Gripped By Drought Read online

  From each of the two traps Mace took and killed four hundred rabbits. He skinned them at the rate of three a minute, tossing the carcasses into heaps, and, when he had done, bagging the balls of fur. He proceeded then to lift the netting of the fence at several places, permitting the rabbits at the water to escape with concerted rushes through the masses pushing to get at the water. Save those killed the next day by the heat, the eagles, and the crows, every rabbit would return for a drink the following night. When he left the dam for his camp, each trap-yard still held approximately two hundred rabbits.

  He had been gone but a minute when the dam ramparts were alive with creeping and crawling kangaroos and slinking foxes, all passing through the army of rabbits as though it did not exist, to reach the water every living thing must drink to survive the coming day.

  3

  Mace again was astir when the dawn first lightened the eastern sky. He boiled the billy, made and sipped hot tea then carted the rabbit carcasses on his truck to a place one mile distant from the dam, there to dump them where some thousands of carcasses already were dried hard and blackened by the sun. With the rabbit carcasses he carted and dumped the carcasses of the kangaroos he had shot, not bothering to skin them, the prices of ’roo skins being low. When the sun had heaved but half its bloody mass above the horizon, its heat scorched the land and raised shimmering heat-waves to roll over the ground.

  Picking up the bagged skins of the animals he had killed early that night, as well as those remaining in the traps, and skinned before carting the carcasses, Mace retired to his camp. Of the camp it could be said only that he was in occupation of the ground below the dam-site. It was quite unnecessary here and in this climate to erect a tent in which, day or night, it would be impossible to stay long.

  The box tree, one of the Eucalypti, possesses leaves wider and larger than the many species of wattle which cover most of the bush-lands. Its shade, therefore, is of the best, yet poor compared with that given by the river gums. Beneath this tree was Mace’s camp: a camp stretcher, on which was a flock mattress only, for sheets and blankets were as unnecessary and as unbearable as the tent. A heap of wire bows–lengths of stout fencing wire bent to form a U over which the skins were stretched–a number of chaff-bags in another heap, three wool packs filled with skins and one partly filled, the camp fire but a little way from the truck, and the truck itself carrying the rations, the tucker-box, the small iron water-tank, and serving for a dining-room safe from the ubiquitous ants, made up Mace’s bush camp–a camp and conditions which would have horrified a hard-bitten explorer.

  Twelve hundred skins Mace slipped over the U-shaped pieces of wire, the points of which he stuck in the ground so that the skins would dry clean of dust and grit. It was nine o’clock when he lay down on his stretcher, covered his face with mosquito netting to keep off the flies, and tried to sleep. Six hours of fitful, tormented half-sleep, after which he rose to make up the fire, proceeded to remove the now board-hard dried rabbit-skins from the wires and pack them in the unfilled wool bale, and then bake damper bread in a camp-oven and boil a piece of hard and mildewed mutton in a kerosene tin.

  Many a time has the gold fever been described, how men energized by the fever pushed into the North American wastes to perish of cold, and penetrated the deserts of Australia to perish of thirst. Man’s frenzied labour whilst he collected the precious gold, labouring till he dropped from fatigue, we also know; and much akin to this terrible gold fever is the fur-getting fever, varied and intensified by a different set of circumstances. The gold-hunter really need not hurry, for the gold will abide passively in the earth; but the fur-hunter, whose trade is governed by seasons and animal life-cycles, must ever race against time.

  Perhaps during three months, or but one month, of one summer in a decade, will rabbits mass to drink as now they were massing to drink at the dams on Atlas. In this year at this time the price per thousand skins obtainable in Sydney was fifteen pound. The average earnings of Tom Mace were fifteen pounds every night. It was made possible by the heat, the scarcity of surface-water, and the absence of moisture in the dead herbage and grasses. With ordinary gin-traps such nightly hauls would be impossible; and, whilst the rabbits came to drink in their thousands, Mace must tackle the flow of fur with all his might; for at any hour a thunderstorm might fill the clay-pans and allow the rabbits again to be scattered thinly over all the land.

  Had Mace been a god, had he been able to live and work without sleep and muscular rest, he could have killed and skinned three thousand rabbits every night. They were on the land bordering Ware’s Dam to which they came to drink–and be trapped. Already that summer at one dam he had taken eleven thousand, at another fourteen thousand. At Ware’s Dam, during his nineteen days’ trapping, he had taken nineteen thousand rabbits; and yet there remained, he estimated, a probable six thousand.

  Day by day the heat increased. At the Atlas homestead the thermometer registered 121º at two-thirty in the afternoon of this day, which proved to be the peak of one of the worst heat-waves experienced on the Darling.

  The Atlas thermometer was in shade–real shade. Near it were huge red-gums casting real shade in which the air might cool. Mace in his comparatively shadeless camp, and the sheepmen in the shade of their red-hot iron humpies, lived in conditions far removed from the luxurious comfort of a station homestead.

  Mace sought peace and rest and found them not. He lay on his stretcher-bed, a piece of cloth in his hand, ever battling against the swarming pestiferous flies attracted by the moisture exuding from his heated skin. About him was no faintest movement of the air, hot enough now to blister him, burn his eyes, and send the blood to his head to hammer at his temples.

  Impossible to sleep, though his brain ached for sleep, the sleep cut down, rationed by the demands of his trade, the unescapable urge to seize the fleeting skirts of Opportunity. Impossible to keep still, impossible to imprison himself within a mosquito-net wherein he would suffocate. The muscles of his arms screamed for rest from the hopeless task of keeping at bay the flies.

  The shade was a mockery. At noon the sun cast the shadow of a man’s head almost on his boots. There seemed little advantage to be gained by keeping in the shade, for the air in shadow was almost as hot as in sunlight. The ground radiated heat as if it held volcanic fire.

  Mace rose and drank from a canvas water-bag hanging by a wire hook from a branch. At once the water oozed from his body through the pores of his skin, giving momentary coolness. He rolled a cigarette and, producing a wax vesta, laid it against the blade of a skinning-knife, when it immediately burst into flame. The galah cockatoos that morning had spent much time by the water in the dam, and now about fifty of them were perched in the branches of the three box trees. For an hour in the forenoon they had singly flown from tree to tree seeking the coolest shade, but for two hours not a bird had dared to leave the shade they had. Ten of them were perched above Mace’s camp, curved beaks wide open, throat feathers throbbing, whilst they gasped for air. From some point a crow almost fell into the tree in its haste to escape the sun, managed to cling to a branch, gained secure perch after much wing-flapping, when the sound of its gasping, tortured breath reached the man.

  Escape! There was no escape. He and hundreds of men, most of them a little more favourably circumstanced than he, were held prisoners by the heat, as by the dust-storms of spring and the cold winds of winter. Unable to keep still, unable to rest, unable even to concentrate his mind on a paper, Mace was unable to find any task to which he could apply himself.

  Seated on a folded bag on the running-board of the truck, he buried his face in his arms in a fruitless effort to escape the flies. Whilst thus he sat there reached his burning ears a “swishing” sound ending in a soft thud, and, raising his head, he saw at his feet one of the galahs-dead. Beyond it, beyond the tree, over all the miniature plain, rolled wave after wave of shimmering heat. It was as though on the plain lay slowly moving water-waves scintillating as the wings of dragon
flies. The waves beat on the camp, on him, on the birds, and presently another galah fell from the branches–dead.

  That most wiry of all birds, the crow, was sorely tempted to fly away, but fear of the hell of sunlight overcame its age-long fear of man. Even when Mace walked round and round the tree-trunk, wildly waving a cloth about his head to keep off the flies, the crow remained.

  For several moments panic gripped Tom Mace. He thought that were the temperature to rise by only one degree, he would no longer be able to bear it. He was tempted to start the truck-engine and drive to the river, twenty-four miles distant; but resisted, knowing the danger of tyre blow-outs, when his situation would be far worse. He saw the grey streak from tree to ground when a galah in the next box tree fell from it, suffocated; and half an hour later the crow above him gave a gurgling caw-aw”, fought upside-down to maintain its hold on the branch, and only when it died relaxed and fell.

  Men would talk of the heat of that day for years to come. It became a terror to Tom Mace, there alone amid the heat-waves. He had heard of the birds falling dead from the trees, but this was his first experience of such heat. His seared eyes swept the southern sand-dunes, and then examined the dunes to the north for no reason save the search for something to occupy his mind for a second. He saw at the foot of one long sand-ridge a low but thick-growing bush that promised real shade; and, because he knew that if he did not do something he would go mad, he decided to walk to the bush and ascertain if it did cast real shade that might be cooler than in his camp.

  With a length of calico over his head like an Arab’s burnous, Mace walked across the plain, with a flaming hell filling the sky above and below, a roasted world burning him through the soles of his boots. Reaching the outer fringe of sparse bush, he saw that every inch of shade was occupied by a rabbit’s live body, and that on ground over which the shadow had passed there lay the swelling carcasses of many dead rabbits. At his approach many of the living rabbits left the shade cast by one bush to run staggeringly to the shade of another. Some ran for three or four yards, a few reached their objective. but the majority were halted by the sun. They leapt upward with a short sharp squeal, to fall dead.

  In that one day the sun killed more rabbits than the eagles, the foxes, poison baits, netting fences, and Man could destroy in twelve years.

  And when the terrible sun at long last had been swallowed up by the blackened bush, Mace watched the survivors of a host come to drink. He trapped one hundred and nine. He would have trapped one hundred and twelve had not two foxes killed three.

  • • • • •

  When Tom Mace reached Menindee with his four wool packs filled with rabbit-skins, the heat-wave had subsided to moderate summer weather. He brought back to Atlas a drink-sodden man who had completed his quarterly business.

  CHAPTER X

  MONEY

  I

  EARLY in February the second heat-wave of the year was broken by a week of thunderstorms even more trying than the fiercer, drier heat. The storms that massed and rumbled daily dropped a total average fall of nearly an inch of rain, putting many feet of water into the dry or drying-up surface dams, but coming at the wrong time of the year to maintain new grasses, which would inevitably be burnt off by the hot sun unless additional rains fell during the month and in March. When Mr. Rowland Smythe came to Atlas the weather again was clear, but less hot than it had been.

  Smythe was the manager of the financial department of Messrs. Boynton and Reynolds, stock and station agents, wool brokers, and station financiers, not of one particular city, but of all Australia. Half-yearly he paid a visit to every pastoral property in which his firm was interested, or was about to become interested, in every State save Western Australia. It could be said with truth that of all men engaged in the wool industry he was the most expert, his sensitive finger ever laid on its fluctuating pulse.

  Upon his advice, under his direction, the wealthiest financial concern in Australia advanced money on property mortgage, on wool clips in bales, and on wool still on the sheep’s back. His firm bought and sold stations, floated companies to control stations, owned huge wool stores at every Australian major port, and was interested in a fleet of cargo carrying ships. In short, Messrs. Boynton and Reynolds carried the pastoral industry as the various State Governments carry the farmers.

  Mr. Rowland Smythe came to Atlas in a roomy eight-cylinder-engined car, accompanied by much luggage, and driven by a chauffeur. Over a plain suit of tweed he wore a dust-coat of the cheapest make, and on his head he wore, as a dove on its nest, an eleven-and-sixpenny trilby hat. His appearance and his bank account did not match. Short, tubby, and close to sixty-five, his red face irresistibly suggested a shining apple: his small blue eyes always gleaming with good humour, one found difficulty in appreciating his granite hardness in finance until engaged with him in a business deal. With him money was governed by cast-iron rules that could never be broken without disaster.

  He was given the quiet room in Feng Ching-wei’s bungalow, and sat down to dinner as immaculately garbed as his host invariably was when he entertained. They talked of foreign politics, of pictures, and of books, rigorously eschewing the subjects of wool and finance. Afterwards, in the cool, balmy night air, they lounged on the wide veranda with cigars and whisky between them, within hearing of ten thousand frogs lifting up one tremendous song of thanksgiving for the recent rain.

  “The fall appears to have been fairly even over all the Western Division and the south-west of Queensland,” Smythe observed when he had secured the acme of comfort. “Conditions were beginning to look blue, many of the small men being hard up against it. Times like these prove my contention of many years that when the country is cut up into small areas of about thirty thousand acres the holders of those areas should be compelled to co-operate with each other, and should at all times be strictly limited to the number of stock each holding should carry. To-day the small man is as prone to overstock as the big man was two to three decades ago. Artificial feeding quickly ruins the small man. It is the greatest money-thief of all.”

  “Yet artificial feeding is now recognized to be very necessary.”

  “Agreed, Feng, agreed. How many are you feeding here?”

  About sixteen thousand on maize and lucerne. We are cutting scrub for a further twenty thousand. Or, rather, we have been cutting scrub. The rain has enabled us to stop that.”

  Smythe pulled at his cigar. His voice when next he spoke was a little harsh, as though it had not properly recovered from the abuse it had undergone when as a young man he had auctioned stock. He said:

  “The next lesson the pastoralists have to learn is that it doesn’t pay to have paddocks as large as they generally run to-day. Ten-by-twelve-mile paddocks are too large, unless water is to be had at both ends. As you know, a large number of sheep watering at one dam or well quickly eat out the feed in the vicinity, and have to travel miles from water to grazing and from grazing to water. Five-mile-square paddocks are large enough, holding a fourth of the number of sheep in the big paddock. The less sheep are compelled to walk about, the longer sheep are able to keep condition in dry times.”

  The financier paused to sip his whisky. Since Feng offered no comment, well knowing that what his guest said was true, Smythe went on:

  “Quite apart from the dry spell, however, which even now is not definitely ended, it is up to all of us to go very slowly, and look hard at every pound before parting with it. This country is facing a deuce of a bump. Our incessant borrowing in London cannot go on much longer. The evil practice of our politicians–even a generous man could not call them statesmen–in borrowing money with which to pay interest on money already borrowed, would be amusingly naïve were it not presently to be so tragic. Do you know that since the War the six Australian States alone have borrowed nearly three hundred millions?”

  “Yes. I read something about it the other day,” admitted Feng.

  Smythe grunted. He was used to people regarding hundreds of milli
ons as a mere current account, and even his host did not appear to appreciate the enormity of the swollen national debt.

  “Our Australian trouble is that we regard politicians as cinema actors. We send men to Parliament who neither are clever enough to make much money for themselves whilst the chance is theirs, or stupid enough to be hopelessly unable to balance expenditure with the income of their weekly wages. As I said, the bump is coming with the inevitability of Fate. John Bull is going to wake up from a long snooze, and discover that he has been quite an ordinary sucker swindled by quite common confidence tricksters. It is revealed, when we study the psychology of the sucker, that when once the sucker is sucked he is a most frightfully jealous guardian of his chequebook. When are Mayne and his wife coming home?”

  “Next month. They are in Melbourne now.”

  “Been away nearly four months? Been to New Zealand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Humph!”

  Between them a silence. In the half-darkness the red ends of their cigars glowed, died down, glowed again. Away across the creek someone was tunefully playing an accordion. The low murmur of voices–those of Mary O’Doyle and Eva reached them. Feng was thinking of Smythe’s thoughts, or probable thoughts. His “Humph!” had been so expressive following his brief discourse on Australian national finance. After a while the money genius said:

  “From memory, the balance of the Atlas wool cheque, after the overdraft had been deducted, was a hundred or so above four thousand pounds, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, that is so,” replied Feng, congratulating himself on having accurately guessed the other’s thoughts.

  “Humph! Well?”

  “Well?” Feng parried, shying at putting into words the thing at which Smythe balked. Then Smythe burst out with unwonted vigour:

  “Damn it, man! Four thousand pounds won’t carry you on until next shearing, will it?”