Just a moment later I heard a tremendously loud whoosh, then a dull thud. I took a moment to glance crazily over my shoulder, having no idea what I would see. Somewhere, way back in the bush, something was burning. A huge cloud of black smoke, bending a little towards me because of the breeze, was rising quickly in the sky. The plane was behind it, banking sharply and climbing, looking perfectly intact. With a bound of excitement I realised what had happened. The plane had caught the helicopter on the ground, a true sitting duck. The chopper wouldn't have had a chance. It was a wonderful unexpected score.
I ran and ran as the plane banked away and disappeared into the distance. I ran for another ten minutes. In all that time I heard no more human sounds. I thought I was safe, that the attack on the helicopter had stopped my pursuers. Finally the point came where I had to stop, no matter who might be following. My lungs had taken on their own life and were rasping and groaning, desperate for air. My legs were cramping up and my knee felt like it was full of fragments of bone. Looking down I was shocked to see how swollen it was. I slowed to a walk, staggered over to a tree and fell on the ground behind it, hoping it would hide me. I lay there grunting. My stomach was cramping up again and I couldn't get enough breath. I really thought this time I was going to die, and die in agony.
But as the minutes passed and no soldiers came I started to recover a little. It was a sweet feeling. I had survived. I had no food or drink, ray body was wrecked, I'd lost my friends but, for the moment, I had survived.
Sixteen
Hunger's a funny thing. It goes in stages. First you're so hungry you think you'll faint. Your stomach is one huge empty refrigerator: the light's on, the door's open, but there's nothing in it. Then that stage passes and it gets better. You don't think about food nearly as much, and the idea of food actually makes you a bit sick. You can go on for quite a while when you're in that stage.
I kept walking for a long time, avoiding any clear spaces, any roads or fire trails. I stuck to the thickest bush, trying to stay invisible, not just to anyone on the ground but to people in the sky too. It was extra tiring, having to concentrate so hard all the time.
When you're lost in the bush you're meant to go back to your last-known point and start again. I'd had that drummed into me often enough. I couldn't do it though, because I didn't really have a last-known point. Or if I did, it was the wharf at Cobbler's Bay. I could have gone back there, but would they have lent me a map and a compass? I didn't think so.
I just kept walking, though my walk soon became a limp—eventually a very slow one indeed. I was looking for any place I could recognise. I'd arranged to meet the others' at a river crossing on Baloney Creek, on a logging track that came off the main Cobbler's Bay road. It was a good fishing spot that a lot of Wirrawee people knew about, but now I didn't have a clue where either the creek or the road might be. I crossed so many creeks as the day went on, some of them quite large', but they didn't have little signs telling me their names.
When the sun got higher I crept into a spot under a bank, shaded by a creeper, and had a sleep. It was a warm sun for winter; seemed like we'd had a lot of warm winters the last few years. The hard walking had made me uncomfortably hot and sticky but I'd rather have had that than rain and cold winds.
I slept only half an hour but I lay there a lot longer, too tired to move. When I did move it was only to slide back into the sun, as it got cold too quickly in the shade. I propped myself against a tree and sat! looking in frustration at my swollen knee. Apart from soaking my hanky in cold water and tying it on, there wasn't much I could do. I wished I had some Aboriginal friends: they would have found a bush remedy in the nearest tree and fixed me up in no time. Or they might have had a packet of Panadol in their pocket. I would have settled for either.
I tried to walk on but letting my knee get cold had been its kiss of death: it just wouldn't function at all. I started to realise that it might be better to spend the night there. It wasn't a very interesting place, or an attractive one, but it would do. I put my little remaining energy into making myself comfortable. I used a sharp rock to gouge out a hollow that I could lie in, and collected a heap of creeper that I could crawl under for a bit of warmth. I don't know what kind of creeper it was, but there was plenty of it around, and I could pull it down from the trees fairly easily. The trees were probably grateful—a lot of them looked like they were close to choking with the stuff. I just hoped I wasn't allergic to it.
There was a creek flowing fast about a hundred metres away, so I waddled over there and had a drink. Growing in it was some green stuff that we'd always called water lettuce at home. It looked harmless so I ate a few leaves, deciding that if I didn't die of it during the night I'd try a bit more in the morning. It didn't have much flavour: it tasted like lettuce that had been soaked in water so long the flavour had been leeched out of it, which is probably exactly what it was.
Already it was getting dark; no daylight saving here. I went back to my bush bed and sat on the pile of creeper, thinking deep thoughts about life, and trying not to get depressed. "You have so much to be proud of," I lectured myself. "You've destroyed a huge container ship, and probably the jetty as well, judging by the size of the explosion. You wiped out one helicopter and indirectly accounted for another. I'll bet the plane was sent to check out the blast at Cobbler's, and it was because of you the chopper was sitting on the ground. So that was a bonus. You've clone more fighting than anyone could have thought or hoped or expected. You shouldn't feel so bad."
But none of that stopped me sinking slowly but surely into depression. I missed everyone so much. Homer, with his strength and leadership and planning; Fi, with her courage and grace; Kevin, with the new energy he'd brought to our little group; Robyn with her wisdom and goodness; Lee with his sexy body..."Whoops, where did that come from?" I wondered. I thought I was off Lee for life. Still, he was a good looking guy...
Most of all, though, I missed my mum and dad. Deep down inside, Ellie, the tough jungle fighter, was a baby, a five-year-old wanting to be tucked into bed, read a story, kissed good night. The nicest times I'd had with Dad when I was little was when he read me bedtime stories. He'd lie on the bed and start a book, then fall asleep beside me, more often than not. Of course, we worked together on the farm a lot, but he always seemed stressed then. If a calf got out of the cattle yards or a dog scattered a mob of sheep or it rained during shearing he'd get so mad. There'd be a flood of swear words; he'd be red in the face and cursing the stock and the dog and the government and the whole farming industry and the heavens above, and me too if I was stupid enough to get in the way. Then Mum would upset me sometimes by telling me how worried she was about his blood pressure and how his father had dropped dead in the middle of changing a tyre on a tractor, at the age of forty-five, and she was scared Dad would go the same way. I never really wanted her to talk to me about things like that—and yet I sort of liked it in a way. I felt like an adult, like we were talking on equal terms.
It's one good thing about being an only child, I guess. Your parents do treat you like you're on the same level. Sometimes, anyway. Sometimes Dad treated me like I really was five years old. Once I left the gate on Cooper's (that's our biggest paddock) open, and the joined ewes that were in there wandered into One Tree (another paddock) and got mixed up with the unjoined ewes. Dad went birko that time. I thought he was going to hit me. Mum had to get between us, to save me. I don't blame him; it was an extremely dumb thing to do, but he always acted like he'd never made a mistake in his life. After all, it wasn't me who sprayed Round-up on Mum's raspberries when she wanted them given some fertiliser.
Sometime in their marriage, Mum decided that she would stay sane by not getting caught up in Dad's moods. She did all the things that farmers' wives do in our part of the world—in fact she did them better than most—but she didn't give the impression that there was nothing else in her life, the way Mrs. Mackenzie and Mrs. Brogan did. Mum seemed able to step away from it all. She often look
ed a bit amused by the things she found herself doing. When Mrs. Mackenzie won the jam section at the Show for instance, she'd get very excited and talk about it for weeks. When Mum won the Best Sponge Cake she just gave a little sly smile and didn't say anything in public. But when we got home she'd laugh and celebrate. One year she even danced me around the kitchen.
She had mixed feelings about it all; I guess that's what it boils down to. Maybe it was to do with her being a city girl originally. Her father was an accountant and she'd never been out of the city in her life, until a friend talked her into going to the' Motteram B & S. The friend had a ute, and they took that because they thought it would look more rural. Some time during the B & S, Dad, who must have been legless, staggered out of the hall looking for a place to sleep. Of course he never admitted to being legless; he said he'd had a long hard day marking lambs. Anyway, he curled up in the back of Mum's friend's ute, under the tarp, and had a good nap. When he woke up it was ten o'clock in the morning and he was still in the ute, 300 k's from Motteram and doing 100 k's an hour. He had to bang on the back of the window to get the girls' attention—it was the first they knew that they had a passenger. I can imagine the shock when they heard the banging and turned around to see a pair of bloodshot eyes staring at them through the glass.
Four months later they were married. Dad was twenty-three; Mum was three weeks away from her nineteenth birthday.
I didn't arrive till eight years later. I think they had a bit of trouble having me, but I never asked them about that. There are some things about your parents you really don't want to know.
From the first I loved the land. I don't know whether Dad wanted a son—most places around Wirrawee are run by men, and handed on from father to son—but he never gave me any sign of that. One time when a bloke at the Wirrawee Saleyards was talking to us he said to Dad, right in front of me, "If I had daughters I wouldn't let them do stockwork." Dad just looked at me for a minute while I waited to see what he would say. Finally he said, "I don't know what I'd do without her." I went red with pleasure. It was the best compliment he ever paid me. I was nine years old.
I'm not saving I enjoyed everything about my life. When Dad was in one of his moods it was no fun being at home. I didn't like some of the jobs, like mulesing— well, you'd have to be sick to like that. But I also didn't like feeding poddies on cold mornings, chopping kindling and lighting the Aga, putting the dogs back on their chains after they'd been for a run, finding mice in my bed during mouse plagues, and finding spiders in my gum boots a few minutes after I'd put them on.
The best time of the year was definitely shearing. We only had a small shed, two stands, and as the economy got worse Dad did a lot of the shearing himself. It was more fun when contractors came in, but I didn't mind either way. As soon as I was old enough I became the roustabout. That was a big moment in my life, being able to do that. Another big moment was being strong enough to throw a fleece onto the table for the classer. Again, Dad had been doing his own classing lately. It was something I wanted to learn; I'd been planning to do a course when I finished school.
I loved the activity in the shearing shed. The sheep milling in the pens. The dogs lying in the shadows panting, their bright eyes watching the sheep, hoping they'd be called up again to run across their backs and shift them to the next yard or back to the paddock. I loved the oily feel of the classing table, the soft whiteness of the fleeces, the quiet bleating of the waiting sheep. I was proud to see our bales, with our brands on them, on the back of a truck heading for the sales. I knew they were going halfway around the world to be made into wonderful warm clothes that would be worn by city-people, people I'd never meet. Even the really 'hardbitten farmers, the ones you'd think had as much poetry in them as a sedimentary rock, got a bit emotional about shearing. Dad used to look at photos of models wearing wool, in Mum's fashion magazines, with a kind of wonder in his face, like he could hardly believe that our great heavy fleeces could travel so far and be turned into things of such beauty. It was a long way from Wirrawee to Paris and Rome and Tokyo.
But I don't want to give the impression that Dad was a rural redneck, like some of the men in our district. When Mum decided she wanted to do things that would extend her mind, he backed her all the way. She did a course in Art Appreciation, then one in Medieval History, then one in Mandarin Chinese. And she joined a public speaking group in town. Dad was really proud of her and boasted to everyone about how smart she was. Some farmers didn't like their wives going to town more than once a week. When Mrs. Salter got offered a job as a part-time debt counsellor with Community Services her husband wouldn't let her take it. So it was pretty gutsy of my dad to stand up in front of his mates and take their jokes about his feminist wife.
I have to admit, we are a few decades behind in Wirrawee sometimes.
But despite all that, Mum was happiest in her kitchen. It was the warm heart of our house, and I think she felt comfortable in it. It was her territory and she was in control. She was a good cook, a creative one, who never followed a recipe exactly. She'd add a touch of basil here, a dash of Tabasco there, and a large swig of wine just about every time. Somehow it always seemed to work out. I can't remember any disasters, except when she sprinkled salt instead of castor sugar on my twelfth birthday cake. She was so good in the kitchen that she intimidated me a bit; I kept to the simplest cooking: scrambled eggs, lamb chops, pasta, anzac biscuits.
There was never much doubt in my mind that I'd run the farm one day. We never talked about it, but I think we took it for granted. All I worried about was how I'd get Dad to give it up without him hanging round for twenty years afterwards telling me what to do.
All of that seemed like a movie to me that night, though, lying under my mat of creepers, waiting for the long lonely hours to tick away. I could call up these images of life as it used to be, but they seemed to be things that happened to other people, happy-looking people in an artificial world, on a big screen. It seemed unreal. I cried myself to sleep, but it wasn't much of a sleep anyway. I was just lonely and scared and lost, and the morning seemed a long way away.
Seventeen
In the morning the hunger had come back. I felt dizzy and light-headed. When I sat up I thought I would faint. I ached all over: my knee was bad, but it was just one of many pains, mostly from sleeping on a cold uncomfortable bed.
But I was still terrified of being tracked and caught, so I made myself get up. I hobbled into the clearing and looked up at the hills. I'd worked out my tactics as I'd lain there in the dark—I had to get to the highest point and see where I was. Once I knew where I was, I could get to where I was going, if that makes sense.
Of course I now had the extra worry of not knowing if the others would be there. They could have been captured or killed, or they could have given up and gone. Stupidly we hadn't made all the alternative arrangements we normally made for a rendezvous; I suppose we'd thought Homer and I would swim straight to the creek and wade up it to meet Robyn and the rest. We hadn't counted on all the distractions. Plus there'd been so many things to think about, and we'd done everything in such a rush.
The people who kept popping up in my mind were Burke and Wills, from the history books. They'd struggled back to Cooper's Creek, sick and starving after crossing the continent, and found their support party had given up and left seven hours before. That had been a death sentence for Burke and his mate. I was scared I might follow their example.
I kept hobbling round till my body was in some sort of working order. The sun still wasn't up, which meant that the ground was very cold, and that made it even harder to get myself going. Eventually I shoved my arms into my armpits and, hugging myself to try to get warm, I set off, head down, eyes half closed against the cruel sharp breeze.
Once I got started it wasn't too bad for a while. The hunger pains left me again and the slope wasn't too steep. It was annoying having to keep a lookout as well as walk; I hoped that I'd hear any soldiers before they heard me, but I couldn'
t count' on that. Navigation wasn't such a problem: I knew that as long as I went uphill it had to be the right direction.