The Trapper’s Camp
BONYFOLLOWEDTHEcreek bank to the dune blocking it at the shore of Lake Otway, and on his walking over the ramparts of blown sand the Lake inall its mystic colour stretched before him.
The continuance of the creek beyond the sandbar and out into the bed of the Lake was plain enough, the Channel being forty yards wide and said to be one hundred yards in length.
The buildings of the out-station were blobs of red-and-white atop the red bluff, and much nearer, on the opposite shore, was the white patch ofBarby’s tent set up in the meagre shade cast by an ancient gum. Everywhere in the shallows extending from both sides of the Channel, ducks were busy, but the herons and other waders fished with such marked indifference as to cause Bony to wonder why they wetted their feet. Flocks of moorhens ran about the dry flats, and galahs sped under the arches of the metallic sky as though to prove to earth-bound men that nothing created by nature has straight lines.
On the wide strip of dry land betweenBarby’s camp and the dwindling water of the Lake, Barby had erected a flimsy fence of wire netting in the form of a very broad V, the point of the V thrust into the wall of a high netted trap about ten by ten feet. Now the netting was lifted off the ground and hooked to the top of the posts, mere sticks hammered into the earth. The rabbits would soon begin their evening journey, from burrows and every inch of shade on the sand dunes and the uplands beyond, to drink at the Lake, and after dark they would be out on the flats in countless numbers. And then Barby would lower the netting, making sure of a wide selvedge on the ground, and in their efforts to return to their burrows and feeding grounds, the rabbits would drive to the point of the V, pass through a hole at the point and so into the great trap.
Barby was cooking at his fire. Close by the tent was the utility, the tailboard beingBarby’s table, and a wooden case his chair. Under the vehicle were his three dogs, who on sighting Bony ran excitedly to meet him. The black-and-white cats came from somewhere to add their welcome, and the galah, who had perched on the tent ridge-pole, became so flurried it forgot to fly and slid down the canvas to ‘flop’ on the ground and emit screams of injured dignity.
“Day, there!”Barby shouted long before Bony drew near.“Seen you coming, so I’ve boiled the billy. How’s things?”
There being nothing to shout unnecessarily, Bony deferred an acknowledgement of welcome until he stood watching the trapper layinga bread dough in a bed of hot white ash.
“Thought I would put in a night with you,” he said. “How is the fur coming?”
“Staying the night! Good on you. Fur’s coming in like a ruddy flood. Two thousand pelts last night. Could have got five thousand if Red had been with me. You sighted him at all?”
“No.”
“Give us a bit of a hand in the morning?” Barby asked, anxiously. “Tea’s in the billy. Sugar and pannikins on the table.”
“I could lend a hand for a couple of hours,” Bony said.
He filled a pannikin, added a morsel of sugar. The dogs subsided. The cats daintily rubbed against his legs. The galah waddled over the ground on its clumsy pigeon-toed feet, tumbled on its back and looked up at him with hard bright eyes.
Barby covered his bread dough with the ash, plus an addition of tiny red coals, careful to spread the heat. Because his face had been darkened by the sun his eyes were inconspicuous, but they were no less quick, no less alert.
“Goin’ to be even hotter tomorrow, by the look of that sun,” he remarked. “Hope it keeps up. Hotter she is the thirstier the rabbits.”
“Did you see the birds go?”
Barby nodded.
“You don’t see a sight like that down in the stinking cities,” he said with emphasis.“Or that.”
Bony followed the direction of his out-flung hand and witnessed a rabbitunhesitantly come running from the dunes, its normal timidity vanquished by the onslaught of thirst. It followed a straight line to the truck, stopped in its shadow for a moment, moved on and over the foreleg of one of the dogs. The dog lifted its upper lip in a sneer of disdain and continued panting. It did snap at a fly. The rabbit ran on to the flat, seeking the water it must drink or perish.
“Why in hell I own dogs I don’t know. Fat lot of use, ain’t they? Well, I’ll knock up a stew for dinner.”
“What can I do?” asked Bony.
“Do! Nothing, just yabber. How’s things on the other shore?”
“Everyone is a little moody.”
“Watchin’ each other, eh?”
“And the Lake.”
The galah determinedly tried to detach tabs from Bony’s riding boots… until a flock of galahs whirled overhead, when it twisted its head to look up at them. Barby shouted to Bony to ‘grab him’, but Bony was too late. The bird took wing and sped upward to join his kind.
“Now we’ll see something, I hope,” Barby predicted. “But one day he won’t be coming home.”
Barby’sbird joined the flock, which proceeded to put on a turn of aerobatics for the benefit of the stranger. The stranger could not be distinguished, for its performance was as flawless. They flew about the camp tree, shrieking at each other and the watchers, and presently there emerged from the general cacophony a sepulchral voice:
“Olefool! Olefool!”
The same line was repeated several times, when the entire flock converged upon one member. The movement revealed the Ishmael, who, uttering a wildshriek, headed for the camp and arrived fast, to land on the cabin of the truck, skate off to fly in a semicircle toBarby’s feet, skid to the ground and then swear with extraordinary fluency.
“That’ll be enough out of you for one day, my lad,” Barby said, severely. “Where you got that Australian language, I don’t know. You never got it off me.”
Taking up the bird, he locked it in the netted cage and, continuing to glare like the parent of an unruly child at a party, proceeded with the preparation of the stew, saying not a word until a vast shadow moved over the camp. The caged bird muttered threats, but not at the passing eagle.
“Plenty of them about,” Barby told Bony. “Ordinary times they keep to their own beats. Now they’re here in thousands.” The eagle, golden of neck and wedge-shaped tail, swung out over the flats, and the trapper carried forward the argument whether eagles do greater good by killing rabbits than the reputed destruction of young lambs.
The sun went down when the stew-pot was simmering, and Barby lifted from the ashes the feather-light loaf of baking-powder bread. The rabbits were leaving the uplands, crossing the dunes like drops of dark-brown ink, passing the camp on either side, taking no fright of the dogs and the cats, and unnoticed by them. An uncountable host was beginning to converge on Lake Otway.
Barby fed his dogs on kangaroo meat and filled their drinking dish. The cats received smaller pieces of meat, and he put a handful of sunflower seeds on a plate with damper crusts and passed it to the galah. The galah promptly emptied his dinner on the floor of the cage and threw the plate away.
Night appeared… stepping from the Lake. Night draped its garments over the surrounding flats, pulled down the red dunes, reached for the slopes of the uplands. The pestiferous flies went home, and the men ate at peace with themselves and with this land which never has been and never will be the servant of man.
Barby went to work on one of the wings of the fence-V, and Bony attended to the other, lowering the netting, making sure the selvedge lay flat. The hole at the apex of the V inside the great trap was examined by Barby. The stars were hazy, and the silence was hot.
Afterwards they squatted on their heels either side the camp fire, where Barby drew at his pipe and Bony smoked cigarettes and betrayed his maternal ancestry by constantly pushing together burning ends of wood.
“I looked into that discarded tank at Johnson’s,” he said. “D’youhappento know what is in it?”
“I do. Shags. Millions of ’em.”
“How do you think they died there?” prompted Bony.
“Don’t know. No one does. It happened after the flood came down, when the Lake was pretty full, so therewas miles of water for them birds to swim in.”
“How soon after the floods arrived?” pressed Bony as Barby appeared to be thinking, on something quite different.
“How soon? It must be about three months after the Lake filled up that I was at Johnson’s, and the shags were in that tank then and ponging high.”
“Although the tank was discarded, it could have held rainwater?”
“That tank wasn’t discarded,” Barby said. “She wastook there from the River to make an extra reservoir tank, but before the stand could be built the flood was coming, and nothing was done about it.
“Martyr and meand Ray Gillen was deciding about them shags one night. Just after the flood entered Lake Otway it rainedmore’n five inches in one hit. That was the first rain for fifteen months, and the last decent rain we’ve had. It must have put five inches into that tank.
“The shags, of course, are flying round. You know how they get wet and sit on fence posts and up in dead trees, droopin’ their wings to dry off. There’s water then in a bit of lake down the creek, too, and those birds was flying from one to the other. One of ’emsits on the tank to dry off, and he could’ve seen a tadpole in the rainwater and went down for it. Then there isn’t flying-room for him to get up, and while he’s flopping round, a cobber sees him and went in, too. Then the others followed on to get trapped in the same way.”
“It could have been like that,” Bony conceded, doubtfully.
“Never heard of a better argument to explain it.”
One of the cats jumped toBarby’s shoulder, settled there and purred like an engine. Foxes barked near and distant. The faint sound of rabbits passing by could be heard when the men were silent. Presently Bony asked:
“D’youthinkMartyr is careless with guns?”
“Didn’t oughtto be,” replied Barby.“Been handling guns since he was three and a bit. Why?”
“It appears he was cleaning a shot-gun late last night and it was accidentally discharged.”
“What time last night?”
“About twenty minutes after ten.” Bony related the details. “There’s an inaccuracy in Martyr’s story. He said that the shot went downwards in the floor, but there’s a hole in the roof which wasn’t there in the afternoon. The situation of the hole in the roof is peculiar. When the gun was discharged it must have been pointing upwards at the ceiling in Joan Fowler’s room.”
“Perhaps the gun was pointing at someone, and someone else knocked the barrel up just in time.”
“If it was like that, George, then the two women and Martyr are hanging well together. There was no one else in the house.”
“And Ma yelled and screamed, and had to be slapped down.”
“We could hear the slaps.” Bony repeated the talk in the men’s dining-room at the morning smoko, adding: “It appeared to me that Lester, for preference, thought one of the women might be in the kitchen and wanted her to know that the tale of the accidental gun discharge wasn’t believed.”
“Could be that way,” agreed Barby. “Lester’s more cunning than the other two added up. Born and reared in this part of the country. Like me, the other two wasn’t. Whered’you reckon Harry Carney could have planted the money he took from Gillen’s case?”
The tacked-on question astonished Bony, but gave him an instrument to use in the near future.
“Under that load of cormorants,” he replied, chuckling.
“By heck, you may be right at that, Bony. Fancy burrowing down among allthem birds to plant a wad of money. Imagine the pong while he was doing it. Well, we’d better think of some shut-eye, for we’re due to rise at sparrow-chirp. I can lend you a wool-pack to lie on.”
Bony slept on the wool-pack until an hour before dawn, when Barby beat him to the bell by announcing breakfast consisting of kangaroo steak, damper bread and coffee.
Soon after the meal, the Lake began drawing Night down from the upland ridges, and Bony sat with Barby on a low dune providing a clear view of the latter’s trapping plan. A little wind came from the north, and even after all the sunless hours it was hot.
The rabbits that had been drinking when the netted arms of the V were lowered had, of course, found their way back to the shore dunes blocked by the fence, and taking the course of least opposition had arrived at the point of the V. Inside the trap all the ground was covered with them, and at each corner living rodents sought freedom by standing on a heap of suffocated rabbits.
Outside the trap the animals were vainly seeking passage to the dunes and, like drops of water trickling from a tap, so they found the hole at the V point and trickled into the trap. Farther out on the flats rabbits ran as though from an enemy, to be slewed by the fence arms and so to run towards the point.
“You’ll see something in a minute,” forecast Barby.
Bony saw the eagles, winging low along the verge of the water. One angled and skimmed the ground, then shot upward: another came on and delayed its swoop until opposite the camp. The rabbit leaped but failed to evade the talons. It screamed when a thousand feet high. Now all along the shore the eagles worked, their wings spanning six to seven feet and as rigid as the wings of a plane until they needed power for the lift. To and fro flew the eagles, and all the rabbits out in the open raced for the dunes and cover, and all the rabbits inside the tips ofBarby’s V raceddunewards, to arrive at the trap.
No eagle missed. Some snatched the victim without touching the ground with a claw; others paddled like the pelicans for a yard or two. Some dropped their catch from a height and swooped to retake the victim before its muscular death-twitching ceased.
“They do that every morning for me,” Barby said.“Good workers, eh?”
“Saves you a lot of rushing about,” agreed Bony.
“They don’t last, though. One rabbit to each eagle and the supply of eagles soon runs short. We’d better get out there and stopthem rabbitsbreakin ’ back.”
The dogs went with them as they circled eventually to walk inwards between the extremities of the fence. The men shouted andhoo-hoo-ed as though droving sheep, but the dogs were blase and useless.
The rabbits crowded into the V point. Many hundreds did manage to break back, and when Barby cursed a bored dog, the animal deigned to grab one and break its neck.
Bony assisted Barby with the skinning, raising his hourly tally to eighty-three. At the end of the third hour, thanks to Barby, they completed this chore with the night’s catch of close on two thousand rabbits. Barby was most appreciative when Bony left him slipping the skins over U-shaped wires to be stuck upright in the sand to dry.