The Night Is for Hunting (11 page)

I had a sudden thought that maybe Fi actually believed in her river fairies. I didn’t want to pursue that idea: I pushed it out of my mind fast, before it did any damage.

As we made our slow slow way up the spur Lee hung well back, making sure we weren’t followed. Then, when we were close to the top, he overtook us to go on up and check the ridge. He sure had become lean and fit. As he passed Gavin, the little guy, to my surprise, yanked at his T-shirt and asked, ‘Can I come with you?’

I made one of those faces at Homer that says ‘Can you believe it?’ I was pleased when Lee nodded though. It was the first time Gavin had shown any open interest in us or the things we were doing, and I’d have hated for Lee to knock him back.

So off they went and that was a minor relief for me, because it meant one of the kids was more or less at the top, on Tailor’s Stitch. Only three to worry about now, although for this kind of stuff they were the three most difficult. We toiled on upwards, me just about ready to jump off the nearest cliff, but using precious energy to cajole and humour and encourage.

With an hour of light left, I finally saw the familiar ridgeline ahead. It had been the slowest trip I’d ever done. I could have knelt on the rock and kissed it, like the Pope when he turns up at an airport. But again we decided to wait, like Iain and Ursula and the Kiwi guerillas, before going over the top. I hadn’t always thought it was necessary, then or at other times since, but at dusk, with a largish group, it seemed sensible.

The kids flopped against the rocks and made their usual grumbling noises about how tired and hungry and sore they were. I passed out the last of the water and tried to ignore the grumbling. I could almost wish Gavin was there. At least he wasn’t a whinger.

It took the whole hour of daylight for them to get their breath back, even though we’d been progressing at the rate of a snail with a wooden leg. I was hoping to get into Hell without another stop, despite the track being so narrow and slippery and overgrown. It was downhill all the way.

Then Lee reappeared suddenly with Gavin, and bullied us into getting up and moving fast to the top of the track. He was very impatient, and it got everyone’s backs up. I didn’t know what the big hurry was, but it misfired, because the kids virtually went on strike. In the end, to shut them up, I carried Casey, Homer carried Jack, Kevin carried Natalie and only Gavin walked in on his own. Natalie was asleep by the time we got to the campsite, which says a lot for the gentle way Kevin carried her.

It was a horrible night though. The track was always difficult, and in the dark, when we were tired ourselves, it was too much. As if that wasn’t enough it started raining in the last half hour, and it got as greasy as a frypan.

Luckily none of the kids wanted anything to eat. We shoved them into two tents. We had four tents altogether these days, all of them doubles. We’d had three empty places for quite a while. The little kids fitted into their two tents easily and then we drew bits of grass to decide who’d squash in with them. Lee drew the short straw.

I crashed, and I assumed the others did too.

When Lee woke me I figured he must have been even more uncomfortable than I’d expected. Through the opening to the tent, behind his lean shoulders, I could see it was barely dawn. There was just a dark grey in the sky to contrast with the black of the night. It was still raining, a depressing drizzle that looked as though it might go on forever.

‘What is it?’ I asked sleepily. I was gradually working up to feeling annoyed, but I didn’t have enough energy for that yet. The first morning in ages I had a chance to sleep in, and Lee had to wreck it.

‘Can you come for a walk?’ he said. Then he disappeared. For a moment I lay there wondering if I’d dreamt it, but I could hear him moving around outside. Cursing silently, so I wouldn’t wake Fi, I pulled on my boots and crawled out of the tent. When I did I realised he meant what he’d said quite literally. He had a pack on his back and was obviously set for a hike.

I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t have the energy for this.

But I knew Lee well enough not to waste time asking questions. It took only a minute to get ready. I’d slept in my clothes, as we usually did these days. I grabbed a sweater and trudged off to our toilet site for a leak, doing up my boots as I squatted there.

When I got back Lee did something that chilled me to the bone. He handed me a rifle.

We had a strange little arsenal in Hell. A collection of guns from all over the place, starting with the .22 and the .303 we’d brought from our own homes after our discovery of the invasion, and others we’d picked up along the way. We didn’t bother with them much, because they were so heavy to drag around, and we had so little ammunition. Plus, it was a good idea not to have rifles if we were caught. We still clung to the faint hope we could get away with a cover story of being innocent kids who lived in the bush and hardly knew there was a war on.

I took the rifle Lee handed me though. I was getting scared. Lee looked so damn serious. ‘Hadn’t we better tell the others where we’re going?’ I asked.

‘I left a note for Homer,’ he said.

We didn’t talk again until we were coming back up onto Tailor’s Stitch. The path from Hell led towards Wombegonoo, a bare rounded peak with good long views in every direction. But before Wombegonoo the track ended in a gum tree with multiple trunks. The tree was concealed from anyone standing above it. From the trunks you walked up a sheet of bare rock, which was good because it meant you left no footprints.

I lay against one of the trunks, wanting to groan with utter weariness. Only pride prevented me from giving up and telling Lee I wasn’t interested. It was too hard, too hard. Especially on an empty stomach. I think Lee needed a rest too, because he was leaning against another trunk, looking quite grey. But all too soon he straightened up and looked at me as if to say ‘Are you ready?’

I nodded. Pride again. We went over the top of Tailor’s Stitch taking maximum precautions, rifles ready, keeping low and scanning the ridge in both directions. I still didn’t have a clue what we were doing, and that annoyed me more and more, but I was in the mood now to be annoyed by anything.

On the other side we followed the usual policy when we were going along the ridge in daylight, keeping well below the skyline. Again Lee made it clear that we had to be extra-careful, moving with extreme caution. We went about three-quarters of a kilometre I’d guess. Then Lee turned to me and put his fingers to his lips to tell me to be especially quiet. We began tiptoeing downhill, moving with excruciating slowness and looking around at every step. At one point we waited at least ten minutes while Lee stared through the scrub. I stared equally hard in the opposite direction, not sure what I was looking for, but feeling bloody nervous. It was well and truly light by now and still raining, but the type of rain had changed. Instead of a steady drizzle it blew in gusts, sometimes stopping for a few minutes, then starting from a slightly different direction. It was a miserable morning for summer. Warm enough, but miserable. I kept reminding myself that we needed the rain, but it didn’t help my attitude.

We went on, but soon stopped again. Peeping over Lee’s shoulder I saw a large clearing. Something about the way he crouched and peered into it for so long made it obvious that this was our destination. We waited half an hour. That was pretty typical for us. We usually tried to err on the side of caution. ‘Time spent in reconnaissance.’

At last though, Lee was satisfied. He led me into the clearing, right to the middle. We stood, staring down at our target. I felt like Robinson Crusoe, looking at Man Friday’s footstep in the sand. Because at our feet, in a place no-one should have visited for twelve months, in an area inhabited by no-one but us, were the nice fresh remains of a campfire.

I knelt and ran my hand through the ashes. It was like a grey-white porridge. Even in this damp and squally weather a little cloud of white powder blew away when I stirred it up. My hand was whitened by ashes that stuck to my skin. I pulled up my sleeve and burrowed in further. There was still a faint trace of warmth in the heart of the fire. I was satisfied. Not much rain had fallen on this.

‘It’s still warm in the very centre,’ I said to Lee.

He nodded. ‘So what do you think, the last twenty-four hours?’

‘No, you can’t say that. If they left it to burn itself out, it could have been three or four days ago.’

The rule for a fire was that you had to stick your hand in its middle. If you couldn’t, the fire wasn’t out. So the first thing I knew was that experienced farmers or bushwalkers hadn’t lit this fire. They’d never walk away without putting it out properly, especially in summer.

I asked Lee, ‘Do you know who’s been here?’

‘Not a clue. I didn’t see them. But I found the fireplace last night, just as you were about to go down into Hell. I had Gavin with me and I didn’t want to spook him, so I didn’t make a fuss. I don’t think he even noticed it.’

‘Was it still smoking?’

‘Maybe.Hard to tell. It could have been smoke, or it could have been wind blowing the ashes.’

‘Let’s look around.’

We made like detectives, combing the grass, looking for evidence, at the same time listening anxiously for any sign of the people returning. The first thing we found was their actual campsite. They’d had four tents, bigger than ours. You could tell, because the grass was still flattened slightly. And to prove it, I found the holes where they’d hammered in their tent pegs, and even a rock they’d used as a hammer. It had little chips out of it, little white scars.

That was all we found. I was surprised, because I thought they’d have left some food remains, like empty packets and stuff. I wondered if they’d buried them, the way we did, and I started looking for signs of a hole filled in. I couldn’t find anything. They mightn’t know how to put out a fire but at least they seemed to respect the bush enough to clean up their mess.

Then Lee appeared out of a patch of bush and beckoned. I went down there and he showed me a path leading to a spring, the water supply for this campsite. It was a pretty path, winding around through dainty little green plants like teardrops on the ground, with moss spread among them. Tiny white flowers peeped out from under the leaves.

I thought, ‘If God created them he must have fantastically skilful fingers.’ I’m too clumsy to make something that beautiful and delicate.

Five minutes into the trees we came to the spring: a gurgling flow of beautifully clear water seeping from a thick mat of undergrowth. There was a couple of small pools but most of the water ran over rocks, with that irresistible bubbly sound like soft laughter, that must be about my favourite noise in the whole world.

I wandered along its banks, looking for anything that might give a clue to the identity of the phantom campers. They were either friends or enemies – everyone fell into one category or the other these days – and they were nearly certain to be enemies, but it would help a lot if we knew something about them.

By the second pool, a large shallow one surrounded by rocks, I knelt to have a closer look. There was something filmy about the water here, as though a cloud had slipped out of the sky into the pool. Not a full-on cloud: more like a trace of mist. I put my mouth to the water and drank like a dog. In the first gulp I tasted what made the water cloudy. It was a slight soapy flavour. They’d used this pool for washing. The water was so pure, so fresh, that you could see and taste the traces of soap, even though it might have been several days since the campers had been here. I sat up, wiping the soapiness from my mouth. As I did I noticed a trace of colour among the moss, a colour that did not fit in. I felt in there and pulled it out. It was a fragment of paper, still stiff and new. I smelt it. The soapy smell again. This was the wrapping paper from their cake of soap. I looked at it. The writing on it was not English. It was not our alphabet. I had seen the paper before. In the barracks of the Wirrawee airfield, when I was checking it out, that terrible exciting day that we tore the place apart. In the store cupboard of the barracks I’d seen dozens of cakes of this official army-issue soap, all with the same labels. I knew now who our mystery campers were.

Chapter Eight

The truth was that we couldn’t do much about the enemy visitors. For one thing, we still didn’t know a lot about them. They could have been a patrol searching for us. They could have been a patrol having a general look around the mountains, making a routine inspection. They could have been a group of off-duty soldiers taking a stroll to admire the beautiful scenery. All three theories were equally possible. But if there was one thing that made me lean towards the first theory it was my fear of the results of our airfield attack. That attack took us out of the nuisance category and put us into the category of major dangers, who must be caught and eliminated. At all costs. That’s the way they’d be thinking. ‘If they’re there, find them. No matter what it takes, kill them.’

If they also connected us with the hit on Cobbler’s Bay and the breakout from Stratton Prison we were lucky they hadn’t nuked half the country in their determination to get us.

Our only real hope, in the long term, was that they’d think we’d gone away. A long way away. Like, to Alaska.

Preferably Northern Alaska.

I didn’t want to have to put sentries on Tailor’s Stitch every day and night. The cost to us would have been too great. Hell was where we came to rest and recover. If we needed one of the five on duty all the time there’d be no real rest for anyone.

Our biggest advantage was the geography of Hell itself. It was such a wild place, a casserole of trees and rocks. From above, standing on Tailor’s Stitch, you could see only the tops of the trees, and a glimpse of huge boulders. I had lived all my life on the other side of Tailor’s Stitch – the position of our farm made us the closest humans to Hell – and I had never heard of anyone finding their way into it. Except for the vague rumours of the Hermit, a hundred or so years before. Certainly no-one I knew had found the route. We’d fluked it.

So the chance of soldiers, men and women unused to the bush, making the same lucky discovery were pretty thin. Nevertheless we weren’t going to take the risk lightly. When Lee and I got back to the others we had an emergency meeting. We agreed to double and triple check our security. We covered the first two or three hundred metres of the track from Wombegonoo with bark and dead leaves, to make it look like an old animal path. We put a lot more camouflage over our tents and cooking area, so that planes or helicopters would be even less likely to see our campsite. When we had a cooking fire one of the kids got the job of standing over it with a piece of stiff bark, fanning the smoke away. I knew smoke could be visible for a couple of kilometres, but flames can only be seen from a few hundred metres.

As time passed and we did all the obvious things, and as we (and the kids) started getting bored, we got more creative. Or sillier, depending on how you look at it. Lee wanted to do booby traps, and of course Gavin and Jack thought that was a very cool idea. After all, they were specialists. I must admit though, I was impressed by how clever the ferals were. All those months in Stratton, surviving in a totally hostile environment, had taught them a thing or two. Gavin started digging a huge hole in a dark shadowy part of the track, that he planned to cover with branches and fill with sharp sticks. He was a bloodthirsty little boy. Jack was a bit more practical. Instead of trying to dig one huge hole he dug four little ditches, each one just wide enough for an adult foot. His idea was that someone running along the track, chasing us, would put a foot in the ditch and break an ankle. Cute. He also got Lee to help him string some tight wires on steep downhill sections of the track, at neck height. He and Gavin made lots of grotesque jokes about soldiers breaking their necks, or even getting their heads ripped off by these wires, if they hit them at high enough speed.

The problem for us was to remember where they’d put these things, because when it was dark, or you were tired, you’d stomp along the track forgetting all their little surprises. I seriously did nearly break my ankle in one of Jack’s ditches. When I’d finished swearing at him and his stupid booby trap I felt impressed that it worked so well. Jack was secretly delighted I think, although he was smart enough not to show it while I was going off at him.

Needless to say, Gavin never got around to finishing his huge hole.

Fi and I didn’t get too involved in the booby trap operation. We had our minds on something else.

I’d been thinking for a while that I wanted to do something good, something happy and positive for the kids. Maybe for us too. I remembered again the time I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen peeling potatoes, trying to work out when it was Christmas. I’d been quite bitter and depressed that the invasion had stolen our birthdays and Christmas. But now it occurred to me that we were kind of conspiring in the process. No-one could steal Christmas without our permission. We were stealing it from ourselves.

When I realised that I went looking for Fi.

And that’s how we started to prepare for the strangest Christmas ever. It wasn’t just strange because it was a little late. It was more that it was a Christmas of our own invention, because we didn’t have too many of the traditional props. No midnight Mass, no angel sitting at the top of the tree, no holly or ivy, no turkey and stuffing, no plum pudding with old-fashioned coins hidden in it, no stockings to hang on the end of the beds. No beds. If Santa was going to visit Hell he’d have to find something else to shove the pressies in.

It was strange in at least one other way too. There we were getting ready for the peaceful time of Chrissie, when a kilometre or so up the track Lee and two of the little boys were happily making booby traps designed to maim or kill.

For all that though, the kids were genuinely excited when we told them it was time for Christmas. They had no idea what month it was – in fact they hardly knew what year it was – so they took it for granted that we were talking 25 December. It didn’t matter. Oh, it might have mattered to a priest or someone religious like that, but Father Cronin wasn’t around, so we just decided to go for it.

We realised early on that we’d need to raid a house or a farm. Mainly because our food supplies were disappearing fast, with nine mouths to feed. I couldn’t believe how fast they were going. Fi and I – I don’t know why it was still always the girls who did these jobs – sat down and did the big stocktake the day after we brought the kids into Hell. And then we worked out a rough menu. We thought we’d be right for ten days if we were careful. We were quite proud of ourselves for being so organised. But after six days, almost every container I picked up was empty, or near enough to it. I said to Homer, ‘Have you guys been pigging out again?’

‘Me? No way. Look how thin I am.’

‘Well someone must be. We’re going through the food like there’s no tomorrow.’

‘Don’t look at me. I’m innocent, as usual.’

‘Might be the kids.’

‘I haven’t noticed them eating that much. No more than you’d expect from a bunch of half-starved little piglets.’

‘What about Kevin and Lee then?’

‘Doubt it. Why don’t you ask them?’

He had me there. ‘I don’t talk to Lee much these days. Or Kevin for that matter.’

‘Yeah, I’d noticed.’

There was a bit of a silence. I could guess what Homer would think of my poor communications with Kevin and Lee, but I sort of wanted to hear him say it. I don’t know why. The only person who gave me advice these days was Fi, and sometimes that wasn’t enough. I needed to hear what a guy thought, and the guy I respected most in the world, outside my father, was Homer. I wanted to know if he agreed with what Fi said to me on our way down into Hell that time.

After a while Homer said, ‘I thought you two might have sorted things out on Tailor’s Stitch when you were looking at that campfire.’

‘I guess we should have. We were too busy trying to work out who’d been hanging around up there. Looking for clues. Anyway,’ I laughed, ‘it was too cold and wet.’

Homer ignored my laugh. He was reading a book that we’d had down in Hell for ages,
Red Shift.
I think Chris originally brought it in. Homer only read a book when he was desperate, but we’d banned any activities that might make noise. Most of the stuff Homer liked doing involved noise. So some days now, when he wasn’t operating his child-care centre, he was reduced to reading to pass the time.

Now he sat playing with the corners of the pages, riffling through them like he was shuffling cards.

‘You’re not a happy camper at the moment, are you Ellie?’

‘Well, I don’t see any of us actually laughing for joy with every passing day.’

‘You know what I mean.’

I tried to think, not of what to say, but of how to say it in a way that wouldn’t frighten Homer off. I had to translate it into his words. What I mean is, you can’t say stuff to Homer like ‘I’m in love with Lee but I don’t think I can trust him any more.’ The way you talk to Homer is a lot different to the way you talk to Fi.

Eventually I said, ‘I still can’t believe the way Lee went off with that chick in Stratton.’

‘Well, he’s a guy. That’s the way we are. Learn to live with it.’

I didn’t bother to jump at that bait. And Homer didn’t expect me to. He was just going through the motions. Old habits die hard, and he wasn’t going to give up stirring girls when the chance came along. But his mind was already ahead of itself. Without waiting for me to reply he said, ‘The thing is, how many mistakes do you let a bloke make?’

‘Only one, if it’s big enough.’

That stopped him for a while. He actually started making little rips in the side of one of the pages, which shocked me. I never like to damage books. I got in trouble for scribbling on my grandmother’s encyclopaedia when I was three, and I guess I learned my lesson.

But after a few minutes he came back at me again. Very stubborn guy, Homer, kind of dogged.

‘So do you hold this against him for the next fifty years?’

I tried to explain.

‘If it was just a bad call, Lee losing his brains and his balls for a couple of weeks, I can get over that. But what if it shows that he’s got some huge character flaw, like so serious that he can never be trusted? That’s what sticks in my throat. I’m scared there’s a side to him that I didn’t know about before.’

‘Do you think there is?’

‘No.’

I felt a great sense of relief when I said that. It was something I’d never been able to confront, never been sure about.

‘You could at least talk to him about it,’ Homer grumbled.

He sounded so like his father, trying to persuade my dad to go see the local member, and make him do something about the bad roads or the wool stockpile or petrol prices. I almost laughed again.

But I was grateful to Homer. I found myself getting quite sentimental about him. Once again he’d proved himself a true friend. I just couldn’t get a handle on how to solve my problem with Lee.

In the meantime I sat down with Fi to plan Christmas Day in more detail. It wasn’t easy, because of the mess our food supplies had got into. Our first decision was that we had to raid a farm for new stocks of food. We could leave the details until a group meeting, but I figured we needed to get going within forty-eight hours. If the raid failed we could forget about Christmas.

How I longed for a trip to the supermarket. I tortured myself with memories of aisle after aisle crowded with canned peaches and All Bran and Snack chocolate and Jatz biscuits, and the refrigerated section, with the ham and salami and King Island Brie, and then there was the freezer: Sara Lee Chocolate Bavarian and Paul’s Ice-cream and chicken nuggets. When I was tired of those sections I’d start on the deli and the meat and fish and the bread and the fruit and veg. The supermarkets of my mind gave me more pleasure than the real ones ever had before the war.

But I had to push daydreams away. It was time to put our tired imaginations to work.

‘Let’s do the brainstorm,’ I said to Fi.

‘Butcher’s paper,’ she said automatically. ‘Textas.’

‘That’s my joke. Come on, get serious. Let’s start with the essentials. Santa Claus?’

‘Absolutely. For Natalie’s sake,’ Fi said firmly, then added, ‘And for mine.’

‘But what’s he going to bring? I mean, it’s not going to be mountain bikes and roller blades and a box of Milk Trays.’

‘No. I suppose when we raid a farm for food we could try to get something ...’

‘Oh sure. We’re really going to pass up an armful of pasta for a Barbie camper van to give Natalie.’

Fi laughed for about five minutes. It gave me quite a shock. That kind of laughter was rare these days. I was glad I could still make her laugh, considering how angry she’d been at me. She said, ‘I can just see Homer with bullets whistling around his ears, stopping to pick up one of Barbie’s sandals.’

‘Well, if Santa’s going to bring pressies we’ll have to get busy. What can we get for Gavin?’

‘Nothing would please Gavin.’

It took two and a half hours but we finally nutted out a list. Not just presents, but everything: decorations and food and drink and games. We had to give up on a few things, like wrapping paper and plum pudding, but I thought we’d done OK. I was exhausted though, and we hadn’t even done any of the work. I began to realise why parents weren’t always quite as excited about Christmas as we were.