Brumby Plains Read online

  ‘Thanks, Dad. We’ll be careful. Thanks a lot. See ya!’

  They drove away through the cool, humid morning air, just as the kookaburras and the storm birds were starting to cackle and call from the tree tops. Wallabies scattered from the house lawns, and the horses in the neighbouring paddock threw their heads up and galloped over to the fence. The sun was a faint glow on the eastern edge of the Escarpment that lay ahead of them, and the day was full of promise.

  Half an hour later, they were there. The country around them was bathed in early morning light, but it would be a while before the sun was visible over the ridge of rocks that towered above them. Sam parked the Landcruiser in a clearing at the base of the ridge and they all climbed out, stretching and yawning.

  Peering up at the looming ridge, Darcy asked, ‘So what exactly do you think is up here, and why all the secrecy? Uncle Mac didn’t seem to worry that we were coming here.’

  Sam and George looked at each other, and Sam answered. ‘He doesn’t mind us coming up to the Arm, so long as we don’t break our necks or anything. It’s just that a few months ago we came here when we were checking the fences with Old Jock, and George and I saw the cave. We told Dad about it at smoko when we got back. Vincent was there too, and he got all serious and said we mustn’t go there, it was a spirit place or something. Dad wouldn’t have let us come if he knew we were going to look for the cave, not after Vincent got so worked up, so we just kind of “forgot” to tell him exactly what we were doing …’

  ‘Why do you think Vincent was so upset? I mean, do you think he’d be angry with us if he knew we were here?’ said Tess, a little worried. She loved the old man and didn’t like the thought of deceiving him.

  ‘Vincent doesn’t know we’re here, so how can he be upset? And if this is a spirit place to him, then he’s hardly going to come here, is he?’ It was all very logical to George. ‘Let’s go before it gets too hot. Come on, Darce.’

  They each strapped on a light pack containing a water bottle and sandwiches, and started off. The climb began immediately. They laboured up the slope, finding ways through the spiky grass and the bushes, winding around huge boulders and squeezing through gaps. Occasionally they found themselves in clearings like small amphitheatres, or else standing on a point with a sweeping view of the vast flood plains below.

  ‘No wonder Vincent thinks this is a spirit place,’ said George. ‘Look at that!’

  They had come out into another little amphitheatre, ringed around with huge boulders and rocks. He pointed to a column of sandstone about four metres high, the dimensions and shape of a man. A huge misshapen head balanced on a neck, supported by a torso-like rock which then dissolved into another rock which looked like two fused legs.

  ‘Man, that’s almost creepy,’ said Darcy, sounding less confident than he intended.

  ‘Yeah, it’s almost like someone was turned into stone.’ Tess was fascinated. She hoisted her pack and continued across the clearing, then paused in the centre and turned back to face the others. ‘It’s funny, but this feels like it was a – a place.’

  Darcy hooted at her, as if to make up for his uncertainty moments earlier. ‘Yeah, good one, Tess! A place! How can it not be a place?’

  Tess crinkled up her forehead in an effort to explain what she meant. ‘It’s like it was a meeting place or, I dunno, a special place with magic powers or something. I know that sounds really dumb, but it just feels that way to me. It’s not scary – it’s kind of … old, and sad. Maybe someone died here a long time ago.’

  ‘Tess, you sound just like Mum and Aunty Lou. You’re not going all new age and mystical on us, are ya?’ George teased her. ‘Come on, let’s see if we can find that cave.’

  Sam looked at Tess. He knew what she meant. He had felt it too, only it was a disturbing feeling that grew in him, and he was beginning to worry.

  ‘Where’s the cave?’ puffed George beside him. ‘We could see it from the track, but it’s hard to work out which way to go once you’re on the hill.’

  Sam stared up at the slope. It looked easy from down on level ground, but now it wasn’t so clear. ‘That big old fig tree up there, over to the left about fifty metres. The cave was right below it, wasn’t it?’

  They climbed further, beginning to sweat a little now in the heat reflected off the rocks. There wasn’t a lot of shade.

  As they paused under a tree for a moment, Sam held up his hand. ‘That’s what’s been bothering me – there’re no birds here.’

  Tess, Darcy and George stared at him, and then looked around, heads cocked, listening.

  ‘This tree’s covered in flowers, the ones the parrots eat, and there’s none in it. I don’t think I’ve seen a bird since we left the car. That’s really weird.’ Sam felt very worried now. The silence seemed to gather itself up and crash over him like a wave. The bush was rarely quiet, except perhaps before a really big storm, or on a particularly dark night. There was always some bird making a racket somewhere.

  ‘Maybe they’ve migrated south for the winter,’ said Darcy hopefully.

  ‘Well, they’ve gone the wrong way then, you dingbat,’ said George. ‘This is summer. They’re probably somewhere else, in another patch of trees. I mean, are there enough birds to fill up all the trees all at the same time? Maybe they haven’t got to this one yet?’

  ‘Ask your dad about it when we get back,’ suggested Tess. ‘There’ll be some reason for it. It is strange, though.’

  They headed off again, and hadn’t gone very far before they could see a dark shadow about fifteen metres above them, right below the fig tree Sam was aiming for.

  ‘That’s it!’ cried Sam, all doubts about birds forgotten now.

  He scrambled up the rocks, sending little showers of stones down on the others in his haste. They followed him up, but came to a halt at a blank wall of rock just below the entrance. The rock was smooth and sheer and looked different from much of the surrounding rock. Sam traced his way along the blank wall, but there didn’t seem to be any way up.

  ‘There’s got to be some way up to the fig tree. Maybe we can get down to the cave from up there,’ he said.

  They climbed back down to the place from where Sam had spotted the tree. The rock wall directly below the cave mouth was wide and sheer, but at each end it was broken and crumbly, and there were plenty of footholds. George started off up the slope, with the rest close behind. It was quite thickly overgrown with bushes and vines, but it wasn’t difficult to get through.

  After a few minutes George found he was following what could almost have been a path, hidden underneath the tangle of greenery. He stopped and called out to the others. ‘Hey, look!’ He held the bushes apart and gestured down with his chin. ‘This is practically a pathway with steps, but it’s so overgrown you can’t see it anymore.’

  Sam, Tess and Darcy stared down. The rocks below the bushes were smoother here, and every so often there seemed to be a rock placed in a convenient place to step up to a higher one, just like proper steps. Whether it was man made or not, it did seem to be bringing them to the fig tree.

  ‘Good one, George, we’ll follow you,’ said Sam, and they set off again.

  Eventually they came out of the scrub at the top of the rise, and the fig tree was in front of them. They looked around. They were right on the top of the Arm, which stretched out to the north and south of them. It was about three hundred metres wide at this point, with a sparse cover of trees and bushes. The banyan was a huge, ancient tree. Its aerial roots hung in a dense and tangled web of pale grey fingers which sought every nook and cranny in the rock ledge to which it clung. They stepped around it, and peered over the ledge. They were standing on a kind of shelf overhanging the cave mouth, and it was obvious that there was no access this way either. The rock wall which had stopped them from below extended to the sides, and was just as sheer.

  ‘We could tie a rope to the fig tree and drop into the cave from up here, like, swing into it on the end of the rope,’ sugges
ted Darcy.

  ‘You first then, Tarzan,’ replied George.

  Sam shook his head. ‘No way. How are you going to get back? Can you climb up a rope, Darce? And then you’d have to get up over this ledge, and that’d be too hard from underneath. Nah, there must be some other way. That’s if you can get in at all. Maybe it’s just a hole, and nothing except lizards and bats have ever been in it.’

  Tess put her pack down and wiped her forehead. ‘Let’s have a good look around the top, and if we can’t find a way in, we’ll have some lunch and head back down.’ The others murmured agreement, and they spread out.

  After a couple of minutes, Sam stopped and scratched his head. ‘I wonder why the ground here is kind of bare, but we climbed up through thick bush to get here. You’d think the level ground would be more overgrown than the slopes.’

  They all focused on the ground at their feet, and realised they were standing in a sort of channel. The rock under their feet was relatively bare of vegetation, and much more worn than the surrounding stone. When they stood back and looked at it from this perspective, it was suddenly obvious that the worn area was a watercourse. Not deep or wide, but nevertheless a scoured-out channel, covered here and there with scraggy bushes. They followed it away from the banyan. Eventually, they came out of the low scrub again onto a large depression. It was shaped like a big shallow basin, about 100 metres in diameter, and they could see where water had pooled and eventually dried up.

  ‘This must fill up with rain and then it drains out down the channel and over the ledge above the cave,’ Tess said.

  ‘It still doesn’t help us find a way into it, though. C’mon, let’s go back to the banyan and have some lunch. I’m starving.’

  They sat in the shade of the big old fig tree, eating despondently. That was the end of the great mystery. It was just a hole in the rock. They were quietly eating, not saying much, when a bird flew into the tree overhead.

  ‘Looks like the parrots decided to come back from their winter holidays, Darcy,’ said George. They squinted up into the foliage.

  ‘That’s not a parrot,’ said Sam. ‘That’s your branded fruit dove. Don’t you remember telling that weird guy Charles all about it?’

  As they watched, it was joined by a second bird and they both set about eating the small ripe figs. They were handsome birds, with a black body and an elegant white head and breast like a low neckline on an evening gown. They moved among the branches gracefully, occasionally hanging upside down to reach the fruit.

  George had moved around to the far side of the fig tree and was looking up into the branches trying to see the birds more closely, when all of a sudden he gave a sharp cry. Sam and Tess leapt to their feet and ran around to him, with Darcy close behind. George was gone. At their feet, where George had been standing moments before, was a hole, and George’s muffled voice could be heard shouting: ‘Sam! Sam! Help!’

  ‘Quick, Darce, there’s a torch in my pack!’ Sam pulled back the bushes which had hidden the hole from sight and tried to make out what was happening below. ‘George? We’re here! Hold on, we’ll get you out!’

  George was hanging in mid-air. He had instinctively grabbed at anything solid when the ground gave way beneath him, and his hands connected with roots of the fig. He clung tightly to them now, and as he heard the others above him, he stopped yelling and opened his eyes. He was in a large hole, and there was light over his right shoulder – he must be in the cave!

  He looked down and saw that he was clinging to a very substantial root which was anchored in the floor of the cave only about three metres below him. The light was coming from the mouth of the cavern, which opened out into a large wide space with a high ceiling, falling away towards the back where it was too dark to see. He looked up again and was blinded by the torch beam.

  ‘George, I can see you. Are you all right?’ Sam sounded desperate. A thousand visions of disaster had already raced across his mind in the twenty seconds it took Darcy to bring the torch. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘I was fine until you blinded me,’ George answered. ‘This is it! I found the cave! I’m going to climb down this root – it feels really strong and it’s not far to the floor. Shine it down below so I can see.’ Before Sam could respond, George had clambered down the root to the cave floor, and stood looking around him.

  ‘Climb down, you mob – this is fantastic!’ he shouted back up to them.

  Within a minute all four were standing in the cave, shining the torch around excitedly. The walls were covered in paintings – fish, kangaroos, crocodiles, all executed in the traditional X-ray style of western Arnhem Land artists.

  ‘Wow, look at this place! This must be really old!’ exclaimed Darcy.

  They examined the paintings in the torchlight. The red and white ochres glowed in contrast to the charcoal black, never having been faded by sun or rain. The figures of men and women dancing seemed to move in the wavering light, and sent a shiver of excitement or apprehension down Sam’s spine – he wasn’t sure which.

  ‘Why would anyone paint inside a cave where you couldn’t see it? They didn’t have torches then,’ wondered George.

  ‘I suppose they lit a fire, or held up burning branches or something. A teacher at school said that the rock paintings weren’t only done for people to look at. They had other purposes, so it didn’t matter if not everyone could see them,’ said Tess. ‘This is amazing …’

  ‘There’s burnt sticks and charcoal on the floor just here – look.’ Sam pointed the torch at their feet, and they could see the remains of long dead campfires scattered about. The cavern was quite large, big enough to park a couple of cars in, Darcy reckoned, and at its highest the roof was about five metres above them. It sloped down gradually to the front of the cave, but dropped quite sharply at the back.

  ‘I wonder how far it goes in,’ said George. ‘Let’s have a look.’ He took the torch from Sam and moved further into the gloom. The paintings on the wall were less prolific here and less carefully made. They looked as if they had been done in a hurry. They showed quite different things too. There were lots of depictions of people lying down.

  ‘Maybe this is a story about a plague, you know, like typhoid or cholera or something, and a lot of people got sick and died around here,’ whispered Tess.

  ‘George, shine the torch over to your right. There’s something on the floor, against the wall, looks like – hey, look out!’ The torchlight flickered wildly off the walls and suddenly went out with a crack as the torch hit the floor. A black, flapping maelstrom filled the cave and the four of them dropped to their knees and huddled as a colony of bats winged past them and rocketed out of the cave mouth, leaving the air heavy with their warm, pungent smell.

  ‘Oh my God! I thought we were dead!’ breathed Darcy as the quiet returned. There were only the scurrying sounds of a few babies left behind, and the pounding of everyone’s hearts.

  ‘Millions of bats! Hey, man, the Bat Cave!’ George was full of good humour now he knew his life wasn’t in mortal danger. He hadn’t been so sure when he’d dropped the torch in fright.

  ‘Yeah, well, steady on, Batman, we don’t have a torch now. That was the only one I could find last night and now it’s busted, so we’ll have to go.’ Sam was moving back towards the cave entrance, where the light was stronger. Tess and the others followed, and they climbed back up the tree root into the sunlight at the surface.

  They stood looking down at the hole. It was a fissure in the sandstone which the banyan had helped to break open further, along with weathering and erosion, to form a ragged-edged hole just wide enough for a slim body to fit through. Bushes and debris from the tree had obscured it from sight until George had plummeted through it. Sam pulled the bushes back across it to hide it again.

  ‘Wow! Those paintings are probably really old and we’ll be famous for finding them!’ Darcy could see his name in lights already.

  ‘No way,’ said Sam. ‘We’re not telling anyone about this place – not
yet anyway. We’re not supposed to be here, remember? Let’s go home. We’ll come back with more torches and stuff and have a good look next time.’

  Dinner that night was a very quiet affair. Sam could see that something was bothering his parents. They didn’t even ask many questions about the trip out to the Arm, which was a bit of a relief. He was sure Darcy and George would be unable to control themselves and would end up blabbing about the paintings. When he and Tess began to clear the table, his parents excused themselves and disappeared into the office.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ asked Tess. ‘They seem awfully quiet.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sam replied as they carried dishes into the kitchen.

  ‘Maybe they had a fight or something,’ said Darcy.

  ‘Mum and Dad never fight.’ George started to fill the sink with hot water.

  ‘It’s probably just too many bills or something – they’ve been spending a lot of time in the office lately.’ Sam sounded more confident than he felt. His parents did seem to be really distracted by something, but he had no idea what it could be.

  ‘I need some strong hands to grease a few saddles,’ Mac announced at breakfast the next morning, ‘and you four are nominated.’

  They all moaned a bit, more out of habit than any real grievance, because it wasn’t such a bad job.

  After breakfast Sam and Tess prepared the greasing mixture and the rags, while Darcy and George laid the saddles and gear on the front lawn in the sun to warm them. They sat comfortably rubbing grease into leather, and quietly discussed the events of the previous day. It had been agreed on the way home that they should say nothing about the paintings because everyone would want to see them, and then they would have to own up to being in the cave.

  George tried to argue that he’d only fallen into the cave by accident, so how could they be blamed for that, but Sam could see too many potential problems.