The Golden Soak (41 page)

We had our first puncture that morning, but all Kennie said was, ‘Lucky it's a drought an' the spinifex not in seed, otherwise you'd have a clogged rad, the engine running hot – you wouldn't be able to see either, it'd be that high. Wouldn't worry ‘bout a little thing like a puncture then.' He was strangely patient, almost subdued as we sweated at the cover, a spinifex wren darting flashes of blue. It took us three hours to cover the fifteen miles. We were into an area of steep sandhills then, the vegetation sparse and all burned up, not a sign of a tree anywhere, only wattles. At noon we headed into the sun, holding on a course due north until we had covered eight miles. The same dead scene, poor scrub and no trees, and the sandhills rolling endlessly, shimmering like liquid in the afternoon heat. After a meal we began our search and by nightfall had completed two boxes, which meant that we had made three north-south runs and moved the search area eastward four miles.

That night I remember we were both of us very tense as we sat huddled in sweaters over a miserable fire. It was surprisingly cold after the day's heat. Kennie was smoking, a thing he seldom did, and he hardly spoke. He seemed shut up inside himself. Quite what the Monster meant to him at that moment I'm not sure. But I know it meant something much more than a geological phenomenon.

We didn't talk much, both of us wrapped in our own thoughts, but we did discuss the next day's search. I think we talked about it twice, and each time his eyes shone with a strange inner light. It wasn't just excitement. It was something more, something deeper. I don't know what put it into my head, but suddenly I found myself remembering lines from a poem I had to learn as a boy:
Nought in the distance but the evening, nought to point my footsteps further
.…
Burningly it came on me all at once, this was the place!
And then at the end of the poem:
Dauntless the slug-born to my lips I set, and blew. ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.'

I leaned forward, pushing a charred and blackened spike of mulga root into the fire's glow, now almost dead with white tendrils, smiling to think that I should remember Browning when Ed Garrety, if he had been here, would have quoted Shakespeare. God help me, I didn't realize how near I had come to understanding. Kennie was no Childe Roland, but he had developed strong moral convictions as a reaction to an unscrupulous father, and like so many young men in the process of growing up, uncertain of his physical courage, he had the need to prove himself.

These are afterthoughts, of course – an endeavour to explain the inevitability of what happened. But I still cannot excuse myself for not being prepared for it. I should have talked to him, there over the dying ashes of that fire. I knew that this second journey out into the desert was a self-imposed ordeal, that he was tensed up and scared. But I thought it was something physical, a weakness to be overcome, a challenge. I never appreciated his real fear. I never understood, till it was too late, that this search for a copper deposit in the Gibson Desert had become for him a sort of purification of the greed he had grown up with.

He was awake at first light, his eyes dark-rimmed with lack of sleep. ‘We'll find it today, won't we?' His voice was high and trembling. ‘We must find it today.'

‘Perhaps,' I said. ‘If it's there.' Instinctively I felt the need to damp down his intense eagerness.

We had completed the first box by nine o'clock. The going had been bad, but it was worse on the second leg north, the sandhills steep-faced, requiring a running start flat out in four-wheel drive. I was driving at the time, the sun in my eyes; Kennie was acting as observer. I saw him suddenly lean forward as the wheels churned at the top of a sandhill. I thought he had seen what we were looking for and I slammed on the brakes, the bonnet of the Land-Rover dipping to the sand trough below. ‘What is it?' I was looking at him as we sat there motionless, the radiator steaming. He was still leaning forward, staring straight ahead, his eyes wide and his face drained of all colour, almost white.

He didn't answer and I cut the engine to let it cool, shading my eyes and staring into the sun. But the view hadn't changed, the desert a series of giant sand swells rolling away to the horizon, an ocean of red sand patched with vegetation. And then, very faint above the boiling of the rad, I heard the sound of an engine. ‘A plane?'

He nodded, pointing, his hands clenched and his body strained forward. The drone of it was moving across our front from left to right and a moment later I caught a glimpse of silver beyond a distant sandhill. It was flying low, literally skimming the surface. We caught another glimpse of it, a flash of sun on metal, to the right of us now and flying south. The sound of it faded. ‘Your father?' I asked. It had looked like the same plane.

He held up his hand, sitting listening, his body rigid. The radiator had stopped boiling and in the silence we heard it again, flying north this time. We didn't see it, but both of us knew what the pilot was doing. He was flying a low level search, doing exactly what we were doing, but doing it faster and with much less effort.

The sound came and went for perhaps ten minutes, and then we lost it. We didn't hear it again until at 09.42 it passed to the north of us, a speck high in the sky flying back towards the west. We were both of us out of the Land-Rover then, standing in the hot sun at the very top of the sandhill, and when the sound had gone and we had lost sight of it, Kennie turned to me. ‘D-dogging us like that – why didn't we do it by plane?' He was suddenly very tense.

‘You think he's found it?'

He shrugged, his eyes still staring at the empty sky to the west.

‘If I'd hired a plane and we'd failed to find it, then you'd be telling me we should have done a ground search.'

He looked at me then. ‘You can't win, can you?' He said it with a smile, but the tension was still there and his face looked pale.

We didn't say anything after that, but pressed on fast, taking a chance and moving the area of our search forward a few miles. We were then into a patch of old mulga scrub, all dead and their roots half buried in the sand, and we had two puncture in quick succession. Altogether it was a bad day with only two boxes completed from our new starting point. Clouds came up in the late afternoon and the night was very dark. Our position was now 26 miles east of the
rira
, and I remember thinking that the abo who had given McIlroy the directions must have been a hell of a tireless walker. Either that or the Monster didn't exist.

We filled up as usual and checked our petrol before turning in. The situation was becoming critical. Each box was 13 miles of ground covered and at our present rate of consumption we had just about enough fuel for five or more box runs, unless we decided to rely on rinding the
rira
again. We had already taken two cans from the abandoned Land-Rover, but there was still a sufficient reserve there to see us back to the Stock Route. We argued it out for some time, lying wrapped in our swags, but when we started out the next morning we had still reached no definite decision.

We need not have bothered. Our search ended that morning just as we had completed the first run north. I was driving, keeping an eye on the clock and the compass as we began the eastward mile. We were then cutting diagonally across the sandhills and for just over a third of a mile we were on the flat floor of a trough, travelling quite fast for once. Then we came to the slope beyond. I didn't change into four-wheel drive, just kept my foot hard down. It was a mistake. I hit a soft spot near the crest and we slowed, the rear wheels digging in, the chassis slewing and tilting.

It took us half an hour to dig ourselves out and get the Land-Rover to the top. We stopped there for a breather, both of us hot and tired, our tempers frayed. And it was while we were standing there, grateful for the breeze and the clouds that had obscured the sun, that it gradually dawned on us that we were looking across, not at another sandhill, but at an area of gibber eroded from the younger Permian overlay to form a shallow rounded hill, and the green that showed in patches through the light brown of the gravel was not the green of vegetation.

I don't know which of us realized this first. I think it hit us in a flash almost simultaneously, for both of us suddenly dived for the Land-Rover and the next minute we were roaring down the slope. We hit the bottom hard on rock, our heads bumping the roof. We were lucky not to break a spring, and when we got out, staring upwards now at the rounded, gentle slope of that hill, it looked like the dead carcase of a giant whale, its petrified flesh blotched with gangrenous streaks of malachite.

‘Jesus Christ!' Kennie breathed. ‘It really does look like a monster.' And he started work there and then collecting and examining samples, moving with feverish haste, literally dancing on his toes with excitement. It was copper. No question of that. The whole red-brown hill was patched with a lighter brown, the surface smooth and rounded and littered with stones and small rocks, and the copper, exposed by the weathering of the calcareous sediments and sandstones that had overlaid it, showed in streaks and blotches that were a greenish brown in colour and merged with the sparse covering of spinifex.

Kennie was immediately convinced that it was a discovery of major importance. I was more cautious, fearing he was letting his excitement run away with him. But, growing up with the geology of Australia constantly in mind, he had developed a sort of sixth sense that I respected, and after we had climbed to the top, so that we had a clear view of the whole hill, he argued very convincingly that this was an old leach area, the Permian sediments worn down by the winds and the extremes of temperature over millions of years to expose the trapped ore in the Archaean rock beneath.

The first thing was to surface map the entire area, and it was while we were discussing this, back at the Land-Rover, planning how we would do it, that the stillness of that strange place was invaded by a low droning sound. It was high up to the south-west, but growing all the time, and then we saw it like an insect descending towards us. It was lost for a while behind the whaleback hill, the sound of it beating against the sandhills behind us, and then suddenly it was there to our right hovering over the tail end of the Monster.

We watched as it settled and the blades stopped turning. A man climbed out, glanced quickly in our direction, and then began unloading an aluminium peg about 6 feet long. The battered hat, the bulky body – no question who it was. And Kennie staring, his body rigid, his face gone white as death. I could literally feel the anger in him as he watched his father start to set up the first corner post. The pilot got out, and another man, and they began attacking the rock with hammer and chisel.

That was when Kennie moved. He gave a sort of grunt, not quite a cry, but a furious expellation of breath that expressed the pent-up fury within him. Then he moved, very fast, and the next thing I knew he was in the Land-Rover, the engine roaring as he slammed it into gear and went bucketing across the rock slope towards the helicopter.

I followed on foot. But I didn't hurry. I didn't think there was any need. I knew he had to get this off his chest, have it out with his father, and there were two other men there if it came to blows. I saw the Land-Rover stop, saw him jump out and go towards his father, who was standing there, leaning on the post, waiting for him. They were arguing there for about a minute. I could hear Kennie's voice, high and strident, but not his father's. Culpin seemed to be reasoning with him quietly.

Then suddenly the whole scene erupted in violence. Culpin dropped the post, caught hold of his son by the collar of his shirt and shook him. The others said later that he was merely trying to shake some sense into him, that there was no reason for him to call his father names like that. But there must have been more to it than that for I heard Kennie scream something at him, and then Culpin hit him.

That was when I started to run. But too late.

Kennie had come up off the ground with an inarticulate cry that seemed to express some inner horror. He was round the back of the Land-Rover in a flash and came out holding my rifle. He took about a dozen steps towards his father, then stopped and raised the gun. Culpin didn't say anything, didn't move; he just stood there, his mouth open and an expression of shock on his face. Kennie's movements were quite deliberate. He took careful aim and fired.

I had stopped by then, of course. But at the sound of that shot I started running again.

Culpin's body took a long time falling, a slow crumpling at the knees. The boy had, in fact, shot him through the heart. But I didn't know that. I yelled to the other two. I wanted them to grab him before he could fire again. The sand drifts tugged at my feet, the rock stony and uneven, and as I raced the last few yards, Kennie standing there dazed, his father dead at his feet and the gun lying where he had dropped it, I saw his legs begin to go. He was in a state of shock, trembling violently and unable to speak, and then he fell forward, his arms flung out, reaching for the rock as though to embrace the entire monstrous body of the ore.

The ten days it took me to get out of the Gibson were the loneliest I have ever spent in my life. The real reaction to what had happened didn't come until after the helicopter had taken off with Kennie and the body of his father. For the rest of that day I just sat there by the Land-Rover, or mooched around, unable to think, or even to feel anything. And all the time the greenish brown of that copper showing through the gibber stones and the redder brown of the whale's back.

And that night, lying sleepless and cold, with nothing there with which to make a fire, I thought back to McIlroy. My God, he'd named it well! McIlroy, Ed Garrety and now Kennie facing a charge of murder – the murder of his own father. And the guilt was mine, or so I felt, alone there in the Gibson with the desert all round me and that hill of copper rising beside me. Edith Culpin's warning words, Kennie and his talk of
mamus
. So like his mother and I lay there remembering his voice, the way he tossed his head when the long hair fell over his face, that irritating little laugh. I wished to God I could have had that day again, change what had happened.