He nodded. ‘Call it fifteen then, and take a bearing on tomorrow’s sunrise. Shouldn’t be far out. But I doubt whether we’ll find the ngalta. That’s the abo word for the kurrajong tree. Right? It has water bearing roots and the blacks can practically live off the seeds when they’re ripe. Those trees will surely have disappeared after all these years.’
‘What about the kurrajong here?’
‘Could be a new one, a seedling.’
In the end we agreed we would drive fifteen miles on our sunrise bearing, then north for eight. After that we’d start a box search working steadily eastward and hoping for the best. By then we had finished our beer, and after a quick meal, we began repairing the fuel line of Ed Garrety’s Land-Rover, watched by a goanna and interrupted periodically by flights of small birds coming into the soak. It took us the rest of the afternoon to get the engine going and clear the sand drift that had built up around the chassis. And that evening after sunset we buried the remains of Ed Garrety’s body. Kennie had found it while stalking the goanna with my rifle. It was away to the south, just beyond the edge of the rira, the covering of drifted storm sand blown away to expose the whitened bone of the skull and one skeletal hand. It was something I could have done without, and after a restless night, cold and plagued by ants and the presence of several small snakes, we took a compass bearing on the sun as it heaved itself up over the horizon like an erupting orb of red-hot metal.
We had our first puncture that morning, but all Kennie said was, ‘Lucky it’s a drought an’ the spinifex not in seed, otherwise you’d have clogged the rad, the engine running hot — you wouldn’t be able to see either, it’d be that high. Wouldn’t worry ‘bout a little thing like a puncture then.’ He was strangely patient, almost subdued as we sweated at the cover, a spinifex wren darting flashes of blue. It took us three hours to cover the fifteen miles. We were into an area of steep sand-hills then, the vegetation sparse and all burned up, not a sign of a tree anywhere, only wattles. At noon we headed into the sun, holding on a course due north until we had covered eight miles. The same dead scene, poor scrub and no trees, and the sandhills rolling endlessly, shimmering like liquid in the afternoon heat. After a meal we began our search and by nightfall had completed two boxes, which meant that we had made three north-south runs and moved the search area eastward four miles.
That night I remember we were both of us very tense as we sat huddled in sweaters over a miserable fire. It was surprisingly cold after the day’s heat. Kennie was smoking, a thing he seldom did, and he hardly spoke. He seemed shut up inside himself. Quite what the Monster meant to him at that moment I’m not sure. But I know it meant something much more than a geological phenomenon.
We didn’t talk much, both of us wrapped in our own thoughts, but we did discuss the next day’s search. I think we talked about it twice, and each time his eyes shone with a strange inner light. It wasn’t just excitement. It was something more, something deeper. I don’t know what put it into my head, but suddenly I found myself remembering lines from a poem I had to learn as a boy: Nought in the distance but the evening, nought to point my footsteps farther… Burningly it came on me all at once, this was the place! And then at the end of the poem: Dauntless the slug-born to my lips I set, and blew. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.’ I leaned forward, pushing a charred and blackened spike of mulga root into the fire’s glow, now almost dead with white tendrils, smiling to think that I should remember Browning when Ed Garrety, if he had been here, would have quoted Shakespeare. God help me, I didn’t realize how near I had come to understanding. Kennie was no Childe Roland, but he had developed strong moral convictions as a reaction to an unscrupulous father, and like so many young men in the process of growing up, uncertain of his physical courage, he had the need to prove himself.
These are the afterthoughts, of course — an endeavour to explain the inevitability of what happened. But I still cannot excuse myself for not being prepared for it. I should have talked to him, there over the dying ashes of that fire. I knew that this second journey out into the desert was a self-imposed ordeal, that he was tensed up and scared. But I thought it was something physical, a weakness to be overcome, a challenge. I never appreciated his real fear. I never understood, till it was too late, that this search for a copper deposit in the Gibson Desert had become for him a sort of purification of the greed he had grown up with.
He was awake at the first light, his eyes dark-rimmed with lack of sleep. ‘We’ll find it today, won’t we?’ his voice was high and trembling. ‘We must find it today.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘If it’s there.’ Instinctively I felt the need to damp down his intense eagerness.
We had completed the first box by nine o’clock. The going had been bad, but it was worse on the second leg north, the sandhills steep-faced, requiring a running start flat out in four-wheel drive. I.was driving at the time, the sun in my eyes; Kennie was acting as observer. I saw him suddenly lean forward as the wheels churned at the top of a sandhill. I thought he had seen what we were looking for and I slammed on the brakes, the bonnet of the Land-Rover dipping to the sand trough below. ‘What is it?’ I was looking at him as we sat there motionless, the radiator steaming. He was still leaning forward, staring straight ahead, his eyes wide and his face drained of all colour, almost white.
He didn’t answer and I cut the engine to let it cool, shading my eyes and staring into the sun. But the view hadn’t changed, the desert a series of giant sand swells rolling away to the horizon, an ocean of red sand patched with vegetation. And then, very faint above the boiling of the rad, I heard the sound of an engine. ‘A plane?’
He nodded, pointing, his hands clenched and his body strained forward. The drone of it was moving across our front from left to right and a moment later I caught a glimpse of silver beyond a distant sandhill. It was flying low, literally skimming the surface. We caught another glimpse of it, a flash of sun on metal, to the right of us now and flying south. The sound of it faded. ‘Your father?’ I asked. It had looked like the same plane.
He held up his hand, sitting listening, his body rigid. The radiator had stopped boiling and in the silence we heard it again, flying north this time. We didn’t see it. But both of us knew what the pilot was doing. He was flying a low level search, doing exactly what we were doing, but doing it faster and with much less effort.
The sound came and went for perhaps ten minutes, and then we lost it. We didn’t hear it again until at 09.42 it passed to the north of us, a speck high in the sky flying back towards the west. We were both of us out of the Land-Rover then, standing in the hot sun at the very top of the sandhill, and when the sound had gone and we lost sight of it, Kennie turned to me. ‘D-dogging us like that — why didn’t we do it by plane?’ He was suddenly very tense.
‘You think he’s found it?’
He shrugged, his eyes still staring at the empty sky to the west.
‘If I’d hired a plane and we’d failed to find it, then you’d be telling me we should have done a ground search.’
He looked at me then. ‘You can’t win, can you?’ He said it with a smile, but the tension was still there and his face looked pale.
We didn’t say anything after that, but pressed on fast, taking a chance and moving the area of our search forward a few miles. We were then into a patch of old mulga scrub, all dead and their roots half buried in the sand, and we had two punctures in quick succession. Altogether it was a bad day with only two boxes completed from our new starting point. Clouds came up in the late afternoon and the night was very dark. Our position was now 26 miles east of the lira, and I remember thinking that the abo who had given McIlroy the directions must have been a hell of a tireless walker. Either that or the Monster didn’t exist.