Chapter 6. Returning Empty Handed; and Melting Into The Night
Eight days after Johns went missing McCullock suggested Sayd should walk out and try for a kangaroo. He was worried about the boy; Will Johns had been like a second uncle to him and the loss had shaken him badly. Their hunting arrangement was the only acceptable means of letting him get away from the place.
Also, as far as the miner was concerned, some fresh kangaroo steaks would be highly welcome, there being a limited number of ways to serve dried salt meat, camp pie and tinned bully beef. Later, when he could muster a bit of enthusiasm, they would pick up Twofoot and Walkabout and drive out from Unka to look for a stray bullock.
Sayd welcomed the treat and was soon on his way. As always he went via Great Northern, except this time he stayed near the ranges – where the showers had brought on some fresh eight-day grass. Disappointingly, all he’d seen after two hour’s steady marching were a couple of kangaroos in the distance. Both were on the move and too far away for a shot.
He kept going, not wanting to return empty-handed, and eventually found himself near the end of the Jervois escarpments. This was a good deal farther than he’d ventured before, so his arrival home would be well after dark.
Nightfall and darkness were of little concern to the lad, however, and neither would McCullock be immediately worried. Sayd knew his hunting area backwards and was a true child of the bush: practical in thought and totally lacking in superstition.
From the ranges he turned eastward and, at the station track, toward home – again without sighting any game. Sunset found him six kilometres short of his goal, though a fat yellow moon on the horizon promised plenty of light to see by.
Eventually Sayd came to a lightning-blazed ghost gum, an ancient termite-hollowed tree struggling to survive in the rocky ground by the track. From there the Lucy/Jervois road went west a kilometre or so to negotiate some rough little hills. It only turned south again after crossing the Jervois line of lode, so following it any farther would have taken him out of his way.
Instead Sayd used a short cut going more directly to the house. The tree was his marker, where he came onto the track when outward bound and where he departed it on returning.
The short cut went via a shallow valley, at the end of which was a ridge with a steep bouldery back slope. Beyond there the country opened onto the eastern sides of Great Northern and the Reward Hill pinnacle.
After descending the ridge the going was easy and Sayd was able to stride along at a good pace. On drawing closer to Great Northern’s broad eastern flank the old spoil heaps slowly came into view, their moonlit shapes all silhouetted against the darker sky, high on his right hand quarter.
The air was still and the night was quiet. All he could hear as he walked along was the fall of his boots on the ground and the occasional crunch of twigs and dry leaves. Then, just as he drew abreast of an isolated pit, a sudden faint clittering reached his ears.
Sayd stopped, eyes seeking detail in the moonlight, his ears straining to hear. It had sounded like a pebble trickling down a rock face, yet all was silent again. Perhaps a stone had been dislodged by a wallaby on Reward Hill, he thought; yet the noise had seemed closer.
Gradually he became aware of something near the edge of the pit, some ten or twelve metres from where he was standing. At first Sayd thought it was a boulder, but he’d no recollection of one being there. And slowly, as he continued to stare, the object resolved itself into a dark, crouching figure.
Somehow the figure sensed it had been recognised. Without a sound it unfolded upward and for a couple of seconds just stood there. Then it moved toward him.
Sayd’s immobility became terrified paralysis. Black skin and white paint; emu feather boots. A Kadaitcha Man!
It stopped about four metres from him, utterly silent. After a moment it whispered: “Pidjay weiye.” (Come here, little boy).
Sayd dropped the rifle and ran like he’d never run before.
When he gasped out his terror to McCullock the old miner had laughed. “Your eyes were playing tricks in the dark,” he said as Sayd stumbled to the sanctuary of his bed.
He followed Sayd to his corner. “—or you imagined it. Kadaitchas don’t talk to uninitiated boys. So what happened to the rifle?”
“I dro ... dropped it ... when I ra ... ran,” the lad sobbed from under his blanket.
The next morning McCullock went out to recover his gun.
As expected there were no tracks other than Sayd’s – and the way his eyes were going he was flat out seeing even those except in the softer patches. He picked up the old rifle; apart from a couple more scars it looked undamaged.
He then looked in the trench. And when he finally arrived back at the house he was blind with anger.
Sayd saw him coming and kept out of sight, frightened the gun was broken. But fright turned to astonishment when McCullock stormed inside and set about smashing Johns’ few possessions. Suddenly the miner came out again with his partner’s unmade bedding and threw it onto the outside fire.
Sayd rescued it as soon as McCullock went inside again. The fire had burned down and the tarp had smothered what little flames were left, so it only suffered a few scorch marks.
Eventually he mustered enough courage to enquire what was wrong. The answer was almost indecipherable through the rage and profanity, but if he was to understand correctly, Johns had come back and stolen the gold.
This assumption was not correct, however, and neither was anything else McCullock now believed about the affair. Other events had occurred in connection with the treasure, both prior to the night of the ironstone gourd and subsequent to it – at both the house and Great Northern. Some he neither knew of nor suspected; others McCullock could never have known.
Crucial among the former was his not being entirely right about Wilbur Johns, for in the weeks prior to his disappearance Johns, too, had been assailed by doubts.
His doubts were mostly to do with McCullock’s possible intentions, though initially he’d been able to think his concerns through in a rational manner and refute them.
The nagging worries persisted, however, and when magnified by rum these doubts became suspicions… Then certainties.
McCullock had been conscious of Johns’ inner turmoil but never imagined the fellow would be watching him. Yet Johns had been doing just that – and saw what he believed were changes in McCullock’s behaviour, such as sudden over-friendliness and excess generosity with his rum.
Of far greater significance, however, was the fact that Johns had seen McCullock transfer the gold to the ironstone, feigning a drunken snore while watching via a nail hole in the corrugated iron wall. And when McCullock set forth into the cloud-broken moonlight it was with no idea whatever that his partner might be coming along behind.
He followed McCullock like a second shadow and observed everything McCullock did, from the time he departed the house to the moment he climbed from the trench – at which point Johns quietly retreated.
Yet even more crucially (and totally unbeknown to either), a third figure had been present that night. It had watched the house for weeks; a shadow by day, at night the night itself – a naked black form in red ochre paint, either motionless as a rock or moving like a wraith. And when it moved its emu-feathered feet made neither sound nor track.
For more than an hour after the others had departed Great Northern it kept vigil there, silent and still. Then it went to the pit with a dry mulga stick and began digging…
Johns arrived back at the house with plenty of time to lie down and feign sleep in readiness for McCullock’s return, still with enough rum in his system to torment his mind and corrupt his thoughts. He was angry at McCullock’s actions, certain as to his intentions and sickened by the apparent collapse of his partner’s integrity. Intermixed with all this were tortuous scenarios of his own, each cunning in purpose and devious of intent, and each in his own mind justifiable.
An hour later, when certain McCullock
was asleep, Johns crept out again. He took a shovel and bag from the lean-to then set off across the Unka Creek, his plan being to empty the gourd and move its gold to a place of his own choosing.
By this time the clouds had closed ranks and the night was much darker. Over the ranges a storm was brewing.
Lightning flashes strobed the scene. Now and then the moon would shine through a break.
Half way to his goal Johns was struck by a sudden wind-front from the storm. Violent gusts buffeted him as he tramped across Reward Hill’s low eastern footing, thunder and wind totally masking the sound of his boots on the stony ground.
As he drew closer the moon suddenly burst through the clouds. It lit up the area like a beacon.
Johns stopped. Someone was in the pit!
The shadowy figure stood up with its back to him then bent down again, digging where McCullock had buried the gourd!
In a sudden blaze of anger Johns dropped the bag and rushed at the unexpected thief, shovel swinging back ready to strike.
The Kadaitcha heard nothing until the miner began his headlong rush. Startled, it looked around, recognised the intent, grabbed a grapefruit-sized rock and hurled it – unerringly – all in the one smooth movement, just as the shovel commenced its deadly arc.
The rock smashed Johns’ forehead without him knowing it existed; the shovel sailed by and went clattering to the ground.
The figure leapt from the pit. Without hesitating it heaved the lifeless form over its shoulder and strode purposefully away.
Up past the old diggings it went; over the low gravelly summit to the western side of the Great Northern rise. And there, in a single isolated trench, within a thicket of scraggy little half dead cassia shrubs, Wilbur Sebastian Johns was unceremoniously laid to rest.
The pit harked from Jervois’ very earliest days, a prospecting trench some three metres long and now all but forgotten. And despite decades of storm wash and animals scratching about it was still more than a metre deep.
Never could those early prospectors have imagined they were digging a colleague’s grave.
Johns’ shovel was then retrieved, following which his body was covered with rubble from the trench’s weathered-down spoil heaps. A dead cassia bush was crushed in to hide the work, after which a generous helping of leaf litter was scattered over the disturbed areas at the sides.
Digging in the ironstone’s trench was then resumed,
this time with the shovel. But McCullock had done a thorough job and by the time the boulder was finally cleared and lifted from the pit the first tinges of daylight were beginning to show on the eastern horizon.
At that point the Kadaitcha seemed to hesitate. Suddenly it jumped into the pit again and started excavating a fresh hole at the opposite end. When completed the gourd was lifted down and rolled into this new hole, then covered with rubble. McCullock’s end was backfilled as well, following which the whole thing was returned to its earlier appearance.
By this time the storm had blown-out and moved east, but an outriding cloud began sprinkling the area briefly. It left the ground damp and the bottom of the trench looking relatively undisturbed. A handful of dead turkeybush leaves and wisps of dry grass completed the illusion.
With the eastern sky lightening the Kadaitcha checked its work. Then it noticed the hessian bag Johns had dropped and went over to collect it. On returning it picked up the shovel, put the morning star to its back and set off toward the ranges.
There it followed euro* and wallaby paths up the first escarpment. The shovel and Johns’ wheat bag were hidden in a low-roofed cave near the top; down in the valley beyond it the Kadaitcha disappeared into the pre-dawn shadows.
* Hills kangaroo
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TIMES RECENT