Part 4 (2/2)

Silk placed his finger with finicking exactness on the spot where the dotted line ended.

Willstead barely looked at the paper.

'My word,' he said. 'Well done, Rooke.'

He did not try to conceal that his blisters were of more interest to him than a mark on a sheet of paper. Silk watched him, his mouth rather set, his chin somewhat drawn in. It was the look he had when Rooke answered a question too exhaustively. Exasperation was the word to describe it, Rooke thought, though Silk was too genial and too gentlemanly to do more than this hardly visible tightening of a few muscles.

'Thank you, Rooke,' he said warmly, as if making up for Willstead's indifference. 'I find it steadying to be able to locate myself so precisely.'

He glanced around at the bushes pressing down the slope towards them so that Rooke wondered whether it was really praise or a subtle mockery.

Leaving the others he paced along the bank of the stream with the compa.s.s in his hand. Establis.h.i.+ng the course of the tributary, he explained to some imaginary questioner. Taking advantage of the last of the light. When he pushed aside a bush to get down to the water, a duck burst up from under his feet. He leaped back in fright. It fluttered along and skidded onto the water quacking with a sound like laughter. Heck heck heck! Heck heck!

A place so strange took a layer of skin off a man and left him peeled.

He made a show of noting the way the stream hooked to the north, but the reality was that he wanted simply to be able to see what was around him. Unrelenting newness made for something like blindness. It was as if sight did not function properly in the absence of understanding. Without his pack and his notebook, he hoped that his eyes might begin to make distinctions among all those trees and bushes.

The gra.s.s by the stream was tender in the thickening dusk, sucking up the horizontal rays of the sun and turning a green so bright it seemed liquid. Beside the stream the fir trees drooped. Firs: it was what everyone called them. But when he pulled off a spray of the needles he saw that, unlike a fir's, they were jointed, the knuckles packed together more closely at the tip. What leaf grew like a telescope, pus.h.i.+ng itself out segment by segment?

He had wanted strangeness. Well, this place was strange beyond comprehension.

The gamekeeper came back just before dark with a brace of parrots and an opossum. His time in the woods had energised him.

'Not much by way of game, sir,' Rooke heard him telling the governor. 'But if it moves, sir, well then I shoot it!'

Brugden was flushed with satisfaction, watching with pride as one of the privates dealt with feathers and fur. The creatures made a stew of sorts that was hardly enticing, but helped the small ration of hard old bread along.

After the meal Rooke, like everyone else, was glad to roll himself into his blanket. His thighs quivered from the day of remorseless up and down, he had been bitten by a thousand insects and the blanket was insufficient against the cold of the night.

But, as sleep descended, the thought came to him: There is nowhere in the world that I would rather be.

They had left the river behind on their journey west, but on the second day they found it again. Along the bank a path had been worn by feet before theirs.

'Ah,' the governor exclaimed. 'At last we may meet some natives!'

Rooke wondered how an exchange might begin. By going forward and offering words, he supposed. That first day on the beach, he should have tried fewer trinkets and more words. He had missed another opportunity the day those two men had pa.s.sed his hut.

He would not miss a third chance. He rehea.r.s.ed it: the laying down of the musket, the stepping towards them with empty hands outstretched. He would not wait for the governor, he would take the initiative. But then? How would the dialogue start?

No natives appeared to put the question to the test, but a hundred and thirty-four paces later they saw trees bleeding red sap from fresh scars. Two hundred and seven paces further brought them to a cl.u.s.ter of native huts and a smouldering fire.

'They cannot be far away,' Willstead said.

'That is perfectly true, Lieutenant,' the governor replied. 'What a shame it is that we do not know in which direction.'

The bushes and trees around them could have hidden an army.

'Where are they?' the governor demanded irritably. 'Why do they hide from us?'

Willstead took it on himself to answer.

'I imagine, sir, that they are waiting to see how we declare ourselves. When they understand our peaceable intentions they will approach.'

But the governor was too exasperated to want soft soap.

'But when, Mr Willstead? When might they condescend to speak with us?'

The river widened and the land on either side curved upwards more gently, the undergrowth gone, the trees standing apart from each other among gra.s.s. Here, as nowhere else, the idea of a gentleman's park was not altogether ridiculous.

The governor called a halt.

'Captain Silk, the trowel if you please.'

He dug up a handful of dark dirt and made a fist around it, inspecting the crumbling ball he produced. He peered, he sniffed. Was he going to taste it? Silk, standing solemnly by with the trowel, caught Rooke's eye with a droll expression.

'Lieutenant Rooke,' the governor said, turning so that Silk had to re-arrange his face, 'would you be so good as to note the location of this spot, it is my view that this soil would reward cultivation.'

Rooke got out his notebook and compa.s.s, took bearings from a nearby hill, drew a line representing the river, and generally made a big work of establis.h.i.+ng where they were.

'I am obliged to you, Lieutenant,' the governor said, and favoured him with one of his squeezed smiles.

That evening Brugden was again given the gun and shot and boasted that this time he would bring back something better than opossum.

'Put your minds at rest, gentlemen,' he announced to Rooke and Willstead as he set off. 'If there is anything worth eating out there, I promise you it will not get away. If it moves, well then by G.o.d I shoot it!'

He swaggered off with the gun over his shoulder.

'My mind was not especially agitated, in point of fact,' Willstead muttered to Rooke. 'That fellow has been given too much lat.i.tude, in my view.'

He watched Brugden go with a sourness he did not try to hide.

Half an hour later as they sat by the fire they heard the retort of a distant gun.

'Dinner, I imagine,' Silk said.

But a short time later there was a tremendous cras.h.i.+ng down the hillside and Brugden burst out of the bushes, cap falling over one ear, his beard full of leaves, and a humid swollen look to one eye.

'The b.u.g.g.e.rs stoned me,' he bellowed, 'saving your presence, sir, but the d.a.m.ned b.u.g.g.e.rs stoned me.'

He held out an arm, showing a swollen red graze.

The governor was not interested in the man's arm.

'What happened, Brugden,' he snapped. 'Quick to it now and tell me straight.'

At this Rooke thought the prisoner looked a little s.h.i.+fty. He struck Rooke as a man with a sharp a.s.sessment of where his own interests lay.

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