At the Source of Life
SUMMER’S FIRST heat-wave found Dot and Dash at Carr’s Tank, twenty-two miles south of Range Hut, and lying at the west foot of the ranges. The tank was a great square earth excavation from which thirty-thousand cubic yards of mullock had been taken by bullock-drawn scoops. The mullock formed a rampart, and through this rampart cement pipes conducted the water from a shallow creek-when water flowed in it-beginning in the hills.
Wholly enclosing tank and banks was a six-wire fence, but so numerous were the kangaroos that hardly one strand of wire remained taut. With no difficulty whatsoever they climbed through the fence to drink at the dam in preference to drinking at the man-made sheep-trough a hundreds yards out, and kept filled by a windmill.
Still farther away was an erection of corrugated iron, hessian bags, and flattened petrol-tins, which served as a kind of house for two stockmen. This sort of house substitute was less in evidence on Windee than on the great majority of Australian stations. There exists an Act that requires the squatter to house his men in enlarged iron boxes, also an Act requiring him to use poison-carts to destroy rabbits. However, since no one lives in the bush with the intention of settling there, but rather to make a cheque and then settle elsewhere, the want of any degree of comfort is a matter of indifference.
The two stockmen and the partners were having an early dinner, since the latter had to be at their places at the dam before sundown. In spite of the terrific heat in the interior of the hut the four men appeared to enjoy eating, seeming hardly conscious of the perspiration that ran from them, brought out by the scalding hot tea drunk from tin pint pannikins. The wind, gusty and hot, rattled the iron sheets nailed to the framework of the structure, and sometimes thickened the atmosphere with fine red dust. Countless flies hummed and settled in eyes and on bare necks and arms. That day the temperature in the shade at Windee was from 102° to 112°. At Carr’s Tank there was no shade much for a distance of fully a mile in any direction.
“Feeling a bit warm, Dot?” queried Ned Swallow, a youthful, lank, red-headed rider.
“Not exactly,” Dot rejoined, helping himself to what purported to be plum duff. “I was jestwonderin ’whar the draught was coming from. Say, Tom!”-to the second rider-“you sure can make plum duff!”
“That’s a better pudding than general,” Tom growled.
“Well, it’sfillin ’, anyway. Try some, Dash?”
“I think not,” Dash said, eyeing it suspiciously.
“Seems as though the outside third of itkinda got stuck on the cloth when you heaved her out, Tom,” Dot observed.
“Yus. I forgot to wet the cloth afore I put her in. Still, it’ll go better cold. She’ll have lost thatslummicky look. Don’t you blokes wait to washup. Me andNed’ll do that.”
“You are very decent, Tom. I’ll roll a cigarette, and Dot and I will adjourn.” Dash went outside and dried his face, neck and arms with a towel. The sun was getting low, and already thousands of galahs whirled about the tank, or strutted on the banks looking like tiny grey-coated soldiers. Around the tank lay a plain covered with fine red dust. One mile away the scrub began. Before the tank was sunk, all that plain bore scrub-trees, but by now the stock converging there daily had eaten or killed them. Across this arid desert drifted an occasional low cloud of red dust, whilst at a point far to the north-west a huge towering red column denoted that the sheep were coming in to drink.
Dash settled himself at the summit of the rampart at that angle which commanded the iron reservoir tanks, windmill, and troughs giving water to two paddocks, with a great sweep of the plain beyond; whilst Dot, at the opposite angle, commanded the shorter stretch of plain bounded by the range.
As a slowly oncoming destroyer sending up a red smoke-screen, a long line of sheep moved across the plain to the dam. Shadows of tank and windmill lengthened with magical rapidity, and the wind became merely a fitful zephyr.
The red dust-screen came ever nearer. Dash could observe the faint white figures of the leaders of the flock of three thousand sheep. On his side Dot could see a similar flock of sheep coming from the other paddock to drink. A mile away three black pin-heads behaved as well-drilled jumping fleas, and between each jump a spurt of dust arose. They were the vanguard of the kangaroos coming leisurely to the dam in fifteen-foot jumps, tireless, wonderfully speedy, infinitely more graceful in action than a racing horse or whippet-dog. At the edge of the scrub numbers of these animals, who had slept and drowsed away the day, were sitting bolt upright watching their leaders, and in twos and threes and fours they bounded out on the plain, so that a few minutes after Dash had seen the first three pinheads he could easily count thirty.
Water! The Spring of Life!
The nearest water lay eighteen miles to the north; the next nearest thirty miles to the west. Between these places the only moisture to be found was in the sap of the trees. In a week or so, when the last of the tiny grass roots were dead, twenty to fifty thousand rabbits would come to water every night with unfailing regularity. Numbers of them even then were drinking at the edges of the square sheet of water in the dam. Others were converging on it in easy stages of a few yards’ run, with pauses to sit up and look around with alert suspicion.
When the sun, still fiercely hot and flaming red, was but four fingers above the horizon, the dust-cloud was within a quarter of a mile of the troughs. Fifty sheep were to be seen moving at its base. Tens of hundreds walked in the cloud in several parallel lines. Dash could hear their plaintive baaing above the scream of the birds, and he observed with never-slackening interest how but one sheep of all that great flock constituted itself the leader. It was an old yet robust ewe. When but a hundred yards from the troughs she broke into a quick amble, followed by those immediately behind her. That seemed to be the point when every following sheep broke from a walk into a run.
A white flood of wool rolled over the ground to the water. The galahs rose from the troughs with a thunderous roar of wings to fly a short distance away and settle like a grey blanket on the expanse of plain. The white flood, reaching the trough, poured around both sides of it and rolled outward as from a centre when the main body of the sheep swelled its volume.
A vast milling, dust-raising, baaing, struggling mass of animals! The level of water in the reservoir tank feeding the trough began gradually to fall. Then from the surging mass one sheep became detached. It was the old ewe leader. She ran back over the way she had come, followed by several others, and then stopped when two hundred yards from the tank, looking back with cunning placidity. In twos and threes, their bellies distended with water, sheep left the mob and joined her, then, with her, to stand a while looking back. Not one ran ahead. And not before all but a few lingerers had drunk their fill did she lead them out across the plain to the scrub and dry grass, the red mounting dust, now rising straight and to a great height, marking their passage.
The army corps of galahs was retreating by battalions to roosting-places in the mulga-trees on the hills. A thunder of hoofs caused Dash to look to his left and observe the second flock of sheep-also led by a single animal-charge in and around the second trough. When they also had gone the sun was set and Dash lay with his . 22 Savage resting in his arms. There were seven kangaroos within point-blank range of his rifle, namely, three hundred yards.
Dash settled down to careful shooting whilst the light held. The cartridges he used costfourpence each, so that he could not afford to miss often. Dot, firing from his. 44 Winchester his own loading cartridges, the cost of which he had carefully worked out at five shillings per hundred, could well afford to take chances; but his weapon was far less deadly beyond two hundred yards than the Savage.
His partner heard him shooting, and sometimes cursing. A quite friendly rivalry existed between them when in the morning they counted their respective bags, after which the merits of their rifles would be argued. The light began to go rapidly, and presently Dash missed for the first time that evening. His following shot also was a miss; and, slipping down behind the rampart, he walked to where a single blanket was folded in its length. Beside it lay a double-barrelled shot-gun of beautiful workmanship, several boxes of BB size cartridges, a billy-can of cold tea, and a hurricane-lamp.
It was his night position. It was situated in a right-angle on the narrow strip of level ground between the bank of the dam and the rampart of mullock. In a similar position in the opposite angle lay Dot. Each of them commanded two sides of the square-shaped tank, and to shoot each other was impossible unless one fired diagonally across the water.
Lighting a cigarette, Dash lay back on the blanket resting his head on his hands. To regard him then was to wonder what form of madness had exiled him from home and country. There was no trace of dissipation on the strong sunburned face, no hint of weakness about the straight mouth and square chin.
His cigarette finished, he sat up and sipped from the blackened billy-can. Above him the sky was blue-black and the stars did not twinkle with so-called tropical brilliance, despite the fact that it was cloudless. The features of the mullock marking his zone of operations were blurred by the general shadow, but those angles of the rampart commanded by Dot still revealed the crevices among the rubble in a soft amber glow. The level summit of Dash’s rampart was clear-cut against the dull pink sheen of the western sky. That skyline would be visible all night long, hence his then position.
A form, soundless in movement, grotesque, almost monstrous, slowly pushed up on that skyline. Dash reached for his shot-gun. The form became still for a moment, then slowly changed from the grotesque to the beautiful, from the monstrous to the lovely, when the kangaroo sat up, his tail resting on the ground balancing him like a third leg, his small but noble head and lifted stiffened ears outlined as a clear-cut silhouette against the darkening sky.
A sharp flash, a roar, and the ’roo lay thrashing in its death agonies.
“Poor devil!” sighed Dash.
From beyond the bank a succession of twin thuds went out as warning to the converging kangaroos, when one or more gave the signal by jumping and bringing their tails down on the earth with a sound like that of a stick beating a dusty carpet.
Dot fired, and Dash heard the wounded ’roo “queex-queex” with pain and anger. Then his attention was taken by the rising figures of two ’roosdirectly opposite him and less than twenty yards distant. He fired twice rapidly, and both animals fell dead. Dash was thankful.
At about eleven o’clock the shooting became less frequent, and Dot at last called out for an armistice. Dash agreed, and lit his lamp. Whereupon each man dispatched his wounded animals with his hunting-knife.
“How many?”Dot asked when the lights revealed both at their respective camps.
“Twenty-nine,” replied Dash without enthusiasm. “What is your tally?”
“Thirty-three,”came the triumphant answer.
After that silence fell once more. The tall partner lay on his side, smoking and thinking. The air was still heated by the roasted earth. The silence became oppressive, more oppressive than the sounds of continuous thunder.
Presently the armistice was called off and hostilities were resumed till dawn.
• • • • •
“Thank heaving, to-day’s the last day of me week’s cooking!” Tom said during breakfast, with tremendous fervour in his drawling voice. “Yours starts to-morrow, Ned. An’ then you can show usyous can cookbetter’n Bony.”
“He wants a lot of beating, does Bony,” the young rider conceded. “I’ve met that bloke beforesomewhercs, but I can’t place ’im. When ’e smiles I nearly get ’im, but not quite. Anyways, ’e can cook, and ’e can break-in ’orses, and ’e can play on a box-leaf. Not a bad sort of a bloke, Bony.”
“Naw. Quiet-like,” Dot agreed.
“Deep,” rumbled Tom.
“Deep as ’ell,” chimed in Ned. “I’ll place ’imone of these days. I know Irunned across ’imsomewheres. Maybe in Queensland; maybe up in the Territory.”
Dash rose from the table and wiped his lips with a handkerchief. Dot rose immediately after, and wiped his with a bare forearm.
“We’ll do thewashin ’-up,” he said to the stockman.
“Good-oh!”
When the washing-up had been done and they went outside to smoke cigarettes in the long shade cast by the hut, they watched the two riders set out in their respective paddocks on jogging horses. The army corps of galahs was mobilizing in continuous battalions about the dam. The crows were strutting suspiciously around the dead kangaroos, whilst high above them several eagles circled with wings as still as those of aeroplanes.
The cigarettes smoked, Dash went over to the ton truck, whilst Pot procured the skinning-knives and steels. Into the truck presently they loaded a dozen ’roosand took them a mile away towards the hills, where they were dumped and Dot fell to skinning them. Dash brought the others to Dot in similar loads, and when all were thus removed from the vicinity of the dam he also fell to with his skinning-knife.
It was not work that an English gentleman would do voluntarily.
By ten o’clock the animals were skinned, for both were practised workers. Back again at the hut, they drank cold tea and smoked another cigarette; after which Dot set to work pegging out the wet skins on a hard clay-pan with short pieces of wire used as nails, whilst his partner mixed and baked a damper and a brownie, and peeled the potatoes in readiness for that evening’s dinner.
For lunch they had cold mutton, bread and jam, and tea. The merciless sun beat down on the iron roof above them, and set all the plain outside dancing in the mirage. The stillness of noonday settled on the world, and the only things that moved were the heat-defying crows and the eagles settled on the heap of carcasses one mile nearer the hills.
Having lunched, they smoked, and slept until four o’clock, when Dash put the leg of mutton in the camp oven and prepared the simple dinner, and Dot went out to take up skins pegged out the day before, and now as hard and dry as boards. Ned came riding home, and, pausing beside Dot, announced triumphantly:
“I remember Bony now. He was a police-tracker at Cunnamulla in ’twenty-one. Got his man, too.”
“You don’t say!” Dot calmly observed.