Walkabout - James Vance Marshall [30]
Normally the platypus were timid creatures, inordinately shy; but now, confident that they were unobserved, they dived, leap-frogged, and darted about with gay agility. Then quite suddenly, quicker than sight, they vanished; for Peter, edging forward to improve his view, had trodden on and snapped a twig. It was a very small snap – the children never even heard it – but in a flash the platypus dived: dived deep: went snaking through underwater entrances to their burrow beneath the bank. There, in the maze of their smooth, highly-polished tunnels, they were safe.
The little boy looked at his sister.
‘Reckon they’re O.K. to eat?’
‘Oh, Pete! I couldn’t! Besides, we’d never catch them.’
They agreed to forgo breakfast in favour of a swim.
Peter jumped feet-first into the pool. After a while he started to mimic the platypus. He pursed out his lips, quacked and bobbed and splashed, showering his sister with spray, driving her laughing on to the bank. His miming became more hilarious, more abandoned – shades of the bush boy and lyre bird – until at last the girl joined in. Together they squawked and splashed to exhaustion; then they lay on the bank side by side in the drying warmth of the sun.
But they couldn’t, Peter knew, stay by the pool for ever. And soon they were on their way, following the course of the stream, climbing the gently-rising valley.
At first the valley was well-shaded and softly-coloured: aglow with the gold of casuarinas, the creamy white of bamberas and the pink of gums and eucalyptus. But as the children climbed higher, the vegetation gradually became more stunted and the colours harsher, cruder. By midday they were traversing a rocky barren terrain, its only trees the drooping mugga-woods, its only flowers the everlasting daisies: the flowers that never die; that live on, even after their petals, leaves, stalks, and roots have crumbled and withered away. The children grew hotter, tireder, and hungrier. It was lucky that Mary had had the foresight to gather a cache of bauble nuts, and these they ate, soon after midday, in the shade of a slab of rock that overhung the stream.
The stream had become a good deal smaller by now; and looking up-valley the children could guess at its source, in a shallow cwm about two hundred feet above them. Mary looked at the hills, shading her eyes against the glare of the sun.
‘Sure you know the way, Pete?’
‘Course I’m sure. The darkie told me. Over the hills.’
The girl said nothing. The hills, she knew, were higher than they looked. And they’d soon be losing the stream. She wished they had something in which to carry water.
They rested for a couple of hours, then pushed on.
The valley became barer, bleaker, progressively less inviting. Yet even here, in its upper reaches, it had a certain beauty; not its former beauty of woods and shades and gentle colours; but a bold, bizarre beauty; a kaleidoscope of strange pigments and exciting, unexpected contrasts. Soon the valley slopes fanned out, exposing new vistas: wider horizons: the whole range of the hills, startlingly detailed in the clear, hazeless air. Dead ahead there swelled up a smooth, symmetrical hummock, its slopes, flecked with mica, reflecting the sun like a massed array of heliographs. To the left rose a rugged mound of granite, smooth and scalloped as a magnified Dartmoor tor. While to the right towered a fantastic pyramid of wine-veined quartz: alternate layers of crimson, grey, and black.
The children moved slowly forward; dwarfed by the immensity of the hills.
A couple of hours before sundown they came to the cwm; and here, in the saucer-shaped depression between the slopes of mica and quartz, they made camp. It wasn’t a very inviting camp-site, being boggy and devoid of shade, but at least they were close to water – of a kind. They had hoped the source of the stream would be a cool, refreshing trickle filtering out of the rock; instead it turned