Death of a River Guide (9 page)

When he awoke everything was black, the fire long out. He looked at the bunk below him, but no form covered the stretched hessian sugar sacks that served as a mattress. His father had not returned. Try as he might, sleep would not come to Harry. Outside he heard the soft swish of snow falling and the occasional scream of a devil, loud and piercing. Finally he got up, lit the kerosene lantern, and sat in its weak puddle of light till morning came. Only then did he return to his bed. That night he built the fire up again, but this time he had filled the hut with wood during the day so that he would not have to venture out into the drying shed in the dark. Shortly before nightfall he stood at the doorway and called his father's name, but there came no reply. He called again and again, called until he was hoarse, then went inside, but did not cry for fear his father would at that moment of weakness walk in and find him blubbering. He sat the pan with the roo patties next to the fire once again, ready to go on the fire at the sound of footsteps. There were no footsteps that night or the following night. There was a lot of snow. There was a lot of cold wind. Harry burnt the kerosene lantern through the second night and through most of the third night, until there was so little kerosene left that he had to put it out so that there would be some to use when Boy returned. On the morning of the fourth day Harry's fever passed and was replaced by the serene weakness of those who have not eaten for so long that their bodies no longer recognise the sensation of hunger. Though he felt no desire beyond that of wishing to endure till his father returned, he recognised that he must eat. He cooked the ten roo patties he had prepared four days before, ate them all with a growing urgency, then prepared and cooked and ate another ten. Then he knew he must go search for his father.

He boiled some potatoes to take with him and put them in a sugar bag. He put on his father's bluey coat, which his father had left the day he had last been at the hut, for that, unlike now, had been a warm and pleasant day. He strung the sugar bag around his body with a piece of old thin hemp. He stood up, walked over to the fireplace, hitched up the thick black flaps of the bluey coat that hung heavy as a woollen blanket down to his knees, opened the buttons of his fly, and pissed on the dying fire. A small cloud of ammoniac ash and steam rose from the fireplace, as if a miniature bomb had struck. Harry did up his fly, let the coat flaps fall back, turned, and walked out of the hut.

He found his father an hour and a half later, up one of his runs, a great branch on top of him, his body a stiff snow-white form. It did not anger Harry that the carrion-eating devils had eaten half his father's face and parts of his hands and arms. That was how it was. It was the same law that allowed them to snare wallabies with the slag of blood about their mouths. But like he felt for the wallabies he felt for his father. He felt shock. The way that in death the pink bone of his father's skull looked so similar to the pink bone of the wallaby carcasses. Shocked at the way living things can be killed, and how there is no coming back from death. He went back to the hut and returned with a rope, an axe and a spade. He chopped the branch into sections that he could drag away with his rope, then nearby found a small, straggly stringybark gum, Boy's favourite tree, close to which he dug a hole through the snow and into the hard, stony earth below for his father's body. This labour took most of the rest of the day. By the end of it he was very weak again. Harry placed his father's body in the grave, covered the savaged side of the face with small branches of beech, looked at the half that remained and tried to remember his father. But Harry could recall nothing, and he felt ashamed that the only thought in his mind was how the sprigs of beech betopping Boy's coarsely hued and textured woollen clothing made his father look more like a tree than ever. Albeit a fallen, broken tree. Harry filled the grave up with dirt, at first slow but then quicker and quicker, because as his body worked he felt his soul fill with an anger. Why had his dad done this? Harry's anger became a fury and the fury propelled mounds of earth violently into the grave, until there was no respect or grief but only something that verged on hate. Why had Boy stood under this tree? Why had he allowed this branch to fell him, when all that while Harry was waiting at the hut for him in his sick bed? Why had Boy forgotten him? Left him? Betrayed him? Not that Harry said any of these things or anything at all. Not that Harry even had words for what he thought. But Harry felt it and he felt it as a flame that consumed his body. Then the grave was full and complete with a mound. And Harry's fury dissipated into the cold early evening air as quickly and completely as his mist-breath. He felt as if nothing remained within him, not love, not hate, not even a desire to move. He turned for home and had taken at best six steps when something impelled him to swing around and look one last time at the grave. What he saw was miraculous. The stringybark was unfolding into massive lemon-coloured blossom, six weeks of summer compressed into as many minutes of winter.

Harry returned home in the dark. This time the darkness did not frighten him. Nothing seemed to touch him. He felt as if he were his father's ghost.

He went straight to bed without even lighting a fire. The next morning he ground up more of the roo meat, cooked sixteen roo patties, ate four, and packed the rest in a possum skin in his sugar bag. He boiled a dozen potatoes and put them in with the patties. He filled up the rest of the sugar bag with matches, a billy, some tea and sugar and a blanket. Then he went out to the drying shed and carefully tied three dozen wallaby skins onto the back of his pack with hemp string, wrapping the lot in Boy's oilskin coat. To not carry them out would, he knew, be a waste of a trip. There were hundreds of skins remaining and it would take a number of trips to get them all out, but Harry knew that by taking what skins he could, no one could accuse him of being a bludger and shirking his duties. He knew he ought go and clear his snares of the latest catch, but he did not desire to see any more death. Instead he struck out north west, back to the land of people and farms and towns.

Harry had been walking for a day and a half when he met up with his uncles George and Basil. Before Harry even spoke, they seemed to know what had happened. They looked at him in a way different than he had ever been looked at before. They looked at him as if he were no longer a child but an adult. Harry looked up at the two men. George short and, as was Boy, built like a brick shithouse. Basil as thin and sinewy and tough as a piece of reused fencing wire, and on occasion as brittle. The one whom Harry would end up resembling. Basil went round the back of Harry and took the pack off his shoulders. ‘Get the load off your feet, Nugget,' said George, Nugget being the name the family had taken to calling him on account of his complexion, so dark that Basil, who (and perhaps for this very reason) was every bit as dark as Harry, once said Harry looked as if someone had rubbed his face with Nugget boot polish.

They all sat down. The long man with the sinewy arms and wide shoulders on a fallen log, thereby accentuating his height; the squat, powerful man with his back to the log, thereby accentuating his shortness, and opposite them the dark boy-man with the face that spoke of nothing and suggested everything. Basil rifled around in the right pocket of his pants and pulled out a battered tin, from which he took a pack of cigarette papers and some tobacco. Placing the tin between his legs, Basil moistened the edge of three cigarette papers and stuck the three papers to his chapped lower lip, so that they dangled like washed nappies from a clothesline, then used his flat index finger, the tip of which was missing from some long-ago chopping accident, to roll the tobacco leaves into three sticks in his left palm. He placed each stick into a paper and rolled it into a cigarette. When he was finished, Basil placed the three cigarettes in the left side of his mouth, lit all three with one vesta struck off his boot, and passed one to Harry and another to George. They sat there, enjoying the brief flare at the end of the smoke as they inhaled and the sensation of the savoury wet sweet smoke filling their mouths and tumbling down their throats and out of their noses, not looking at each other, all looking straight ahead or straight down till George, in his low voice both melodious and gravelly, finally spoke.

Saying: ‘And Boy?'

Harry turned and looked at George, and knew what he must say and how he must say it, like a man, and he was at once grateful for being allowed the space between his feelings and his tongue that this response allowed: ‘A tree,' said Harry. He stopped.

After a time George said, ‘Yep,' as though he had just lost some money at the horses and was philosophical about the loss. George looked down at the rollie he held between his thumb and forefinger, the smouldering end shielded within the cavern of his curled hand, and, his voice now a halting whisper, said, ‘Ye-ep,' as though it were two words, two of the saddest words he knew.

Harry knew he had to say something more.

‘A rotten branch of bloody myrtle,' he blurted. Now he was a man, now that he had the respect of his uncles as their equal, he immediately wanted back the woman ways allowed a boy-child, wanted to hug George's belly and cry and cry. But that was not possible. So instead he focused his eyes on the coal-red tip of his rollie, inhaled to make it flame, and then closed his eyes as the smoke unravelled in fern coils in his mouth. He thought he saw his mother coming toward him, a very powerful feeling it was, and she said, ‘I love you,' and then was gone. Harry opened his eyes and spoke in a slow and quiet voice.

Saying: ‘Six days ago.'

I could, of course, be mad. That is a possibility. That is also a form of hope. If insane, this entire horror is nothing more than a delusion, a malfunction of nerve endings and electrochemical impulses. If sane, I am in true agony. In hell. If sane, I am dying. And being humiliated by memory at the same time. For I am none too happy with what this moving weight of water, this river is showing me. When I was a kid I wished for a set of x-ray specs like they had in the cartoons, that showed you the bird cooking in the cat's mind while the cat croons sweetly to the bird, that showed the crook with moneybags for a heart who is telling the sweet old rich lady how much he likes her terrible cooking. I used to watch them with Milton, on the street outside Burgess's electrical store where they had a grand display of televisions working in the front window, and everyone who didn't have one of these new wonders - which was most of Hobart for a long time - stood in the rain and the heat and the traffic fumes, laughing and pointing and saying it was only a fad. Now my wish has come true and I wish it hadn't. These visions are my x-ray specs - with them I see not the surface reality but what really took place, stripped of all its confusing superficial detail. Except what I see now exposed isn't a cat or a comic crook. It is me. And I am not pleased about that, about the way the river is shoving my mind and heart about, pushing my body, forcing open parts that I thought closed forever.

Because I could be mad, but I know I am not. And I know I can't stop seeing what I am seeing, what took place back then - the bedroom filled with tears, which then spilt over into the small kitchen and the dingy bathroom and from there filled the bedrooms and the loungeroom, so many tears that we swam in them and began to drown in them. At which point I opened the door and the dam burst and out roared a river of tears, and being washed away with that river was me, to be taken in its turbulent waters in a crazy serpentine course through the next thirteeen years of my life all over this vast continent.

A river of tears.

Upon its banks, on a small beach of river sand, I spy Aljaz sleeping as the forest takes its forms and shapes for the day in the earliest of dawn's dim light. Wet and pungent comes the smell of the damp black earth to my nostrils; of the forest dying, to be reborn as fecund rot and fungi, small and waxy, large and luminous; to be reborn as moss and myrtle seedlings, minuscule and myriad; as Huon pine sprigs, forcing their way through the crumbling damp decay, forked and knowing as a water diviner's stick; as the celery top saplings, looking as if a market gardener had planted them there; as the small hardwater ferns and old scrubbing-brush-topped pandanni. Here, ensconced within the river's waters I see it all, feel it all, sense everything that once was part of my recent life. It's as if I am now lying there on the ground beside Aljaz on that morning so distant it seems impossible it was only three days ago. As if I too am beginning to drink the richness of that early morning into my body and soul. Aljaz sits up and sees that his sleeping mat and bag lie within the white sand perimeter of riverbank dried and kept dry by the campfire that lies at the hub of the circle, now reduced to a fine hot dust and a few pieces of charcoal. A kangaroo rat scavenging vegetable scraps at the fire's edge bounds away the moment it senses Aljaz's woken presence. Aljaz rolls over onto his stomach and looks at the black wet earth beyond the circle, at the mist above and around, and runs his fingers through the white river sand, dry and warm. He deftly kicks his sleeping bag off and naked walks to the site of the fire, upon which he place a few sticks as thin as string and upon which he then blows gently through pursed lips until a lick of flame begins that morning.

 the third day 

That day, the third of their journey, they paddled their rafts on and their paddling took them further into remote country, more days away from any vestige of modern people. Took them past huge rocks that arose from the water like monsters, past sandbanks bearing traces of strange animal prints, took them through the sound of wind moving manferns in the most beautiful of motions, like sea anemones on the ocean floor. Not that the punters saw this or much else for that matter, for they only saw what they knew and they knew none of it, and recognised little, and most of that was the world they carried within their crab-backed rafts - their tents and dry camp clothes and coffee pots and routines and rules for ordering the crowding chaos that loomed over them and threatened them and which Aljaz felt as a caress. They felt consumed by the river, felt that they had allowed it to chew them up in its early gorges and were now being digested in its endlessly winding entrails that cut back and forth in crazed meanderings through vast unpeopled mountain ranges. And it frightened them, these people from far away cities whose only measure was man; it terrified them, this world in which the only measure was things that man had not made, the rocks and the mountains and the rain and the sun and the trees and the earth. The river brought them all these feelings, and of a night it brought worse: the most terrible blackness, the most abrupt and ceaseless noises of rushing water and wind in leaves and nocturnal animals moving. There were of course the stars, but their infinite space was no solace, only evidence of a further encircling world in which it was possible to be lost and never found and never heard.

Some of the punters went quiet. Others began to talk more and more. They took photographs of streams that looked like wilderness calendars, and rocks they fancied looked like a human face or a man-made form - a boat, a machine, a house. On balance, Aljaz preferred the quiet ones.

A cold zephyr raced past them, hurriedly announcing the cold front it preceded, and then like some youthful scurrying envoy of war was gone again, too soon for the punters to readily apprehend its message, long enough for Aljaz to stop feeling relaxed.

They paddled on. Then two kayakers in boats of bright yellow and luminous blue were upon them and they said that their names were Jim and Fin and that they had left the Collingwood Bridge only the day before. Their kayaks were much faster than the plodding rafts and the kayakers were skilful and nimble in their handling of their craft. They played on the rapids like water creatures, darting back and forth as if they were freshwater porpoises. They talked a little to the punters and said that they were pushing on through Deception Gorge that very same day because the long-range weather forecast was for a huge low coming in from the west and they wanted to be well clear of the gorge before the bad weather really struck. They appeared a little drunk and every so often one would pull a bottle of port out of their kayaks and have a swig and then pass it to his companion. And then they were gone, vanished into the river beyond. The rafters paddled on.

As they floated past Rafters Race and left Fincham Gorge and entered the long stretch of river known as the middle Franklin, the rainforest gave way to a more scrubby type of bush that had grown in consequence of repeated firing, all tall gums and silver wattles. Aljaz was no longer sure exactly where he was. A little past where the Walls of Jericho rose up white and striking on a close mountain tier, Aljaz sensed that the punters were unhappy. It was cold and drizzling, yet despite the rain that had arrived soon after lunch the river had not risen an inch. With the river so low their progress remained slow, there being little or no water running over boulders and logs, and the rafts constantly ran aground. Then the guides would have to jump out chest-deep into the river beside the rock or log, grab hold of the deck lines that ran around the pontoons, and reef the raft this way or that, getting all the punters to sit on one side so that their weight worked with the guides' hurting, aching arms to free the raft up and get it moving again. It seemed the worst of both worlds, this paddling a shallow creekbed of a river while the rain fell upon them, heavy and mocking. After three days of hard work the punters were exhausted and wanted to know how far it was to that night's campsite. But for the moment Aljaz did not know where he was. After a further hour's paddling they had not arrived, and it was about then that he realised they had missed the campsite altogether. His eyes had searched the riverbank intensely, hoping that through the sweeps and drifts of rain the telltale little pebble bank with a log sticking out above would be obvious against the backdrop of dense dank greenness. But he had somehow missed it. Perhaps the log had washed away in a winter flood during his absence of so many years.

The punters were even more unhappy when Aljaz told them they would have to paddle for another hour to reach the next campsite, called Hawkins and Dean. He would rather have used the campsite in between, known as Camp Arcade, but there had been reports of it being infested with wasps that summer, so no one was using it.

Another hour of dreary paddling in the growing gloom of late afternoon. The punters' resentment faded into a dull determination to simply get to the campsite. Aljaz scanned the riverbank, hoping against hope that he wouldn't miss this one as well. Suddenly he leant back and reverse-swept his paddle to swing his raft towards the riverbank. He yelled to the Cockroach's raft, pointing at the bank. They landed, tethered the rafts, and Aljaz and the Cockroach went off to explore the site while the punters waited for their verdict. The guides climbed up the steep bank and disappeared into the rainforest. The Cockroach knew that something was wrong. There was no path up to the campsite, and the campsite, apart from a level platform of sand ten metres up from the river, was difficult to recognise.

‘Shit a brick,' said the Cockroach. ‘No one's camped here for years.' It was true. In only a few short years the rainforest had reclaimed the tent sites. A hardwater fern grew up through a small patch of charred earth that Aljaz recognised as a firesite. Blackwoods and celery top pines and myrtle seedlings and freshwater ferns crowded what were once cleared areas. Here and there trees had fallen across the sites levelled for tents and new growth rose up from the fallen trunks staggering toward the distant sun.

Aljaz shrugged his shoulders. ‘There's nothing between here and the gorge,' he said. ‘We're stuck with it.' The Cockroach was annoyed at Aljaz's choice, and Aljaz sensed his annoyance and it only accentuated his own feeling of encroaching depression. For his memory of the river was being destroyed by the natural world of the river itself.

They went back down to the punters and told them, inadequate as the campsite was, they were staying there the night.

‘And tomorrow?' asked Sheena.

‘Tomorrow?' said Aljaz. ‘Tomorrow's a breeze. Tomorrow we are set up for a good run into the big one - Deception Gorge.' Aljaz paused. He looked at the punters and thought he ought say something positive to make amends for the poor site they were about to spend the night in. ‘Look,' he said, ‘I know it's been hard. But the good side of a low level is that Deception Gorge can be got through easily. At high water it becomes difficult. Dangerous.' He made a casual gesture with his hand indicating the low level of the river. He gave a theatrical smile. He said, ‘But we don't have to worry about that.'

With her good arm Sheena had been twirling her paddle back and forth in the water as Aljaz spoke. She looked up when he'd finished. She said, ‘What if the river rises?'

I watch the sheets of rain blur the exhausted, depressed punters into small blobs of colour speckling the big red blobs of rafts; the weary, angry guides more recognisable standing in the shelter of the rainforest. One, the Cockroach, looking downwards and shaking his head, the other, Aljaz, looking not at Sheena but at the dark sky, fearful and not wishing to say so. And then Aljaz does something entirely unexpected: he begins to dance a crazed jig, a berserk cross between a polka and a bush dance, all legs at wild angles and shrieks and yahoos, presenting himself as a fool to the punters below. One by one, the punters begin to smile, and when Aljaz unexpectedly takes a flying leap out of the rainforest and hurtles himself into the bleak cold river they burst out laughing aloud, their depression exorcised in mirth.