Free Man of Two Tribes by Arthur W. Upfield Page A

Lunatic’s Moan, a blow-hole from which air rushed with a continuous moaning noise; Lover’s Lane, where was a rock-hole between two great barriers of straw. Since Lonergan was last here, both barriers had been moved and the trapper’s path wiped out but Millie ploughed through the masses, a ton of which would dwarf a cathedral.
    It rained half an inch the night they spent at Curley’s Hate, and the next day they walked up from the Plain on to the wind-ribbed sand of the desert, then turned east to reach the extremity of Lonergan’s trap-line, where they found hisfiresite in the shadow of two belar trees. Trees! O blessed trees! To hear the soft sunset-wind singing its lullaby in a roof of trees! Far into the night Bony sat by his fire of solid wood, and frequently praised old dead Patsy for having named this place The Bushman’s Home.
    The rain had filled the shallow claypans between the dunes, and water had run into the deeper depressions along the verge of the Nullarbor Plain. On the lower dunes the young buckbush attracted the camels, but even so soon after the rain the wind crested the high dunes with red feathers.
    The rain provided independence of rock-holes, but it was also disadvantageous in that it wiped smooth this page of the Book of the Bush, and thus much valuable information would be withheld until time enabled the new printing to be done.
    Bony remained in camp at The Bushman’s Home for two days, scouting on foot, when he chanced on a group of kangaroos, and bagged one. Wild dogs were here, and rabbits were numerous, and all this world was kind and protective.
    But inland from this northern ‘coast’ the country rapidly deteriorated. Penetrating it for three miles, he found that the dunes dwindled into a sea of spinifex slopes and naked gibber flats, the gibber stones so polished by the wind-driven sand particles that the upper surfaces reflected the sun with such power as to torture the eyes. Far to the north lay a line of flat-topped residuals, red and bare, and onward for two thousand miles it would be just the same as this picture of the Great Inland Desert, populated by aborigines never in contact with the white man, and so dispersed that for one to be killed by a rocket would almost be an impossibility.
    Bony wondered who the heck would want to open this back door to Australia’s atomic secrets.
    From this point he travelled along the verge of the Plain where the going was easy, making to the east to ‘cut’ the line of flight of the aircraft he had heard when at Dead Oak Stump. Fortunately the surface water held. Kangaroos were numerous, and the rabbits promised the summer, if itbehaved, to make of themselves a plague. Bony passed colonies of jerboa rats; the roofs of the ‘houses’ well secured from the wind with stones. Bell birds mocked from the scrub trees, and at night wedges of ducks lanced across the sky. The crows were busy too, and altogether Bony found these days most pleasant.
    When the camels first became restless, he attributed it to their normal dislike of unfamiliar country, there being nothing else to account for it. The country was open. The weather remained perfect. He found no tracks of wild aborigines nor any other indication of their proximity. Lucy was neither restless nor suspicious, and normally a man can place full reliance on a dog to inform him of anything unusual.
    On being confident that he had actually ‘cut’ the aircraft’s line of flight, he camped under a most ancient box tree growing on the edge of the Plain. This night he pondered on his next move, squatting beside his fire, and, as men of all nomadic races have done, he drew with a pointed stick a map on the ground, and marked on it the railway, the stop named Chifley, the homestead at Mount Singular, and the imagined course of the aircraft.
    When he had heard it at Dead Oak Stump, the destination of the aircraft was at one of two points: either to