I sat back again, against the hot rock. So, that was Nature’s way. The mosquito felt pain and panic but the dragonfly knew nothing of cruelty. He didn’t have the imagination to put himself in the mosquito’s place. He just enjoyed his meal. Humans would call it evil, the big dragonfly destroying the mosquito and ignoring the little insect’s suffering. Yet humans hated mosquitos too, calling them vicious and bloodthirsty. All these words, words like ‘evil’ and ‘vicious’, they meant nothing to Nature. Yes, evil was a human invention.
Chapter Nineteen
It was dark, probably around midnight. We were lying in a culvert, looking out over the edge at the dry black highway. We’d just come within seconds of making a very big, very fatal mistake. The way Robyn and the others had described it, they’d bowled up to the road, sat there watching for an hour or so, then shoved off again. So we’d taken much the same approach. We were about fifty metres from the gravel edge. I was leading, then came Lee limping along, then Fi, and Homer bringing up the rear. It was just the slightest unnatural sound that caught my ear. I was going to ignore it and go on, but my instincts took over, and I stopped and looked to the right. And there they were, a dark solid mass coming slowly down the road.
Now my instincts betrayed me: they told me to freeze; they stopped me from going anywhere. I had to get rational again, and fast. I had to activate that determined voice in my brain: ‘If you do nothing, you’ll die. Move, but move slowly. Be controlled. Don’t panic’ I started fading back, like a movie played backwards, and nearly stepped straight into Lee. Luckily he didn’t say anything; I felt his surprised hesitation, then he too started stepping backwards. By then the patrol was so close that it became dangerous to move any further. We stood still and pretended we were trees.
There were about ten soldiers and they were in double file, dark shapes against the skyline, higher than us because we were in the scrub off the shoulder of the highway. I didn’t know where Fi and Homer were but I hoped they wouldn’t suddenly come blundering out of the bushes. Then my heart seemed to stop at a sound away to the left, a startled rattle of movement. The soldiers reacted as though someone had pressed a button in their backs. They leapt around, spread out in a wide line and threw themselves to the ground. They came shuffling forward on their elbows, facing Lee and me, but with the nearest one just metres to our left. The whole thing was frighteningly efficient. It seemed like these were the professional soldiers Mr Clement had told us about.
A moment later a giant torch, its light burning a path through the night, began to search the bush. We followed its traverse as though we were already caught in its beam. Then the light hesitated, stopped, focused, and I saw what actually was caught in its beam. A rabbit, very young, crouched low to the ground, its little head searching to the left and right, sniffing at the white shining around him. There was laughter from the road. I could feel the relaxation. Men started standing. I heard a rifle being cocked, a few comments, then a violently loud explosion. The rabbit suddenly became little fragments of rabbit, spread over the ground and rocks, a bit of fur splattered on the trunk of a tree. No one came down the embankment. They were just bored soldiers, enjoying themselves. The light switched off, the patrol got back into its formation, and continued down the road like a dark crocodile.
Only when they were out of sight and hearing, and Fi and Homer had come forward, did I allow myself to get the shakes.
When we did go on into the culvert we travelled like snails rather than crocodiles or soldiers, crawling silently along. I don’t know about the others but I could easily have left a glistening trail behind me, a trail of sweat.
We stayed there about an hour, and in that time we saw only one small convoy. There were two armoured cars in the lead, followed by half a dozen jeeps, half a dozen trucks, then two more armoured cars. We also saw a second patrol; a truck with a spotlight mounted on the roof of the cabin and a machine gun in the back. It wasn’t a very smart arrangement, because we could see it from a long way off, the light combing the bush, backwards and forwards. We had time to slide back into the scrub and watch from behind trees. I wouldn’t like to have been a soldier in that truck, because guerillas could have picked them off easily. Perhaps it showed that guerillas weren’t so active around here. But as I waited behind the tree for the truck to pass I was surprised and a little alarmed to realise how much I was starting to think like a soldier. ‘If we were up a tree with rifles,’ I thought, ‘and one person shot out the spotlight and the others went for the machine gunner ... Better still have one person out the front shooting through the windscreen to get the people in the cabin ...’
Satisfied with our ‘time spent in reconnaissance’ we withdrew further into the bush to talk. We agreed that it was dangerous and probably pointless to stay there any longer. We looked at Homer, for ideas on what to do next.
‘Can we just go up to the Heron?’ he asked. ‘I want to have a look at something.’
The Heron was the local river, not named after the birds but after Arthur Chesterfield Heron, who’d been the first person to settle in the district. Half of Wirrawee, including the High School, was named after him. The river flooded occasionally, so that the bed was wide and sandy, and the water itself meandered across its bed in a pretty casual way. A long old wooden bridge – almost a kilometre long – crossed the Heron just outside Wirrawee. The bridge was too narrow and rickety for the highway, and about every twelve months there’d be a big ruckus about the need for a new one, but nothing ever seemed to get done. To close it for any time would have been a big inconvenience, as the detour into town was a long and awkward one. In the meantime the bridge was quite a tourist attraction – there wasn’t a big demand for postcards in Wirrawee but the few that you could buy showed either the bridge or the War Memorial or the new Sports Centre.
Under the bridge, along the banks of the river, were the picnic grounds and the scenic drive. ‘Scenic’ was a joke; it was just a road that went past the rotunda and the barbecues and the swimming pool, and on into the flower gardens. But that’s where Homer wanted to take us, and that’s where we went. Three of us, anyway. Lee had done enough. His leg was hurting and he was sweating. I realised how exhausted he was when we parked him under a tree and told him to wait, and he hardly complained at all. He just closed his eyes and sat there. I kissed him on the forehead and left him, hoping we’d be able to find the tree again on the way back.
We got very cautious once we were close to the bridge, as we figured it might be heavily guarded. It was obviously the weakest link of the highway, which I guessed was why Homer was so anxious to see it. We came at it from a sideways direction, across country, through the Kristicevics’ market gardens. I wondered how my mate Natalie Kristicevic was doing, as I munched on her snowpeas. It was good to have some fresh greens, even if Fi got nervous at the noise I made crunching them.
From among the sweet corn we had a good view of the bridge and the picnic grounds. We could see the dark silhouettes of soldiers walking along the bridge. There seemed to be six of them, four standing at one end while the other two prowled around on a regular beat. Another convoy came through, and the sentries gathered at the end of the bridge, watching it. One held a clipboard and made notes, checking the number of vehicles maybe. One talked to the drivers; the others seemed to search under the trucks. It took quite a while. The bigger trucks then crawled across the bridge with wide gaps between them. They obviously didn’t have a lot of faith in Wirrawee’s mighty bridge.