‘Tell me, Boyle, did you have any luck?’
This referred to a passage in his letter of several months earlier, in which the Colonel had written:
With reference to the boy Jackie, it is most important that you detain him if he camps down with you before my arrival. If you should hear of his whereabouts even, from other natives, I would ask you to send word to him that his assistance is needed in locating the remains of Voss and his party, as well as those of the mutineers, or, if God should grant that any of these men be still alive, their unfortunate persons.
Now the Colonel could not wait to hear.
Boyle laughed. Out of respect for his stained whiskers, he formed his full lips into a delicate funnel, and spat.
‘Jackie,’ said the grazier, ‘did pass through Jildra a couple of weeks ago.’
‘And you did not apprehend him?’
The Colonel was quite taut.
‘Apprehend Jackie!’ said Boyle. ‘A man would as well attempt to put a willy-willy in a bag.’
‘Did you at least question him?’
‘Useless,’ sighed Boyle.
The Colonel would cheerfully have put under arrest this subordinate who had failed in his duties, but, in the circumstances, had to content himself with a show of blazing heartiness.
‘My dear fellow,’ he exclaimed, ‘do you know what you have done? You have only thrown the needle back into the haystack.’
Boyle waved a puffy hand.
‘Jackie,’ he said, ‘is mad.’
‘Madness will sometimes make sense,’ replied the Colonel piercingly.
‘I do not doubt you would have drawn the teeth out of the patient. Everybody always would have, except myself,’ said Boyle, who was still cheerful. ‘But come inside, Hebden, and let us sit down to a friendly drink. I can offer you some genuine Jamaica. None of this local stuff.’
So Jackie was not apprehended, just then.
*
What of Jackie?
On the most fateful day of his life, this boy, who had experienced too much too early, had run from the camp of his adoptive tribe. He ran a good deal at first, while the red light rose higher in the empty morning, but when the yellow sun took full possession of the sky the fugitive figure began to walk, though even then he was forced intermittently to run, as flashes of the grey soles of his feet would indicate.
The boy, whose isolation in the colourless landscape was not made less terrible by his black skin, carried with him his empty hands. He wore a girdle of bark cloth, and round his neck, upon a string that he had begged one evening from Mr Judd, the bone-handled pocket-knife, a present from their leader. So that, as well as being alone, he was almost quite naked. In normal circumstances, the isolation would gradually have been reduced by the many little measures that made life agreeable and possible: by following the tracks of animals, by looking into scrub or logs, by looking for water or honey, by looking, always by looking. Temporarily, however, his eyes would not see clearly, and the loneliness was increased by his thoughts. Terrible knives of thought, sharpened upon the knives of the sun, were cutting into him. At night his thoughts, less defined, became, or were interchangeable with those spirits that haunted the places where he chose to sleep.
So Jackie continued on his way. Whether he made fire or not, he was not saved from darkness. When it was necessary he did dig for yams, or stone a lizard, or suck the liquid roots of certain trees, or even the leaves of trees while the dew was still upon them, because to quench thirst and satisfy hunger were habits that he had learnt. Once he stalked some emu chicks, and eventually clutched a straggler and was feeling for his little knife, but suddenly preferred to wring the bird’s neck.
How, finally, he came to lose the knife he could not tell, but threw off the broken, greasy string, glad for what was a disaster of some practical significance.
The absence of the knife’s physical weight did not relieve his spirit, however. Because he was without obligations and there was nobody to observe, he would certainly play at times as if he had been still a child, but these short-lived games did not really interest him, for duties were allocated to children at a very early age.
At least he knew the comfort of motion. He was always travelling. Once at dusk, in an outcrop of rock, he came upon the hip-bone of a horse still wearing its grey hide and, next to it, a snaffle ring that rust was eating. The boy could not help but recall the immaculate, the superhuman perfection that the splendour of all such harness could suggest. In his mind it glittered, as in the country of its origin. He touched the ring, but became more cautious, even afraid, as he approached the fusty clothes that contained the few remains of a man. Then, he kicked the bundle, and rummaged in it. It was, he saw, the last of the one they called Turner, whom he had avoided whenever possible on account of his smell, which was the particular smell of all dirty white men.
The boy lingered in that darkening desert of broken windmills and old umbrellas. Beyond the rocks, with their cutting edges of glass, he found a handful of hair. He pulled the tuft as if it had been a plant — at least it was growing out of the sand — and as he shook it free, he shivered for the sensation of white man’s hair, that he was touching for the second time. This was fine, frizzy stuff, a smouldering red in the last light. This, the blackfellow realized, would be the hair of Mr Angus. He remembered the thighs of the young man gripping the withers of a horse, and his pink skin shining through a wet shirt.
In that desert place the light continued to deepen.
Whatever else there might have been, Jackie knew there was no time left to discover it. So he ran from the dead men. When overtaken by darkness, about a mile off, he had reached a patch of brigalow scrub, and there he lay down.
Moonlight was of doubtful benefit when it came, because all night the spirits of the dead were with him. The thin soul of Turner was hanging like a possum, by its tail, from a tree. There was a cracking of sticks and whips by Mr Angus, who would rise up very close in a huge, white, blunt pillar of furry light. The boy thought he would not be able to endure it, and was pouring sand upon his head. When daylight came, his eyes were turned up and the rims of his eyelids staring outward, in a kind of fit. But he soon recovered in the heat of the morning and continued eastward, talking to himself of what he had seen.
As he left the country of the dead behind him, he realized that he had not found the remains of Mr Judd. Journeying along, through the glare of the sun and the haze of memory, the form of the big white man was riding with him on and off, the veins in the back of his broad hand like the branches of a tree, his face a second copper sun. This link between the flesh and the sullen substance of nature was in itself an assertion of life, and the boy would hang his head in relief and shame.
Jackie promised himself great happiness in talking to old Dugald. As he approached Jildra, he began to sing. To his disappointment, however, he discovered that Dugald had become so old he was again young, and he, Jackie, was weighed down with the wisdom of age. So he did not tell Dugald much beyond some uninteresting facts concerning the mutiny of the white men. All else he kept to himself.
For it is not possible to communicate lucidly with men after the communion of souls, and the fur of the white souls had brushed the moist skin of the aboriginal boy as he shuddered in the brigalow scrub. He was slowly becoming possessed of the secrets of the country, even of the spirits of distant tribal grounds. The children of Jildra ran screaming from him and hid in the gunyahs, and when he went from there, whole tribes of strange natives would beat the trees as he approached, or sit in ashy silence round their fires as he recounted to their unwilling ears tales of the spirit life.