Walkabout - James Vance Marshall [16]
And once again he was naked; for at the moment of climax the elastic of the panties had snapped, and the gift – symbol of civilization – lay under his feet, trampled into the desert sand.
White girl and black boy, a couple of yards apart, stood staring one at another.
The girl’s eyes grew wider and wider.
The bush boy’s eyes widened too. He realized, quite suddenly, that the larger of the strangers wasn’t a male: she was a lubra, a budding gin.
He took a half-pace forward. Then he drew back. Appalled. For into the girl’s eyes there came a terror such as he’d seen only a couple of times before: a terror that could for him have only one meaning, one tragic and inevitable cause. He began to tremble then, in great, uncontrolled, nerve-jerking spasms. For, to him, the girl’s terror could only mean one thing: that she had seen in his eyes an image: the image of the Spirit of Death.
CHAPTER EIGHT
TO the bush boy everything had its appointed time. There was a time to be weaned, a time to be carried in arms: a time to walk with the tribe, a time to walk alone: a time for the proving-of-manhood, a time for the taking of gins. A time for hunting, and a time to die. These times were preordained. They never overlapped. A boy couldn’t walk before he’d been weaned; couldn’t take a gin before his manhood had been proved. These things were done in order.
This was why the question of the girl’s sex had never interested the bush boy. Didn’t interest him now. For in his tribal timetable he had only arrived at the stage of walking alone: the stage immediately preceding the proving-of-manhood: the stage of the walkabout.
In the bush boy’s tribe every male who reached the age of thirteen or fourteen had to perform a walkabout – a selective test which weeded out and exterminated the weaker members of the tribe, and ensured that only the fittest survived to father children. This custom is not common to all Aboriginal tribes, but is confined to the Bindaboo, the most primitive and least-known of the Aboriginal groups who live among the water-holes of the Central and North Australian desert. The test consisted of journeying from one group of water-holes to another; a journey which invariably took some six to eight months and was made entirely unaided and alone. It was a test of mental and physical toughness far fairer – but no less stringent – than the Spartan exposure of new-born babies.
It was this test that the bush boy was now engaged on. He had been doing well: had covered the most difficult part of the journey. Yet he wasn’t, it seemed, to be allowed to finish it. For the lubra had looked into his eyes and seen the Spirit of Death.
Death was the Aboriginal’s only enemy, his only fear. There was for him no future life: no Avalon, no Valhalla, no Islands of the Blest. That perhaps was why he watched death with such unrelaxing vigilance; that certainly was why he feared it with a terror beyond all ‘civilized’ comprehension. That was why he now stood in the middle of the Sturt Plain, trembling and ice-cold, his body beaded in little globules of sweat.
Peter looked in amazement, first at the bush boy then at his sister. He couldn’t grasp what was happening; couldn’t understand