Kevin was still standing at the same spot; Robyn was a few metres in front of me and doing what I was doing, standing and looking and puffing and trembling; Fi was in the creek, I’ve got no idea why; Lee was up a tree, about six metres from the ground and rising fast; Corrie was intelligently at the fire and using it as protection; Homer was nowhere to be seen. Neither was the snake.
‘Where is it?’ I yelled.
‘It went that way,’ said Corrie, pointing into the bush. ‘It chased me, but when I got here I jumped over the fire and it veered away.’
For someone who’d just been chased by a frenzied snake she seemed the calmest of us all.
‘Where’s Homer?’ I asked.
‘He went that way,’ said Corrie, pointing in the opposite direction to the snake. That sounded safe enough, even for Homer. I slowly stopped panicking and came in to the fire. Lee, looking a bit sheepish, began descending the tree. Even Homer appeared eventually, coming cautiously out of a dense patch of scrub.
‘Why were you standing in the creek?’ I asked Fi.
‘To get away from the snake of course.’
‘But Fi, snakes can swim.’
‘No they can’t ... can they? Oh my God. Oh my God. I could have died. Thanks for telling me guys.’
That was the end of our major excitement for the day, unless you count the Sausage Surprise that Homer and Kevin produced for tea. It certainly was full of surprises, and like the snake it was the kind of excitement I could do without. We went to bed pretty early. It had been one of those days when everyone was exhausted from doing nothing. I climbed into the sleeping bag at about 9.30, after first checking carefully that it was empty. By that stage only Fi and Homer were still up, talking quietly at the fire.
I sleep pretty soundly, pretty heavily, and this night was typical. At one point I woke up but I’ve got no idea what time it was, maybe three or four o’clock. It was a cold night; I needed to go to the dunny but spent ten minutes trying to put it off. It just seemed too cruel to have to crawl out of that snug sleeping bag. I had to give myself a stern lecture: ‘Come on, you know you have to go, you’ll feel better when you do, stop being such a wimp, the quicker you do it the quicker you’ll be back in this warm bag’. Eventually it worked; I struggled grimly out and staggered about ten metres to a convenient tree.
On my way back, a couple of minutes later, I paused. I thought I could hear a distant humming. I waited, still unsure, but it became louder and more distinct. It’s funny how artificial noises sound so different to natural noises. For a start, artificial noises are more regular and even, I guess. This was definitely an artificial noise; I realised it had to be some kind of aircraft. I waited, looking up at the sky.
One thing that’s different up here is the sky. This night was like any clear dark night in the mountains: the sky sprinkled with an impossible number of stars, some strong and bright, some like tiny weak pinpricks, some flickering, some surrounded by a hazy glow. Most views I get tired of eventually, but never the night sky in the mountains, never. I can lose myself in it.
Suddenly the loud buzzing became a roar. I couldn’t believe how quickly it changed. It was probably because of the high walls of rock that surrounded our campsite. And like black bats screaming out of the sky, blotting out the stars, a V-shaped line of jets raced overhead, very low overhead. Then another, then another, till six lines in all had stormed through the sky above me. Their noise, their speed, their darkness frightened me. I realised that I was crouching, as though being beaten. I stood up. It seemed that they were gone. The noise faded quickly, till I could no longer hear it. But something remained. The air didn’t seem as clear, as pure. There was a new atmosphere. The sweetness had gone; the sweet burning coldness had been replaced by a new humidity. I could smell the jet fuel. We’d thought that we were among the first humans to invade this basin, but humans had invaded everything, everywhere. They didn’t have to walk into a place to invade it. Even Hell was not immune.
I got back to the sleeping bag and Fi said sleepily: ‘What was that noise?’ It seemed that she was the only one awake, though I could hardly believe it.
‘Planes,’ I said.
‘Mmmm, I thought so,’ she said. ‘Coming back from Commem Day I suppose.’
‘Of course,’ I thought. ‘That’s what it’ll be.’
I started to drift into a kind of sleep, restless and full of wild dreams. It still hadn’t occurred to me that there was anything strange about dozens of aircraft flying fast and low at night without lights. It wasn’t till much later that I even realised they’d had no lights.
In the morning, at breakfast, Robyn said, ‘Did anyone else hear those planes last night?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was up. I’d been to the toilet.’
‘They just never stopped,’ Robyn said. ‘Must have been hundreds.’
‘There were six lots,’ I said. ‘Close together and really low. But I thought you slept through it. Fi was the only one who said anything.’
Robyn stared at me. ‘Six lots? There were dozens and dozens, all night long. And Fi was asleep. I thought you were too. Lee and I were counting them but everyone else just snored away.’
‘God,’ I said, starting to realise, ‘I must have heard a different lot to you.’
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ said Kevin, tearing the wrapper off his second Mars Bar. He claimed that he always had two Mars Bars for breakfast, and so far on this hike he was right on schedule.
‘It’s probably the start of World War Three,’ said Lee. ‘We’ve probably been invaded and don’t even know.’
‘Yes,’ said Corrie from her sleeping bag. ‘We’re so cut off here. Anything could happen in the outside world and we’d never hear about it.’
‘That’s good I reckon,’ said Kevin.
‘Imagine if we came out in a few days and there’d been a nuclear war and there was nothing left and we were the only survivors,’ Corrie said. ‘Chuck us a muesli bar someone, will you please.’
‘Apple, strawberry, apricot?’ Kevin asked.
‘Apple.’
‘If there’d been a nuclear war we wouldn’t survive,’ Fi said. ‘That fallout’d be dropping softly on us now. Like the gentle rain from Heaven above. We wouldn’t even know about it.’
‘Did you do that book last year in English?’ Kevin asked. ‘X or something?’
‘Z? Z for Zachariah?’
‘Yeah, that one. That was good I reckon. Only decent book we’ve ever done.’
‘Seriously,’ said Robyn, ‘what do you think those planes were doing?’