We filled up and checked our petrol before turning in. The situation was becoming critical. Each box was 13 miles of ground covered and at our present rate of consumption we had just enough fuel for five or six more box runs, unless we decided to rely on finding the rira again. We had already taken two cans from the abandoned Land-Rover, but there was still a sufficient reserve there to see us back to the Stock Route. We argued it out for some time, lying wrapped in our swags, but when we started out the next morning we had reached no definite decision.
We need not have bothered. Our search ended that morning just as we had completed the first run north. I was driving, keeping an eye on the clock and the compass as we began the eastward mile. We were then cutting diagonally across the sandhills and for just over a third of a mile we were on the flat floor of a trough, travelling quite fast for once. Then we came to the slope beyond. I didn’t change into four-wheel drive, just kept my foot hard down. It was a mistake. I hit a soft spot near the crest and we slowed, the rear wheels digging in, the chassis slewing and tilting.
It took us half an hour to dig ourselves out and get the Land-Rover to the top. We stopped there for a breather, both of us hot and tired, our tempers frayed. And it was while we were standing there, grateful for the breeze and the clouds that had obscured the sun, that it gradually dawned on us that we were looking across, not another sandhill, but at an area of gibber eroded from the younger Permian overlay to form a shallow rounded hill, and the green that showed in patches in the light brown of the gravel was not the green of vegetation.
I don’t know which one of us realized it first. I think it hit us in a flash almost simultaneously, for both of us suddenly dived for the Land-Rover and the next minute we were roaring down the slope. We hit the bottom on a hard rock, our heads bumping the roof. We were lucky not to break a spring, and when we got out, staring upwards now at the rounded, gentle slope of that hill, it looked like the giant carcase of a giant whale, its petrified flesh blotched with gangrenous streaks of malachite.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Kennie breathed. ‘It really does look like a monster.’ And he started work there and then collecting and examining samples, moving with feverish haste, literally dancing on his toes with excitement. It was copper. No question of that. The whole red-brown hill was patched with a lighter brown, the surface smooth and rounded and littered with stones and small rocks, and the copper, exposed by the weathering of the calcareous sediments and sandstones that had overlaid it, showed in streaks and blotches that were a greenish brown in colour and merged with the sparse covering of spinifex.
Kennie was immediately convinced that it was a discovery of major importance. I was more cautious, fearing he was letting his excitement run away with him. But, growing up with the geology of Australia constantly in his mind, he had developed a sort of sixth sense that I respected, and after we had climbed to the top, so that we had a clear view of the whole hill, he argued very convincingly that this was an old leach area, the Permian sediments worn down by the winds and the extremes of temperature over millions of years to expose the trapped ore in the Archaean rock beneath.
The first thing was to surface map the entire area, and it was while we were discussing this, back at the Land-Rover, planning how we would do it, that the stillness of that strange place was invaded by a low droning sound. It was high up to die southwest, but growing all the time, and then we saw it like an insect descending toward us. It was lost for a while behind the whale back hill, the sound of it beating against the sandhills behind us, and then suddenly it was there to our right hovering over the tail end of the Monster.
We watched as it settled and the blades stopped turning. A man climbed out, glanced quickly in our direction, and then began unloading an aluminium peg about 6 feet long. The battered hat, the bulky body — no question who it was. And Kennie staring, his body rigid, his face gone white as death. I could literally feel the anger in him as he watched his father start to set up the first comer post. The pilot got out, and another man, and they began attacking the rock with hammer and chisel.
That was when Kennie moved. He gave a sort of grunt, not quite a cry, but a furious expellation of breath that expressed the pent-up fury within him. Then he moved, very fast, and the next thing I knew he was in the Land-Rover, the engine roaring as he slammed it into gear and went bucketing across the rock slope towards the helicopter.
I followed on foot. But I didn’t hurry. I didn’t think there was any need. I knew he had to get this off his chest, have it out with his father, and there were two other men there if it came to blows. I saw the Land-Rover stop, saw him jump out and go towards his father, who was standing there, leaning on the post, waiting for him. They were arguing there for about a minute. I could hear Kennie’s voice, high and strident, but not his father’s. Culpin seemed to be reasoning with him quietly.
Then suddenly the whole scene erupted in violence. Culpin dropped the post, caught hold of his son by the collar of his shirt and shook him. The others said later he was merely trying to shake some sense into him, that there was no reason for him to call his father names like that. But there must have been more to it than that for I heard Kennie scream something at him, and then Culpin at him.
That’s when I started to run. But too late.
Kennie had come up off the ground with an inarticulate cry that seemed to express some inner horror. He was round the back of the Land-Rover in a flash and came out holding my rifle. He took about a dozen steps towards his father, then stopped and raised the gun. Culpin didn’t say anything, didn’t move; he just stood there, his mouth open and an expression of shock on his face. Kennie’s movements were quite deliberate. He took careful aim and fired.
I had stopped by then, of course. But at the sound of that shot I started running again.
Culpin’s body took a long time falling, a slow crumpling at the knees. The boy had, in fact, shot him through the heart. But I didn’t know that. I yelled to the other two. I wanted them to grab him before he fired again. The sand drifts tugged at my feet, the rock stony and uneven, and as I raced the last few yards, Kennie standing dazed, his father dead at his feet and the gun lying where he had dropped it, I saw his legs begin to go. He was in a state of shock, trembling violently and unable to speak, and then he fell forward, his arms flung out, reaching for the rock as though to embrace the entire monstrous body of the ore.
The ten days it took me to get out of the Gibson were the loneliest I have ever spent in my life. The real reaction to what had happened didn’t come until after the helicopter had taken off with Kennie and the body of his father. For the rest of that day I just sat there by the Land-Rover, or mooched around unable to think, or even to feel anything. And all the time the greenish brown of that copper showing through the gibber stones and the redder brown of the whale’s back.
And that night, lying sleepless and cold, with nothing there with which to make a fire, I thought back to McIlroy. My God, he’d named it well! McIlroy, Ed Garrety and now Kennie facing a charge of murder — the murder of his own father. And the guilt was mine, or so I felt, alone there in the Gibson with the desert all round me and that hill of copper rising beside me. Edith Culpin’s warning words, Kennie and his talk of mamus, so like his mother, and I lay there remembering his voice, the way he tossed his head when the long hair fell over his face, the irritating little laugh. I wished to God I could have that day again, change what had happened.