Читать книгу We of the Never-Never - Jeannie Gunn - Страница 10

“Tethered goats!” Mac called us, and the world must apply the simile as it thinks fit. The wizard of the Never-Never weaves his spells, until hardships, and dangers, and privations, seem all that make life worth living; and then holds us “tethered goats”; and every time the town calls us with promises of gaiety, and comfort, and security, “something pulls us back with a jerk” to our beloved bush.

There was no sign of rain; and as bushmen only pitch tent when a deluge is expected, our camp was very simple: just camp sleeping mosquito-nets, with calico tops and cheese net for curtains—hanging by cords between stout stakes driven into the ground. “Mosquito pegs,” the bushmen call these stakes.

Jackeroo, the unpoetical, was even then sound asleep in his net; and in ten minutes everything was “fixed up.” In another ten minutes we had also “turned in,” and soon after I was sound asleep, rolled up in a “bluey,” and had to be wakened at dawn.

“The river’s still rising,” Mac announced by way of good-morning. “We’ll have to bustle up and get across, or the water’ll be over the wire, and then we’ll be done for.”

Bustle as we would, however “getting across” was a tedious business. It took nearly an hour’s hustling and urging and galloping before the horses could be persuaded to attempt the swim, and then only after old Roper had been partly dragged and partly hauled through the back-wash by the amphibious Jackeroo.

Another half-hour slipped by in sending the horses’ hobbles across on the pulley that ran on the wire, and in the hobbling out of the horses. Then, with Jackeroo on one side of the river, and the Măluka and Mac on the other, swags, saddles, packbags, and camp baggage went over one by one; and it was well past mid-day before all was finished.

Then my turn came. A surcingle—one of the long thick straps that keep all firm on a pack-horse—was buckled through the pulley, and the Măluka crossed first, just to test its safety. It was safe enough; but as he was dragged through the water most of the way, the pleasantness of “getting across” on the wire proved a myth.

Mac shortened the strap, and then sat me in it, like a child in a swing. “Your lighter weight will run clear of the water,” he said, with his usual optimism. “It’s only a matter of holding on and keeping cool”; and as the Măluka began to haul he added final instructions. “Hang on like grim death, and keep cool, whatever happens,” he said.

I promised to obey, and all went well until I reached mid-stream. Then, the wire beginning to sag threateningly towards the water, Mac flung his whole weight on to his end of it, and, to his horror, I shot up into the air like a sky-rocket.

“Hang on! Keep cool!” Mac yelled, in a frenzy of apprehension, as he swung on his end of the wire. Jackeroo became convulsed with laughter, but the Măluka pulled hard, and I was soon on the right side of the river, declaring that I preferred experiences when they were over. Later Mac accounted for his terror with another unconscious flash of humour. “You never can count on a woman keeping cool when the unexpected happens,” he said.

We offered to haul him over. “It’s only a matter of holding on and keeping cool,” we said; but he preferred to swim.

“It’s a pity you didn’t think of telegraphing this performance,” I shouted across the floods; but, in his relief, Mac was equal to the occasion.

“I’m glad I didn’t,” he shouted back gallantly, with a sweeping flourish of his hat; “it might have blocked you coming.” The bushman was learning a new accomplishment.

As his clothes were to come across on the wire, I was given a hint to “make myself scarce”; so retired over the bank, and helped Jackeroo with the dinner camp—an arrangement that exactly suited his ideas of the eternal fitness of things.

During the morning he had expressed great disapproval that a woman should be idle, while men dragged heavy weights about. “White fellow, big-fellow-fool all right,” he said contemptuously, when Mac explained that it was generally so in the white man’s country. A Briton of the Billingsgate type would have appealed to Jackeroo as a man of sound common sense.

By the time the men-folk appeared, he had decided that with a little management I would be quite an ornament to society. “Missus bin help me all right,” he told the Sanguine Scot, with comical self-satisfaction.

Mac roared with delight, and the passage of the Fergusson having swept away the last lingering torch of restraint he called to the Măluka; “Jackeroo reckons he’s tamed the shrew for us.” Mac had been a reader of Shakespeare in his time.

All afternoon we were supposed to be “making a dash” for the Edith, a river twelve miles farther on; but there was nothing very dashing about our pace. The air was stiflingly, swelteringly hot, and the flies maddening in their persistence. The horses developed puffs, and when we were not being half-drowned in torrents of rain we were being parboiled in steamy atmosphere. The track was as tracks usually are “during the Wet,” and for four hours we laboured on, slipping and slithering over the greasy track, varying the monotony now and then with a floundering scramble through a boggy creek crossing. Our appearance was about as dashing as our pace; and draggled, wet through, and perspiring, and out of conceit with primitive travelling—having spent the afternoon combining a minimum rate of travelling with a maximum of discomfort—we arrived at the Edith an hour after sundown to find her a wide eddying stream.

“Won’t be more than a ducking,” Mac said cheerfully. “Couldn’t be much wetter than we are,” and the Măluka taking the reins from my hands, we rode into the stream Mac keeping behind, “to pick her up in case she floats off,” he said, thinking he was putting courage into me.

It wasn’t as bad as it looked; and after a little stumbling and plunging and drifting the horses were clambering out up the opposite bank, and by next sundown—after scrambling through a few more rivers—we found ourselves looking down at the flooded Katherine, flowing below in the valley of a rocky gorge.

Sixty-five miles in three days, against sixty miles an hour of the express trains of the world. “Speed’s the thing,” cries the world, and speeds on, gaining little but speed; and we bush-folk travel our sixty miles and gain all that is worth gaining—excepting speed.

“Hand-over-hand this time!” Mac said, looking up at the telegraph wire that stretched far overhead. “There’s no pulley here. Hand-over-hand, or the horse’s-tail trick.”

But Mine Host of the “Pub” had seen us, and running down the opposite side of the gorge, launched a boat at the river’s brink; then pulling up-stream for a hundred yards or so in the backwash, faced about, and raced down and across the swift-flowing current with long, sweeping strokes; and as we rode down the steep winding track to meet him, Mac became jocular, and reminding us that the gauntlet of the Katherine had yet to be run, also reminded us that the sympathies of the Katherine were with the stockmen; adding with a chuckle, as Mine Host bore down upon us. “You don’t even represent business here; no woman ever does.”

Then the boat grounded, and Mine Host sprang ashore—another burly six-foot bushman—and greeted us with a flashing smile and a laughing “There’s not much of her left.” And then, stepping with quiet unconcern into over two feet of water, pushed the boat against a jutting ledge for my convenience. “Wet feet don’t count,” he laughed with another of his flashing smiles, when remonstrated with, and Mac chuckled in an aside, “Didn’t I tell you a woman doesn’t represent business here?”