The Cattle Baron. Margaret Way
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that Mick would show up for dinner. Probably someone would let him sleep it off at the club.
After he’d gone a mile, he turned off the side road and onto the highway, saluting as always his grandfather, the town’s founding father who’d had the foresight to line the route with royal palms. They soared a uniform eighty feet, forming a superb entry into the little rain-forest town. Then the poincianas suddenly replaced them, forming an interlocking canopy over the main street, turning the air rosy when they were in bloom. North of Capricorn was a fantasy world, a paradise, a celebration of nature. He had visited other parts of the world, sailed around the glorious South Pacific with two of his university friends, but there was nowhere on earth he’d rather be than the place he was born. Three Moons. His great-great-grandfather, Patrick Banfield, an Englishman in search of adventure, had named it after the three almost perfect moon-shaped lagoons on the vast selection he’d taken on from the colonial Queensland government. Their characteristic feature was magnificent water lilies, and Patrick Banfield had realized they would be easily seen from the Malaysian-style homestead he planned to build.
All kinds of water birds still thronged to the lagoons—ibis, egrets, pelicans, ducks, magpie geese, pygmy geese, the brolgas, the blue cranes that mated for life. There were no beautiful water lilies farther back, in the swamp country. There the surface was completely overgrown with aquatic plants, the thick vegetation hiding the waterfowl and the crocodiles. The common crocodile mostly, freshwater, harmless, living mainly on fish. But the big stream the Aborigines called Gongora, the place of the sacred crocodile on Three Moons coastal border, was home to a few estuarine crocs that weren’t particular about what they ate. Anything and everything that might come to drink at the water’s edge. Birds, reptiles, mammals, tortoises, cattle, men.
The station had suffered three crocodile-related disasters over the years, which was close to a miracle, considering no one seemed to heed the warnings. Victim one at the turn of the century—an unwary stockman. Another in the 1930s when a visiting English cousin deliberately went after the legendary Munwari, the gigantic sacred crocodile said to be thousands of years old. Ah, the thrill of the kill! Everyone had warned him not to interfere with the crocodiles, a species that had survived unchanged for more than 150 million years, but according to the cousin, this was even better than hunting rhino in Africa. He’d made it to the upper reaches of Gongora, deep into country few white men had ever traveled; he’d never returned. A large search had been mounted, but it was as though he’d vanished from the face of the earth. The Aboriginal version of events was that the earth and not the Great Spirit guardian had swallowed him up; either way, he was never seen again. His story was part of the saga of the Wilderness Coast. A zoologist, the author of many scientific papers on reptiles, including crocodiles, lost a leg right up to the thigh in the course of his study of Munwari. That was in his father’s day. Porter had never allowed anyone else onto the station after that. Chase didn’t intend to, either, and that included Dr. Graeme Marley.
The last time, and it had to be two years, Marley had tried calling him. No go, especially when Marley had used Porter for a reference. Now Marley had decided to show up in person with his girlfriend in tow.
Girlfriend? Surely he’d seen a photograph someplace of Marley and a wife? A little brown hen to Marley’s peacock. It could even have been on TV. Marley had made quite a few appearances after he’d discovered and dated the Winjarra paintings. Ah! He remembered now. There was a journalist involved. A young woman. Banfield started to make the connections. A redhead. His mind ranged back over Mick’s description. Masses of orange hair. Obviously she wasn’t bothered by the fact that Marley was a married man.
Well, time hadn’t changed his mind. He had no intention of allowing Dr. Marley and his girlfriend to run around Three Moons uncovering more bric-a-brac. Probably stuff buried by poor old Porter, whose imagination worked on overdrive. Porter might be obsessed with “proving” the existence of some ancient Egyptian village in the wilds of the up-country, a real no-man’s-land; Chase was far more interested in what was happening on Three Moons here and now. The mustering had to be completed before the onset of the Wet between December and March. They were well into September, spring in the state capital, Brisbane, more than a thousand miles away. Life at Three Moons was dictated by the season. The Wet and the Dry. A creek that was little more than a trickle in the Dry could become a raging torrent in the Wet. If a cyclone blew in from the Coral Sea to the east, the Timor to the north, the Indian Ocean to the west, all hell broke loose. It was either one thing or the other—drought or flood—presided over by the timeless culture of the Aborigines. Banfield had great respect for the Aborigines and great sympathy for them as they coped with the problems that beset them as traditional life broke down. It wasn’t easy trying to adapt to the white man’s culture, almost diametrically opposed to their own. Aborigines were intimately attuned to the land. They weren’t terribly receptive to material gain. But they were the backbone of the big stations, splendid stockmen, trackers, horse breakers. The bush owed them a great debt. His childhood mentor had been Moses, not his uncle Porter. Moses was Three Moon’s leading stockman, the most loyal of employees and a tribal elder. Moses had been asked to look out for him in his childhood days when he’d been running wild. Moses had taken the job very seriously. Banfield didn’t know what he would’ve done without him in those first terrible years after he’d lost his parents and Porter had withdrawn to a place inside himself that could not be reached. Moses was a remarkable man. In many ways a foster father. It was men like Moses who had helped him win the battle to reestablish Three Moons.
CHAPTER THREE
HE WAS NOSING down a sharp rise when he was snatched out of his reverie by one hell of a sight. A small white car in the distance suddenly swerved off the road and took off down the thickly vegetated slope facing the sea. He saw at once why. A wallaby was still standing foolishly on the center line. The driver of the vehicle equally foolishly had swerved to avoid the animal. Just how far should you put yourself at risk? He felt a rush of anxiety for the driver, gunning the accelerator and covering the distance in record time. The main business of life was staying alive. No one would deliberately want to hit a harmless animal, but when the alternative was careering off the road, the only safe option was to hold course. If this accident had happened a mile back, the car would have hurtled down into an old volcanic crater. As it was, with the slope nowhere near so steep, the driver had a good chance of surviving. Still, it would be one hell of an experience, crashing wildly into the brush.
His four-wheel drive with its formidable bull bar slammed to a halt at the spot where he’d seen the small car go over. The tires had left skid marks on the road, and the trail led straight over the side. God! He pushed trailing branches of bougainvillea aside, taking the blood-raising lash as they snapped back, and looked down, wincing at what he might see. Instead, he felt a rush of relief and, it had to be said, admiration. The small car had come safely to rest in a dry gully with a bed of glittering stones, narrowly missing a huge boulder a few feet away. No sign of the driver, but then, he was looking at the passenger side.
Swiftly he got on his mobile and passed a message to Chipper Murray, the local police constable, then he reached into his vehicle for a good strong rope, knotting it securely to the bull bar. He touched his neck, felt a smarting, bleeding raised welt. Mercifully the gully was bone-dry. He went over the side, working his way down in a series of jumps much like the rappelling he used to enjoy. He got down easily, covering the small clearing to the car. The birds were singing. The sky was a cloudless peacock-blue. The air was sweet with the scent of the many species of wild herbs his boots had crushed.
He was almost at the driver’s door when it suddenly opened and a young woman swung her long jean-clad legs to the ground and leaned out. “Hi!” she said in a husky but otherwise perfectly focused voice. “What did I do wrong?”
He laughed over a hard wave of relief. This was a remarkably composed woman. “Regardless of what you did wrong, you’re obviously one hell of a driver.” He approached, studying her with considerable interest. Masses of marigold hair, skin as white as a snowflake, a sprinkling of freckles standing out in high relief, extraordinary eyes, green with gold flecks in them like sunlight on a deep lagoon.
“Skills get sharpened when you’re interested in staying alive,” she answered wryly. “It was the wallaby.