Walkabout - James Vance Marshall [9]
Turning to where the dead rock wallaby lay in the sand, he picked it up. Odd ants had found it: were nosing through its fur. The boy brushed them off. Then he walked quietly away; away down the valley; soon he was out of sight.
The children couldn’t believe it; couldn’t believe that he’d really left them. It was all so sudden: so utterly unexpected.
Peter was first to grasp what had happened.
‘Mary!’ his voice was frightened. ‘He’s gone!’
The girl said nothing. She was torn by conflicting emotions. Relief that the naked black boy had disappeared, and regret that she hadn’t asked him for help; fear that nobody could help them anyhow, and a sneaking feeling that perhaps if anyone could it had been the black boy. A couple of days ago she’d have known what to do; known what was best; known how to act. But she didn’t know now. Uncertain, she hid her face in her hands.
It was Peter who made the decision. In the bush boy’s laughter he’d found something he liked: a lifeline he didn’t intend to lose.
‘Hey, Mary!’ he gasped. ‘Come on. After him!’
He went crashing into the bush. Slowly, doubtfully, his sister followed.
‘Hey darkie!’ Peter’s reedy treble echoed down the valley. ‘We wanna come too. Wait for us!’
‘Hey, darkie!’ the rocks re-echoed. ‘Wait for us. Wait for us. Wait for us.’
CHAPTER SIX
THE bush boy turned. He knew what the call meant: the strangers were coming after him, were following him down the valley; already he could hear them crashing and lumbering through the scrub.
He waited; relaxed both physically and mentally: one hand passed behind his back and closed round the opposite elbow; one foot, ostrich-like, resting on the calf of the opposite leg. He wasn’t frightened, for he knew instinctively that the strangers were harmless as a pair of tail-less kangaroos; but he was mildly surprised, for he had thought them both, especially the larger, impatient, eager to be on their way. As the children came racing towards him, he dropped his foot to the ground; became suddenly all attention; full of curiosity to know what they wanted to say and how they were going to say it.
Peter launched into a breathless appeal.
‘Hey, don’t leave us, darkie! We’re lost. We want food, an’ drink. And we wanna know how we get to Adelaide.’
Mary looked at the bush boy, and saw in his eyes a gleam of amusement. It angered her, for she knew the cause; Peter’s high-pitched, corncrakey voice. All the tenets of progressive society and racial superiority combined inside her to form a deep-rooted core of resentment. It was wrong, cruelly wrong, that she and her brother should be forced to run for help to a Negro; and a naked Negro at that. She clutched Peter’s hand, half drawing him away.
But Peter was obsessed by none of his sister’s scruples. To him their problem was simple, uncomplicated: they wanted help, and here was someone who could, his instinct told him, provide it. The fact that his appeal had failed to register first time nonplussed him for a moment. But he wasn’t put off; he stuck to his guns. Breath and composure regained, he now spoke slowly, in a lower, less excited key.
‘Look, darkie, we’re lost. We want water. You sabby water? War-tur. War-tur.’
He cupped his hands together, drew them up to his lips, and went through the motions of swallowing.
The bush boy nodded.
‘Arkooloola.”
His eyes were serious now. Understanding. Sympathetic. He knew what it meant to be thirsty.
‘Arkooloola.”
He said the word again. Softly, musically, like the rippling of water over rock. He pursed up his lips and moved them as though he, too, were drinking.
Peter hopped delightedly from foot to foot.
‘That’s it, darkie. You’ve got it. Arkooloolya. That’s the stuff we want. And food too. You sabby food? Foo-ood. Foo-ood.’
He went through the motions of cutting with knife and fork, then started to champ his jaws.
The cutting meant nothing to the bush boy; but