Walkabout - James Vance Marshall [10]
‘Yeemara.’
His teeth, in unison with Peter’s, clicked in understanding.
The white boy was jubilant.
‘You’ve got it, darkie. Got it first time. Yeemara an’ Arkooloolya. That’s the stuff we want. Now where do we get’em?’
The bush boy turned, moved away at right angles, into the scrub. He paused, glanced over his shoulder, then moved away again.
‘Kurura,’ he said.
There was no mistaking his meaning.
‘Come on, Mary,’ the boy hissed excitedly. ‘Kurura, that means “follow me”.’
He trotted eagerly after the bush boy.
Slowly, reluctantly, the girl followed.
After a while they came to a forest of heartleaves. Beneath the thick, closely-woven foliage the shade was deep: a striking contrast to the glare of the bush. Beneath the close-packed trees the white children moved uncertainly, stumblingly: their sun-narrowed pupils slow to adjust themselves to the sudden darkness. But the bush boy, his eyes refocussing almost at once, pushed rapidly on. The others, stumbling and tripping over ground roots, were hard put to keep up with him.
It was cool beneath the heartleaves; cool and quiet and motionless as a sylvan stage set. Hour after hour the bush boy led on, gliding like a bar of well-oiled shadow among the giant trees. He moved without apparent effort, yet quickly enough for Peter to be forced to jog-trot. Soon the small boy was panting. In spite of the shade, sweat plastered back his hair; trickled round his eyes and into his mouth. He started to lag behind. Seeing him in trouble, Mary also dropped back; and Peter reached for her hand.
The girl was pleased: gratified that in his difficulties he’d turned to her. Subconscious twinges of jealousy had been tormenting her. She had been hurt, deeply hurt, at his so quickly transferring his sense of reliance from her to an uncivilized and naked black. But now things were returning to normal; now he was coming back to the sisterly fold.
‘All right, Peter,’ she whispered, ‘we won’t leave you behind.’
She knew that he must – like her – be suffering cruelly from thirst, hunger, and physical exhaustion: knew that his mouth, like hers, must feel as if it were crammed with red-hot cotton wool. But there was nothing they could do about it: or would it, she wondered, help if they acted like dogs – lolled out their tongues and panted?
Ahead of them the heartleaves ended abruptly. One moment they were groping forward in deep shade, the next they were looking out across an expanse of glaring sand: mile after shimmering mile of ridge and dune, salt-pan and iron-rock: the Sturt Desert: heat-hazed, sun-drenched, waterless.
‘Kurura,’ the bush boy said.
He started to walk into the desert.
Mary held back. She didn’t exactly mistrust the bush boy, didn’t doubt that if he wished he could – eventually – lead them to food and water. But how far away would the food and water be? Too far, most likely, for them ever to reach it. She sank to her knees in the shade of the last of the heartleaves. Peter collapsed beside her; the sweat from his hair ran damply into the lap of her dress.
The bush boy came back. He spoke softly, urgently, the pitch of his words rising and falling like the murmur of wavelets on a sandy shore. The words themselves were meaningless; but his gestures spoke plainly enough. If they stayed where they were they would die: the bush boy fell to the sand, his fingers scrabbling the dry earth; soon the evil spirits would come to molest their bodies; the bush boy’s eyes rolled in terror. But if they followed him he would take them to water; the bush boy swallowed and gulped. They hadn’t far to go: only as far as the hill-that-had-fallen-out-of-the-moon; his finger pointed to a strange outcrop of rock that rose like a gargantuan cairn out of the desert, a cairn the base of which was circled by a dark, never-moving shadow.
It looked very far away.
The girl wiped the sweat out of her eyes. In the shade of the heartleaves it was mercifully cool; far cooler than it would be in the desert. It would be so much easier, she thought,