Death of a Lake b-18 Read online

  “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 wing
s 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.

  Chapter Twelve

  A Night Out

  WITHINBONY’SPHILOSOPHYof crime investigation was the conviction that if the criminal became static immediately following the unlawful act he had every chance of escaping retribution, and when this, rarely, happened in an investigation he was conducting, he countered by prodding the suspect to activity.

  On his way back to the out-station, he decided on a little prodding, and the opportunity came at the afternoon smoko when again he met the two women, Lester, MacLennon and Carney, the men having returned early.

  “Have a good time?” asked Carney, andMacLennon raised his dark brows and seemed to await the answer with unusual interest.

  “Yes. Quite a change from horses,” Bony replied. “Helped George to trap and skin justunder two thousand. He netted the same number the night before.”

  “My! What a big pie,” exclaimed Mrs Fowler, again vivaciously dark and off-setting her daughter’s vivid colouring.

  “You wouldn’t believe how thick they are a bit away from here,” Lester put in. He sniffled before adding: “This side of Johnson’sWell they’re thicker than sheep beingdruve to the yards. And foxes!”

  Bony, munching cake, was conscious of Joan’s eyes, but resisted looking at the girl in order to outwit the watchful Carney. MacLennon grumbled:

  “And after what they said themyxotossis would do, too.”

  “If the floods and droughts can’t wipe out the rabbits, the mosquitoes and germs haven’t a chance,” Lester said. “Look, four years ago there wasn’t a rabbit anywhere within a hundred and fifty miles of this place, and I hadn’t seen a rabbit for eighteen months. Then one day I saw a rabbit on a sandy ridge, and a month afterwards rabbits wereburrowin ’ andbreedin ’ like mad. Them city fellers can’t even imagine how big Australia is. They think the rest of Australia is another suburb or something.”

  “And they won’t believe rabbits drink water, either,” declared Mrs Fowler. “When I said they did, I was called a liar.”

  “Caw!”Lester sniffled twice. “Rabbits’lldrink water and they’ll climb trees and gnaw off the suckers and then go down to eat the leaves. When therean’t no grass, they’ll scratch up the roots. And wild ducks will lay their eggs a mile from water, and lay ’emup in trees, too. Won’t they, Bony?”

  “Yes. And cormorants will fill a three-thousand-gallon water tank up to the brim.”

  “Ah! You had a look in there?” asked Joan, and Bony now met her eyes and, while nodding assent, decided they were blue.

  “George was telling me how it must have happened,” he said. “But what I don’t understand is why the topmost birds died there when they could have waddled to the side, stepped up to the rim and flown away.”

  “But…” Carney began and trailed, and impulsively Lester asked:

  “How far down from the rimd’you reckon them birds is?”

  “Three inches. Not more than six.”

  The almost colourless eyes dwindled, then flashed examination of the others.

  “Them birds was down eighteen inches when I seen ’emlast.”

  “When was that?”

  “When? Yearago, could be. You tell George about that?”

  “That the level of the birds was almost up to the rim? No.”

  “I wonder what raised them,” murmured Joan, gazing steadily at Bony.

  “Some chemical change which has gone on since Lester looked in the tank. The action of heat and the air and what not might have caused each carcass to expand a fraction.”

  “Sounds likely,” supportedMacLennon. “I still can’t believe the yarn how they got there.”

  “Give us a better one, Mac,” urged Mrs Fowler.

  He shook his head, grinned and lurched to his feet. “I’m no good at inventing lies,” he said, and went out. There was silence for a space, broken by the girl.

  “You sure, Bony, about the level of the birds?”

  “Reasonably so, but I could be mistaken,” replied Bony. “I merely pulled myself up to look over the rim just to see what was inside. A few inches down from the rimwas the impression I received.”

  “I expect the crows got at the carcasses and stirred them up,” Carney volunteered. “Say, Bony, did you ever see the sun suck a dam dry?”

  “Only once,” recalled Bony, aware of the effort to change the subject. “It was one of those days when the sky is full of dusty-looking clouds that never pass under the sun to throw a shadow. I happened to be heading for a dam containing seven feet of water in a twelve-thousand yard excavation. It was 112 degrees in the shade, like today, and no wind. When I first saw it the water was being sucked up in a fine mist you could see through. The mist thickened to a light-brown rod, and then the roddensed and became dark brown, almost black, and suddenly it looked like a water spout upside down. At the top it formed a white cloud, and in two minutes the bottom of the rod was drawn up like those pelican chains we saw. When I reached the dam there wasn’t enough moisture, let alone water, to bog a fly.”

  “It doesn’t often happen, then?” asked Mrs Fowler, keenly interested.

  “So rarely that people who haven’t seen it won’t believe.”

  “I believe it. I believe anything can happen in this country,” Mrs Fowler claimed, and Lester sniffled and told a story about fish coming up three thousand feet from an artesian bore. After that the ‘party’ dispersed, Bony satisfied with the initial effect of his prodding.

  When darkness spread over the Lake he was sitting on his favourite dune well to the right of the bluff, and when the night was claiming the dunes, he caught sight of the figure stealing between the dunes and taking advantage of the low but sparse scrub trees. He thought it could be Lester.

  It was dark when he moved. The light was on in the sitting-room, but the bedrooms were vacant. He drifted across to the house. There was a light in the annexe, but no one was there. On the side veranda the two women were listening to a radio play. He did not see Martyr.

  In his room at the quarters, he stripped and put on sandshoes. Because the light in the sitting-room could reveal him leaving, he slid over the sill of the bedroom window at the back, and drifted down to the Lake to follow the flats to Johnson’sWell.

  On arrival atPorchester Station, he was allInspector in an efficient police department, but quickly assuming the role of horse-breaker, he travelled far from that lofty appointment towards the normal occupation and status of the half-caste. When he started out for Johnson’s Well this early night on a mission of stealthy observation, he travelled beyond the half-caste to become all ab
origine… save in the ability to assess the psychology and bushcraft of the white man.

  The men at the out-station were expert in this bush of the Continent’s interior where open space separated the flat plane of earth and sky. They knew their stars, and were familiar with the importance of sky-lines… the shape of things against the sky… so that movement in the normal dark of night was barely less curtailed than by day. Set against the aborigine standard the bushmanship of these station men was poor, but none the less to be respected.

  Bony followed the flats all the way till barred by the sheen of water he knew to be the Channel. This he swam and continued towardsBarby’s camp before turning ‘inland’ and so reaching Johnson’sWell.

  Any tracks his sand-shoes might leave would be attributed to the trapper, and presently against a sky-line appeared the shapes of remembered trees, and then the short straight lines abhorred by Nature

  … the shape of the hut.

  Here he waited to prospect with his ears. He could detect the scurry of rabbits, now and then the warning signal made by a rabbit thumping a hind foot on the ground, and a methodical thudding as of wood on iron. This last came from the direction of the discarded tank, and he guessed correctly it was made by a fork or shovel being used in emptying the tank of dead birds.

  He had to bring the tank to a sky-line, and because the man at work was almost certainly being watched, the watcher or watchers had to be located.

  He moved in a wide arc to cut the drift of the faint air-current bearing the musty odour of the dead cormorants, and then moved up-wind, progressing on hands and toes to reduce the danger of crossing an enemy’s sky-line. Eventually he could see the level rim of the tank regularly broken when the worker tossed out carcasses.

  In the air-line of the bird-odour lesser scents could not be registered. He moved to the right, and so was aware of the smell of a white man. The white man was lying against the steep bank of the creek, his head protruding above the bank, so that he had a clear night-view of the tank. He located the second white man positioned near the engine shed, and he also had a clear view.