Gripped By Drought Page 13

  With arms resting on the mantel, for long he looked up at the face he worshipped. Very slowly, as though the act caused agony, he turned the double picture. His head sank on his arms. A curlew in its flight down-river vented its terrible, haunting scream.. He wished he could scream like that ghostly night bird.

  CHAPTER IX

  FUR

  I

  SINCE the War Great Britain has sent to Australia three classes or types of emigrant. By far the biggest class in point of number comprises those who are content to slave all the daylight hours for farmers, with the ambition of ultimately owning their own farms and slaving all the daylight hours for themselves. In point of number the second biggest class comprises those men and women who, having been tricked by immigration propaganda into believing Australia to afford an easy living to all and sundry, stowaway on home-bound ships or write letters to the home papers describing their sad experiences. This class is as useless to Australia as it must have been to Great Britain. The third class, small in number, may be called the aristocracy of the immigration movement. It consists of those men who, having the wanderlust deeply rooted in their hearts, are not satisfied with the narrow confines of farm life, and needs must push into the interior of the country to live the freer life of the station hand, the drover, the prospector, the sandalwood cutter, and the engineer.

  To this last class belonged Tom Mace. He came to Victoria direct from the Army in India. The Ex-Service Migration Association which sponsored him guaranteed him work on a wheat farm, and he had not been on that farm long before he began to wish himself back in the Army. Fortunately, an avenue of escape presented itself in the person of a bushman carrying his swag back to the bush from Melbourne, where he had “gone broke” after the spending of a two-hundred-pound cheque. Said the bushman:

  “Cripes! Fancy working for a cocky! Not me, thank you. I’m on me way back to the stations, where ordinary times a man don’t work until it’s too dark to see.”

  “Let me come with you,” Mace pleaded.

  So Mace left the farm. He asked for the wages due to him, four weeks at thirty shillings a week; and, the farmer demanding a week’s wages in lieu of a week’s notice (to which he was not entitled), Mace told him to keep his money, and dragged his suitcase and two blankets out to his new-found friend who was waiting on the road.

  “Wot are you gonna do with that flash suitcase? You can’t hump that about with you. Here, layout your blankets like this. Now empty out your case. Arrange your shirts and spare clothes like this. Now fold over the blanket edges so, and now roll up hard like this, so that you’ve got a swag. Never mind the towel yet. I got some cord to spare. We tie the roll in two places and join the ties with the towel loose like this, so you can sling the swag over the shoulder, the towel not cutting into it. See? You got a bushman’s swag now. What are we gonna do with the blasted suitcase?”

  “This!” cried Tom Mace, and, taking a run at the suitcase, kicked it over the fence into his late employer’s horse-yard.

  “You’ll do!” the bushman said admiringly. “Now, if you just take notice of what I tell you and not try to teach me how to suck eggs, I’ll show you a hundred better ways of earning a living than working for a cocky, or a sweating factory boss. How any man can be such an utter sucker as to work in a factory or on a farm when there’s life and freedom to be had almost in the next street, as it were, beats me.”

  They walked to the border of New South Wales and one hundred miles into that State. Mace learned how to bake a damper loaf in the camp-fire ashes. He learned the best approach, first to a farmer’s wife and eventually to a station cook, to secure the three main items of food–flour, tea, and sugar–with the addition of mutton once they entered the pastoral country. He was taught bushcraft; his initiative was developed to a point when he lost that dreadful fear of losing a job, yet still was not content to be without work.

  For twelve months he worked on a station near Rankin’s Springs, starting as a homestead roustabout and leaving one day when he was the bullock-drover’s off-sider. He left with his swag rolled and slung from one shoulder, because he wanted to peer into the great north country. It was early winter when he reached the township of Lake Cargelligo, on the edge of this splendid permanent sheet of water. In a hotel he met one who called himself “King of the Rabbit Trappers”. The king leased camp equipment and traps, found trapping ground and collected skins and carcasses with a motor-truck from his lessees, who worked on a very fair percentage.

  “Is this trapping hard?” Mace asked.

  “Too hard for you!” replied the King of the Rabbit Trappers.

  “Don’t be too sure of that. I’m a trier, anyhow!”

  “All you Pommies say that. You can do anythink, can’t you?”

  “I’ve caught rabbits at home with my old mother’s sewing thread.”

  “You ’ave! How do you set a snare?”

  Mace demonstrated with a piece of string and a pencil.

  “Damned if I don’t give you a go,” the king decided.

  And so for another twelve months Mace caught rabbits with gin-traps on a percentage basis which returned him more money per week than ever he had earned before in a month. During that year he saved enough to purchase a horse and dray, camp equipment, and the necessary two hundred gin-traps. He left Lake Cargelligo for the River Darling, someone having told him the rabbits were thick on the Gutter of Australia.

  2

  Of medium height, and now toughened to the resilient yet enduring qualities of kangaroo hide, Tom Mace had by great good fortune found his country and his occupation. Mentally high-strung, physically endowed with untiring energy, imbued with ambition to make money, he fitted into the scheme of things like a well-oiled cogwheel.

  At the beginning of the drought he was thirty-three years old. The elements were stamping his features, making the formerly round plain face lean and rugged, and giving to it a hint of the hawk that existed also on ground animals. Grey-blue eyes peered from beneath sun-drawn brows, whilst the mouth had gained firmness and was becoming slightly suggestive of one of his own gin-traps.

  The beginning of the second year of drought found Tom Mace trapping hosts of rabbits which came to the surface dams on Atlas nightly to drink. He did not use the gin-traps now, but wire-netting. The great heat-wave found him at Ware’s Tank, five miles south of White Well. Each succeeding day added to itself a further meed of heat. The sun rose mighty and of bronze, moved with infinite slowness across a sky of haze, finally to set in a sea of blood. Day–by day–by day. Never a cloud to mask for a moment the celestial furnace and cause men to thank God for the shadow.

  For thirteen hours daily the sun blazed on a forty-by-forty-yard square of water lying in the bottom of a man-made hole, daily sucking from it in invisible vapour four inches of water–precious, priceless water–in a land rapidly becoming a desert.

  The huge, scooped hole in the ground, situated where surface water from rain might flow into it, was surrounded by a ten-foot rampart of the earth taken from it. Of necessity the dam lay in a ground depression between two lines of sand-dunes divided by a half-mile flat of red flour-fine dust, soil pounded and repounded by the hoofs of thousands of sheep, the feet of two thousand kangaroos, and the paws of ten thousand rabbits coming every night to the dam to drink. Black, stunted pine and mulga, growing, or struggling to grow, on the sand-ridges, dotted the country beyond. The plain surrounding the dam was an unnatural plain: no phenomenon of Nature had made it a plain where once had grown the stunted scub-trees. It had long been cleared of every tree, every bush, every bleached wisp of grass by sheep, rabbits, and kangaroos which were loth to go far from the water.

  On the farms the larger number of settlers on smaller land areas are able to cope with the rabbit and control its depredations, if not entirely destroy it; but on the huge pastoral areas it has been proved that huge expenditure on poisons and fumigation has hardly any appreciable effect. There is good in every ill phase of Nature, and drought wil
l do what man, despite all his efforts, cannot. At the beginning of a drought the land is in fair condition, and the rabbits, being widely “spread” over the country, do not appear to be notably numerous. It is after a dry period, when no moisture remains in the herbage and grasses, that the rabbits, coming to congregate in the vicinity of the man-made water-catchments, amaze by their countless numbers. It was the second week in January. Mace had erected a fence of wire-netting one yard from the edge of the square sheet of water, so constructed that at two places along each side the fence sharply turned in to the water in the shape of a V, the point of the V but four inches from the water, thus:

  FENCE

  –––––V–––––––V–––––

  ––––––––––––––––––––

  WATER

  At the V-points, two inches from the ground, Mace had made holes just large enough to permit a rabbit to squeeze through to get at the water, whilst at opposite corners in his fence outward pointing V’s led into stoutly constructed trap-yards.

  At this time Mace was in undisturbed possession of Ware’s Dam–so named from the contractor who sunk it–for at any moment of the day the shallow sheet of water might magically disappear. The sheep had been removed from those paddocks the dam supplied, and Mace’s only enemies were the kangaroos.

  He had taken a meal of baking-powder bread and salted mutton, accompanied by draughts of black tea, when the sun, a flaming crimson, went to bed behind the distant scrub, the while he walked over the mullock rampart carrying a billy-can of tea, a water-bag–the water in the dam was undrinkable and luke-warm–a shot-gun, a haversack of cartridges, and his skinning knives. Watching him were nine kangaroos, halted by his appearance a quarter of a mile away.

  Mace set down his gear on the level ground between the mullock rampart and the bank of the dam, thence to proceed on a tour of the holes at the point of each V in his fence, and assure himself that a selvage of the netting lay flatly on the ground inside the fence, or that side nearest the water. His final preparations completed, he returned to his gear, seated himself on his hat, for the ground was still too hot to sit on without adequate protection, and, after making a cigarette, loaded his shot-gun.

  The sun-stored heat, radiating upward from the earth, struck on his face and naked arms. The metal of the gun was almost too hot to touch. The moisture of his mouth was difficult to maintain, and was only kept fluid by constant sipping from the billy-can. That day he had drunk so much that he felt unwell. Despite his having an hour before poured two buckets of water over himself and put on clean undervest and trousers, his body felt as though it had been bathed in gum. Everywhere his clothes touched his skin the material stuck to it.

  His world was plashed with amber and with crimson. The water was like a sheet of aluminium. The sky above was the tint of cadmium. In the west it resembled the walls of a slaughter-house.

  Twilight was slowly darkening to indigo the eastern sky. It was so silent and the air was so still that it seemed as though the sun had congealed the air so that sound could not penetrate. Mace’s tobacco-smoke rose straight above his head in a thin column five or six feet high. The brilliant crimson of the dreadful western wall was fading as blood with age, whilst night pushed its blue-black curtain over westward, downward to the horizon. Stars appeared, winking, almost violently dancing, in the heat haze–golden stars like windfalls from some vast orange grove.

  Arrived abruptly the vanguard of a mighty host, shadows on the ground revealed by the last of the lingering twilight. A rabbit appeared on the summit of the rampart, paused for half a second to sit up and stare at him, then ran down the rampart, passed him but a yard from his feet, sped on down to the balking fence. Ten seconds later three rabbits were coming over the rampart. The main host had left the scrub a quarter of a mile each side the dam, moving purposefully, determinedly, without fear. Ten seconds after the first rabbit appeared, Mace saw three, and two seconds later he saw a dozen. After that he was unable to keep count.

  A rabbit frantically running along the outside of the fence came to one of the V’s pointing to the desired water. Into the V it went, quickly to reach the hole in the netting at its point. There it hesitated, its twitching nostrils not four inches from the water it must drink. A little fearful, it edged to the V-hole, ready to dash back, but the water magnet proved too strong. Overwhelming desire suddenly banished timidity. It must drink. Resolutely it pushed through the hole its head, its shoulders, and drank and drank, lapping like a cat. Its period of hell was temporarily over.

  A second rabbit entered that V behind the first. Seeing and hearing the first rabbit drinking, knowing that the first rabbit had found a hole in the fence and was blocking the hole, the second rabbit bit the first on the rump. The first rabbit, determined not to wriggle back till it had swelled its stomach with water, fearing to wet the fur of its paws, twisted through the hole, yet remained on the inch or two of dry ground between the V-point and the water, and came to greater space between the water and the fence itself, there to continue drinking; and ultimately was unable to find its way back to the V-point through which other rabbits were pouring.

  Like all successful hunters, Tom Mace was a born naturalist.

  He thrilled at this, the most wonderful natural phenomenon Australia can offer. With him familiarity did not lessen the fascination. An army of rabbits, a hundred quickly following a hundred, followed by yet more hundreds, ran across the flat summit of the rampart, sped down to the fence. No human being could count their multitude. The faint whispering of their feet on the uneven ground was like the sigh of water deep in the earth. Already probably a thousand rabbits were racing along the outside of the fence.

  Mace could not now see the fence, but he knew that through the hole at the point of each V the rabbits were passing as drops from a dripping tap. Hundreds of rabbits now were racing along the inside of the fence, their bodies swelled with water, frantically searching for a way back through the fence, finally finding a way–the hole at the V-point which enticed them into one of the two trap-yards.

  A shape, grotesque, monstrous, slowly appeared on the west rampart, outlined on the ribbon of dark silver sky. This vision of a hybrid horror, a cross between a spider and a crab, with the ancestry of a beetle and a horse, for a second remained motionless, then slowly rose and, gradually shedding its horrific appearance, took to itself lines of wondrous beauty and grace; until, balanced by its tail, holding its forearms close, its baby hands across its chest, there sat a kangaroo alternately staring with suspicion at the motionless man, and with desire at the forbidden water. The long curves of its body mounted to the outline of a noble head, with long, gently moving, leaf-like ears.

  Unable now to see his gun-sights, yet practised to work without such aids, Mace fired. The ’roo crumpled, thrashing the ground with its broken legs and its tail. Above the sounds of its final struggle came the undiminished sound of racing rabbits. Vibrating thumps were made by a sentinel ’roo’s tail far beyond the rampart, warning others, now halted by the gun report, sitting up like bronze images, mystified, a little frightened. Yet they, too, must drink or perish, and soon were down again on forepaws creeping toward the dam as horrors from another planet; whilst others, leaving the scrub-lands, bounded across the narrow plain more gracefully than our racing thoroughbreds.

  One kangaroo reaching Mace’s flimsy netted fence would have made a breach and liberated hundreds of rabbits. With straining eyes he sought for them, discovered their almost invisible outlines against the now dim steel of sky-line, and fired again and again.

  A fox ran over the rampart too quickly to be seen. It saw the ring of rabbits balked by the fence, saw the fence, the water beyond.

  Nothing in all the world mattered to the fox but to lap and lap and lap the water it had craved for fourteen dreadful hours.

  Mace heard the increased humming roar set up by the rabbits in frantic effort to give passage to the fox. Yet the fox did not disturb him. Its
catlike spring to the top of the fence and over did not threaten its stability. It was the creeping, persistent kangaroos, a perpetual menace to his fence, which fully occupied his attention: his sight, his hearing, and his gun.

  The sky no longer reflected the past terrible day. It was ten o’clock. Still the earth radiated the sun-stored heat, still the air felt as though congealed. No cooling night wind reached Mace to relieve the strange mental lethargy that possessed him. His eyes burned. His lips felt as though cracked, and the cracks as though filled with salt.

  An hour later he lit the hurricane-lamp and went down to the fence. Bordering the outside of the fence, ringing the four sides of the dam, was a compact mass of animals, here a foot in width, there three feet in width. Through the V-points they still trickled. At places long rows of rabbits were drinking. Only those rabbits that had drunk their fill and were trapped inside the fence dashed along it before his approach.

  Reaching one of the six-foot, stoutly built trap-yards, he lifted the lamp above his head and gazed down on a block of rabbits eight feet square, and averaging eighteen inches in depth. Impossible now for any further rabbits to squeeze in. Those below the surface of the mass were asphyxiated; those alive on the surface were bunched in heaped-up masses at each corner.

  Now and then from the dam came a soft “plop”, marking the moment when a rabbit, maddened by the imprisoning fence, sprang from the shore. Tiny gurgling sounds denoted its death by drowning. What the lamp revealed was unimaginable save by one who has witnessed that scene. Low, tiny sounds, mysterious and sinister to the uninitiate, encompassed Tom Mace. Beyond the dam the silence of the void. It was as though the tragic drama going on below the ramparts of the dam was being enacted on the dimly lit stage of some enormous theatre, watched silently, entranced, by the red, winking eyes of an audience of stars.