They were hunting in pairs. Hunting her.
One looked at the other and they nodded and kept going. She was trapped between them. The one on the left was on a path that would take it within feet of her.
All she could do was kneel in the dirt and keep still. They were both carrying something. Something she recognized. Something blacker than the dark around them.
In the bright southern starlight the unmistakable shape of a Remington 870 long-barreled pump-action shotgun.
As they got closer, she saw that they were wearing denim overalls and had animal skulls on their heads. Wolf skulls. Or, more likely, dingo skulls.
There was a moment when all three of them were on the same line of longitude and then they walked past her and kept on going until they reached an ATV parked on the grass.
“Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an American!” Kate yelled into the spinifex. She sat on the ATV and lit a cigarette. “You’re all cowards! Skulking there in the dark! Well, the dark’s your only friend. Get a good night’s sleep, ’cause ready or not, tomorrow morning, here we come! You’re gonna work tomorrow. You hear me, Heather? Work. And this is one massage that ain’t gonna have a bloody happy ending!”
Kate and her partner laughed, flipped on the lights on the ATV, and began driving back to the farm.
Well, if they’d been trying to terrify her, they had succeeded. And this was only the start of it. Civilization meant nothing here. Perhaps it had always meant nothing. There were no monsters on Dutch Island, but the beast was man, had always been man.
She was shaking. Goddamn, she could do with a cigarette. She gulped down the air and tried to calm her nerves. But it was hard. The day had tossed her about like a deerskin kayak on the Sound.
“Come on, Heather, just get up and walk, one foot in front of the other.”
She got up, and the grass and the Milky Way brought her to the eastern shore.
Petra was waiting by the big eucalyptus tree.
“You made it!” she said, hugging her.
“The kids?”
“Hanging on.”
“Owen?”
“Yes.”
“I got the water.”
“I’ll give it to him. I’ve done first aid; I’ll rehydrate him carefully.”
Heather followed Petra to the beach.
Petra gave them the water.
Heather watched them drink.
It was one of the most beautiful things she’d ever seen in her life.
Petra drank and then, finally, Heather drank.
The kids started to revive. Within minutes, they were alert and chatting to each other. Amazing how resilient they could be.
Amazing.
She asked Petra to come and talk to her.
“What is it?” Petra asked when they were out of earshot.
“I got hit by two shotgun pellets. You’re going to have to dig them out with the penknife. One’s in the back of my arm, one’s in my shoulder. I can show you exactly where, and there’s good starlight.”
Petra looked skeptically at the stars and waning sliver of moon and shook her head. “Show me,” she said.
Heather took off her T-shirt and bra and lay down on the beach. “Can you see?”
“Perhaps we should wait until morning.”
“No. Now, please. I don’t know how it works but…I think…the danger of infection.”
“I can try, if you want. Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll…OK. I’ll get something for you to bite on.”
“Talk to me about something.”
“What?” Petra asked.
“Holland…no, that thing you were talking about. The dream lines.” Heather put a twig between her teeth.
“Yes. I’ve been reading a lot about that since I got here. It’s quite interesting. The Aboriginal people were often nomadic, following what they thought of as dream lines through an actual geography that was also a mythological landscape. By following these ancient routes, they believe that they sang the Earth into being…”
The pellet in the arm wasn’t hard to find. It was embedded in the fat just above the elbow. Petra rummaged with her finger and got it out easily. “One gone,” she said.
The shoulder pellet, however, would have to be dug out with the penknife.
For some reason, Petra was talking about the Sex Pistols now. “And that is why Johnny Rotten talks about England’s Dreaming. England has to reimagine its own mythological future and…”
Heather took the twig out of her mouth and panted like a dog.
Petra continued talking to distract her. “What do you do, Heather?”
“I was a massage therapist. I was pretty good at that.”
“And how did you end up here?”
“My husband was in Melbourne for a conference. About knees.”
Petra began to laugh. “My husband was here for a conference too! About old cars. He’s writing a book. He thought we might find some interesting specimens on the island.”
“Husbands.”
“Husbands.”
“I only really came here for the three-hour tour,” Heather added, weakly singing the three words of the Gilligan’s Island theme, which, of course, Petra had never heard.
“Are you sure you want me to keep going?” Petra asked.
“Yes.”
Heather bit down on the twig again. She bit down hard. The pain was everything. The pain was the path.
The ball in the shoulder was lodged in the muscle. Petra worked on it with her fingers and then the penknife for fifteen minutes.
Heather was drenched with sweat. She had bitten two sticks in half.
“I got it!” Petra said.
Heather gasped for breath in the sand.
She was weak. So weak.
She went down to the sea to bathe the wound.
She was her mother’s favorite saying come to life. The cure for everything is salt water: tears, sweat, or the sea.
The water was warm. It cleansed her. Floated her. Helped her. She wished she could stay in the ocean, but most sharks were night feeders.
She waded out of the water and sat on the beach with her knees tucked under her chin. Petra placed a poultice of wet sand and eucalyptus leaves over the wounds.
“Are you OK?” Petra asked.
“How are the kids?”
“Fine. Sleeping,” Petra said.
“Sleeping? Really?”
“Sleeping.”
Heather nodded and found that she wanted to cry some more, but crying was a luxury and there were no tears left.
25
A black iron nothingness. An ellipsis of time. Perhaps a minute; perhaps ten thousand million years.
A nimbus of yellow goblin light.
And from the nothingness, a poker stirring the cold gray ash of sentience.
Pain, diffuse and weird. A surrender to a more urgent, primal logic. The rawness of now.
“He’s awake.”
“I see that. Will he live?”
“I doubt it. Who knows? I’ll put a couple more milligrams of morphine in his drip.”
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Do you want to take over?”
“No.”
Diminishing pain.
More darkness.
Another ellipsis.
26
The sun, never tiring of the human comedy, was coming up on the eastern side of the island.
Blue-dirt sky. Red-dirt sky. Yellow-dirt sky.
Heather was up on the mesa, sitting in the long grass, keeping watch.
No vehicles yet.
No movement from the ferry.
Clouds under the fading final stars.