front of the vehicle. He leapt off and crunched my knuckles warmly and introduced himself. He said he’d heard I had a sick camel so he thought he’d just drop by to see if I needed anything. He owned a station we had been through earlier, but had been away at the time. I took him over to the camels, while he busily told me his father had owned camels back in the old days, so he knew a thing or two about them. ‘Yeah, she’s pretty crook, the old girl,’ I said, slipping easily into outback jargon. ‘Like a crow on jam tins really. Yeah, nothing but crow-bait, poor old cow.’ Zeleika, who looked now like an Auschwitz survivor, was standing with the other two healthy bullocks. The man calmly walked up to Dookie, looked at him thoughtfully, shook his head slowly and sadly and said, ‘Yeah, by crikey, you’ve got yourself a sick camel there all right. Poor old blighter. Tsc tsc tsc. Dunno what you can do for her though.’ Richard and I tried gallantly to control our sputtering and smirking, while the man continued to tell us about camels. Richard drove him back to the plane, he took off in a cloud of bull dust, dipped his wings and flew home. We still laugh over that.

A day later, we clanged into Dalgety. Margot and David Steadman fell in love with the camels at first sight and spoilt them outrageously. After a week there, Zeleika had improved to the extent where I thought she would easily make it to the coast. I believed a swim would do the old girl a power of good. I had kept Goliath away from her with the aid of cattle yards and this had sped her along the road to recovery. The calf did not stop screaming and wailing and cursing me for one second, even though I gave him bucket after bucket of milk and molasses. Little pig. It was traumatic for Zeleika too — she kept trying to press her udder through the railing for him to suckle. Another week of pampering and she looked better than she had for the whole trip. She even managed a buck or two in the early morning light.

I decided to take them all to Woodleigh station, where Jan and David Thomson were eagerly awaiting our arrival. The property was a mere fifty miles from the ocean, and a blessed one hundred miles from Carnarvon, the welcoming committee and the press. I was still nervous about reporters, so just to make sure they wouldn’t hunt me down, we decided to send a fake telegram over the Steadmans’ two-way, from me to Rick, saying, ‘Zeleika still ill, will be in Carnarvon mid-November’ — a dirty trick but a good one as I discovered later on. I wanted to travel this last short distance by myself and Rick and I arranged to meet at Woodleigh in a few weeks’ time.

The weather was turning now. There is no real spring or autumn in the desert. The weather is either cold, hot, very hot, or bloody hot. It was getting into the bloody hot. While the stations around Dalgety consisted of good fertile country, the ones I hit further south were quite different. Undulating red ridges of sand covered in stunted khaki-coloured scrubby trees called wanyu — a kind of mulga that was meant to be reasonable camel fodder, but which mine refused to touch. They had never seen it before. Within days they lost all the condition they had built up at Dalgety. I tried to convince them it was delicious but they didn’t believe me. Didn’t trust me. And there was virtually nothing but wanyu. By the time I reached Callytharra, the last station before Woodleigh, I was again worried about them.

George and Lorna came to my rescue this time. I pulled into their homestead — a tiny corrugated iron shack with a lot of charm, but set in a boiling hot dust-bowl surrounded by bits of dying and dead machinery and tamed feral goats. These two people astonished me. They had nothing. No electricity, no money, and the drought had hit them badly. They were extraordinary people. They shared with me everything they had. One old bottle of beer that Lorna had kept under her bed for god knows how long, for horse colic, was brought out for the occasion. She gave me expensive feed for the camels and she looked after me like a long-lost daughter. They were perfect examples of what are known in Australia as ‘real battlers’. Lorna, a woman of about fifty or sixty (it was hard to tell), was still breaking in horses bare-back. George kept all his station bores and machinery going with bits of wire and kicks. And somehow they clung on, remained kind, generous, warm and uncomplaining with absolutely nothing. The night after I left them, they drove out in their old jalopy to bring me yet more camel feed, and a warm bottle of lemonade. The car had broken down on the way but George could fix anything and they arrived in camp late at night. Of all the outback people I met on the trip, I think George and Lorna personified battling bush spirit the best.

I was only a couple of days from Woodleigh now, and of course everything started to disintegrate. The pack suddenly developed holes and rips, saddles began rubbing camel backs overnight, and my last pair of trusty sandals broke. I had to tie them on with string, which hurt and cut into my feet, because I could not go barefooted any longer. You could have fried an egg on that sand. And the country was all the same, the bores were salty and warm and I just wanted to get to Woodleigh and sit in some shade and drink cups of tea. I had taken my clothes off because of the heat when I stumbled across the homestead. It was marked wrongly on the map and I came upon it ten miles too soon. I hastily dressed and clanged up to the house.

It’s hard to say who Jan and David were more pleased to see — me or the camels. I knew my beasts could enjoy a happy and pampered retirement here — to this day, my friends at Woodleigh are the only people I can really discuss camel behaviour with ad nauseam and know that they will understand. They dote on them as much as I do and are virtual slaves to their every whim. Dookie, Bub, Zelly and Goliath had landed on their feet. This was their new home, and they immediately took over.

Rick arrived a few days later, all speedy and bouncy and uncontrollable from his dealings with the world outside. He had been hanging out of helicopters in Borneo this time. He told me that when he went to have the car fixed in Carnarvon the day before, the garage mechanic said, ‘Hey, have you heard what’s happened to your girlfriend? Her camel’s sick and she’ll be here in mid-November.’

Jan and David offered to truck the camels to a spot just half a dozen miles from the ocean. That was fine with me — I was no purist. Besides it was hot. I tied the camels down this time, leaving Goliath to squeeze in last. He leapt in without any trouble. He wasn’t about to see his milk supply carted off.

I was dropped off with the camels. Jan and David promised to come and pick us up in a week. I saddled up and rode those last miles, filled with apprehension. I didn’t want this trip to end. I wanted to head back to Alice, or the Canning, or anywhere. I liked doing this. I enjoyed it. I was even reasonably good at it. I had visions of myself spending the rest of my life as a tinker, wandering around the desert with a herd of dromedaries behind me. And I loved my camels. The thought of leaving them was unbearable. And I didn’t want Rick waiting for me at the ocean either. I wanted to be alone for that bit. I asked him not to take photos at least. He got that petulant thwarted look. Oh well, I smiled and thought wryly to myself, as it was in the beginning so shall it be in the end. It wasn’t all that important. Poetic justice really.

And now I could see the afternoon sun glinting on the Indian Ocean behind the last dune. The camels could smell it and were jumpy as hell. And here I was at the end of my trip, with everything just as fuzzy and unreal as the beginning. It was easier for me to see myself in Rick’s lens, riding down to the beach in that clichéd sunset, just as it was easier for me to stand with my friends and wave goodbye to the loopy woman with the camels, the itching smell of the dust around us, and in our eyes the fear that we had left so much unsaid. There was an unpronounceable joy and an aching sadness to it. It had all happened too suddenly. I didn’t believe this was the end at all. There must be some mistake. Someone had just robbed me of a couple of months in there somewhere. There was not so much an anticlimactic quality about the arrival at the ocean, as the overwhelming feeling that I had somehow misplaced the penultimate scene.

And I rode down that stunningly, gloriously fantastic Pleistocene coastline with the fat sun bulging on to a flat horizon and all I could muster was a sense of it all having finished too abruptly, so that I couldn’t get tabs on the fact that it was over, that it would probably be years before I’d see my beloved camels and desert again. And there was no time to prepare myself for the series of shock-waves. I went numb.

The camels were thunderstruck at the sight of that ocean. They had never seen so much water. Globs of foam raced up the beach and tickled their feet so that they jumped along on all fours — Bub nearly sent me flying. They would stop, turn to stare at it, leap sideways, look at one another with their noses all pointed and ridiculous, then stare at it again, then leap forward again. They all huddled together in a jittery confusion of ropes. Goliath went straight in for a swim. He had not yet learnt what caution was.