The Untold Read online

  She listened for them. She listened with all of her intent but there was a sound that echoed in her head. It was the words she had just spoken—I will miss you.

  SHE MOVED DOWN.

  She did not make fires in the day but allowed herself only a small fire at night to cook a snake or wallaby or any edible creature that she caught. She did not use her gun but hunted in silence with her knife or her hands. When she came upon a snake she would grab its tail from behind and snap its neck, as clean as she would crack a whip, and that was the most noise she made. She was cautious of killing legged creatures for their screeching as they fought, but if they were in sight and, better, within reach, she killed them as swiftly and as quietly as she could.

  She slept in caves or upon some scrubby surface, any place that would not hold her impression or give her away. She walked, when she could, in darkness and she found a pace that was almost silent. Most days she walked barefoot carrying her boots under her arms in case she came across anything she could eat and needed to save. She walked for so long that there were moments she forgot why she was walking at all. But then the birds would sound loudly at some point in the day, as if their calls were a warning and she must remember to listen beyond them for the sounds of men riding solo and in packs.

  She walked on stealthily, disturbing nothing that she did not want to eat. She felt herself to be no more than a two-legged creature, roaming and hunting and sleeping. She moved along, one foot, then the other. She thought that even animals must sense their fate, and as she had seen, some of them did not run from it. If death was to be her fate, she would not deny it, nor would she put her head straight into its mouth. She imagined herself then to be one of those creatures whose nature was not to run from death, but to run alongside it.

  Jack Brown and Barlow rode into the mountains and the mountains rose up around them. Jack Brown could see a confusion of tracks and he wondered how long it would take for the tracks to sink into the earth or be blown clean. He was aware, as they rode, that they were leaving their own tracks, too. And as they rode higher and higher into the mountains they were being remembered by some lost world, some world beyond time.

  It was nothing he could name or describe to Barlow.

  You don’t have to find someone dead in their tracks to prove it was their tracks, was all he said, from sunup to sundown. He swayed them towards the highest mountain. Barlow trailed behind.

  The night was too bright to walk unobserved so Jessie slept in a cave. She wound her hair up and used it to pillow her head against the rock. She slept easily and dreamt of a swirling universe, and when she woke she did not know what it was or why she saw it. She lay in the cave that was still dark, well concealed as it was from the sun that had already risen, that its shallow entrance did not allow in. Her blood surged as she heard voices. Frozen in fear, one ear to the rock, the other to the hollow and dark of the cave. The voices folded around her. They were loud but she could not tell what they were saying. She waited, pressing against the rock, not daring to breathe until the voices passed, waiting until she could hear nothing but the birds cawing into the day.

  IT WAS BROAD DAYLIGHT as she tracked them but she could have tracked them in the deepest dark with a mile between them. There were four of them and they rode messy and loud and she could not imagine how they would have found her unless they had tripped over her, which they almost did. She followed them all day as they warred against the bush with their blades and their guns, as if the trees themselves were another and certain enemy. By early afternoon she could tell they were worn-out. From behind she could see them, woozy and swaying, their weapons slack against their calves.

  She walked at a pace that relied on them moving steadily. Some of the ground was uneven and patchy with branches they had cut down, and these sliced her feet and sounded her steps and she felt the tension of having to keep a distance so they would not hear her.

  When it was dark she moved closer in and hid in the low scrub. They lit a fire and the smell of something cooking on it turned her stomach for her hunger. She chewed on a bit of bark, then spat it out so it did not splinter in her throat.

  She could hear them shouting at one another. She could see them, through the split of branches, their faces lit up, the four of them. She watched them, and when their shouting dropped away, she feared they had spotted her.

  She waited but nothing happened. She looked again. She hoped they had passed out. She could see only one of them who was still upright, his arms folded across his chest. She was not close enough to tell if he was sleeping or watching the fire.

  She waited until she could not wait anymore. Her feet were itchy with scratches and she was too hungry to be still. She crawled in closer, close enough to see the horses were tied up in a cluster but on the other side of the men.

  She began to step around the outside of their camp in a wide arc, but without the cover of their movements and their shouting the bush made so much noise that she was sure to wake them. She could go out wider but now, closer in, she could see that they were camped beneath a ledge of rock and she determined that she could shuffle over it and climb down behind their horses. She strapped her gun down her back and tied her knife to her arm but her boots would drag on the rock so she left them behind.

  She crawled to the ledge, sacrificing skin for silence as her knees and elbows took the brunt of her slow, dragging movements. From the ledge, she could see all of them. She could not see the faces of the ones lying down, but the one sitting up looked ghastly; his head was back and his mouth was open and he need only open one eye to be looking directly at her.

  She tried to stay back in the shadows, but even the shadows were well lit by the bright sky and the ledge was close enough that she could feel the heat of their campfire. She crawled on. When she was above their horses she began to claw down the face of the rock, hoping with each step down that her hands and feet would find another groove close enough so she did not have to jump.

  When her feet touched the ground, the earth was warmer and more comforting than anything she had felt. She surveyed their horses and began to soothe the best-looking one, patting its neck, lowering her eyes. She swung herself up. And then, taking its mane, she set off, right through the camp, the fastest way out of there, heading towards the track she had followed them on all day.

  She did not look back but knew the sound of the horse splitting through their camp would wake them. She bolted down the uneven track as fast as she could and for a moment was grateful for the almost-full moon that lit the track. But then she heard a shot and she knew that in this light her back would be as visible as the moon itself and though she only heard one shot, she knew it would not be the last. Death was on her.

  Jack Brown and Barlow thought they heard the lowing of cattle as they traveled up the mountain, but moving farther up, towards the source of the sound, they realized it was not cattle they heard. The sound seemed to come from inside the mountain itself. It was shifting and strange. Eventually they explained it away as the wind blowing through splices of rock and that same wind pushing and echoing into deeper chambers.

  They rode on.

  They saw no human or horse tracks. It was late in the day when Jack Brown spotted a path to a stony ridge that led up to the mouth of a cave. They secured their horses with rope to a tree and then began to climb up the ridge that was steep and loose with rocks. Their boots were made for riding horses, not climbing ridges, so they slipped and scrambled, taking turns to offer a hand up or find a foothold. By the time they reached the lip of the ridge they were sweating and panting and their fingers smarted from clinging to the rock face. They heaved themselves up over the top of the ridge and as they sighted the opening of the cave, a huge bird flew out of it and swiped their heads.

  Fuck me! What was that? said Barlow.

  I don’t fucking know, said Jack Brown. But it fucking parted the hair on my head and the hair on my arse as well.
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  They sat panting on the ridge like two old men, watching the bird fly out over the escarpment. Despite its size, it soon disappeared from view.

  They were cautious about entering the cave. Barlow lit a match and held it out in front of him, which did little to illuminate the darkness of the cave.

  Get a couple going so we can take a look inside, said Jack Brown.

  Barlow lit more matches and carried them like a torch in front of him. They moved in slowly.

  They could not tell what they were stepping over but the ground crunched underfoot. The matches soon burnt down, and in attempting to light more, Barlow dropped the packet on the ground. The total darkness played tricks on their eyes and Jack Brown thought he saw the form of a sleeping child and then, farther on, the movement of bodies against the cave wall.

  Will you light the bloody things? said Jack Brown.

  Barlow was patting around, searching for the packet of matches. He finally found it and lit two more.

  Someone has been here, said Jack Brown. He felt the floor of the cave and it felt warm to him, as if someone had just been sleeping there.

  I’m getting the fuck out, said Barlow. I’m going to camp outside.

  I’m gonna sleep in here, said Jack Brown.

  That night Jack Brown was happy to be inside the cave without the fitful moanings and exclamations of Barlow waking him. He dragged his swag in as far as he could while still able to see the opening of the cave. He lay back and listened. The mountain sounded discordant and strange. With his head upon it, the lowing was amplified. Being inside it he could imagine it better, the wind passing through its tunnels and chambers. He gave his mind to it and he imagined that the source of the sound was not the wind but the wind was merely the carrier and what he actually heard was the echo of past inhabitants. And maybe they had not passed at all but the sound he heard was human voices freshly created.

  In his time in the valley he had heard drovers talking. Some of them said that the tribes in the mountains had moved on, but there were a few who said that the tribes remained and that they defended the mountains. There was one drover whose voice he could still hear: As black as those men are, they can make themselves invisible and you will only see them as they lean over you to kill you.

  Jack Brown did not know what of it might be true. He suspected the drovers made things up for their own entertainment. He’d listened to the talk of men around a fire that sounded to him as fanciful as something from a children’s storybook. What he knew for sure was that he himself was descended in part from one of the tribes that they spoke of. If he had inherited from either his droving father or his domestic mother an inclination to kill, for all the times he had imagined killing Fitz he did not do it. They were the times he wished he was more possessed of killing than was actually in him, wherever it came from.

  He wondered who had camped here last. If it was Jessie. And who had lain here before her. Had they contemplated the sounds that echoed inside the mountains? What stories had they made of them?

  Jack Brown was overwhelmed by the thought of it. And soon the thoughts turned to feeling and he could not bear to think of anything else on earth disappearing. Whether it be tribe or man or woman, he could not bear to think of anything of fight or spirit vanishing into rock. He hoped that within the mountain there was indeed a tribe and they were safe in secret places, and if this was their cave, he hoped too that they would forgive his trespass upon it.

  The boy had shown her a gorge and she led the hunters to it. The only way to lose them was through tougher and tougher terrain, and yet she could not lead them back up the mountain for fear they would discover the campsite or any sign of the gang. And she knew she could not lead them directly down into the valley to be fired at without cover or protection in the open fields.

  The gorge was narrow and dark and promised a steep decline and an uneven surface, then the surprise of rushing water. She ripped along the track, weighing its danger. Three hunters on her trail, if they hadn’t collected more. Three armed riders with nothing to lose except the horses they rode. It would be worth it, even to lose one of them.

  She pushed on in the dark, finding her way around trees that shone back silver. She could smell the water of the gorge carried up the warm cliffs and she breathed it in. The track vanished and she plummeted down into the deep canyon. She laid herself flat on the stolen horse and tried not to give herself away by screaming out the fear that was in her.

  The horse flew down the slope and did not stop. It could not have, even if it wanted to. The drop passed as a terror and she did not know if beneath them was rock or dirt or air or what the horse was even holding on to. The horse skidded down and she breathed relief when the horse’s neck evened out and it found its feet. She pulled herself up to sitting.

  She heard them then. All three hunters flinging themselves down the same drop. She pushed the horse into the water and rode through, not stopping for the horse to balance but holding its neck pointed to the other side so it had no choice but to get there. She heard the men hitting the water and the screaming of a man as he lost his horse and panicked. From the continued surging sound of the water she knew his companions had not stopped to save him.

  She crossed the water and pelted on through the thick scrub, pushing her body right down against the neck of the horse. Its heart was pounding. She urged it on and, though it did not stop and she did not turn back, in her mind she could see the man left behind in the river. The man was grabbing for a stick and, finding the stick without buoyancy, wrestled with it until his shirt and coat twisted up and drowned him.

  That night, Barlow was sick of the sight of Jack Brown’s head. He lodged himself outside the cave and by the light of the sky he tried to write in his empty journal. But as he pressed down, the nib of his pen snapped, and where he wanted words on the page there was only a blob of ink. He had thought that this would be his story to tell, a young sergeant capturing an infamous female bushranger. But he had no spare nib to write the story and there was still no certain sign of her.

  In truth, he felt far from victory or hope. Days and days of sitting on his horse directed by whatever sign that Jack Brown intuited had bred an impatience and, later, a hostile anger in him, a force of rage he had not ever felt or expected to feel.

  He closed his journal and lay down on his swag to sleep but was kept awake by the involuntary grinding of his teeth. He twisted and arched his back and neck and kicked his legs under a blanket, trying to get the feeling out of him.

  All day he had watched Jack Brown, easy and relaxed in his saddle, sun slick, his hands floating on his knees, his body moving as if it were another muscular extension of the body of the horse. Looking this way, looking that, coming out with grand statements beyond rhyme or reason, like he always knew something that Barlow did not.

  For Barlow, the mountains had unfolded without meaning. The colors and shapes continued to be strange to him and as they had moved higher up the slope he felt the clouds weighing in like the ceiling of a room that was sinking down upon him.

  All day he saw silver leaves as bullets shooting through the trees and though he wore his badge visible and shiny with its eagle sweeping in, it seemed ridiculous when they saw no one, and he knew the badge itself would not deflect a bullet once a gun was aimed at him.

  He lay there, his heart racing from the spasms of his body, the kicking and the snapping of his legs. He knew there was every chance he might die before he saw her again, that bullet or cliff could claim him and he would never get to see her as a grown woman, or reproach and punish her for deserting him. He knew that he might die with her only as a recurring dream and a recurring nightmare of Miss Jessie leaving Bandy Arrow.

  Jessie was cold and wet and frantic. She had survived the gorge but her mind was blank and she had no knowledge of the terrain on the other side of it. There were still two men on her trail and she knew that by pushing forward s
he was only marking a path for them to follow. She could hear the wheezing of their frightened horses and yet they pushed on as she did, reckless as hell in the dark. It was almost too close to continue.

  She rode on anyway, searching below her. All she could see was the shiny surface of the rock face disappearing into darkness. She guessed it was slippery with moss and water. But she had to climb down it. She pulled up the horse suddenly and swung to the ground. With a slap she sent it back in the hunters’ direction. At best they would think she had been bucked, falling to her death. At worst they would think she had been unseated and would still come after her. She knew they would not risk leaving their horses and there was no way of traveling down the rock face on horseback unless they were intent on their own suicide. Better if they were.

  She rolled up her trousers and emptied the bullets out of her gun in case she slipped and fired it. She strapped it again to her back and she began to scale down. Her hands and feet clung to clumps of moss and twisted vines and roots that grew out of the rock.

  Silently she went. She could not hear the hunters, so she carried on, moving down, clutching at whatever she could, whatever nature offered her. She stopped when she heard them above her, pressed her face and body against the rock and waited for them to pass. She could not risk a loose rock giving her away.

  As she held on, her legs began to tremble with exhaustion. She clenched them to stop them shaking and then a feeling like pins and needles set into her feet and they finally grew numb.

  The hunters passed. She kicked her feet against the rock to prompt her blood’s return to them. She trusted only the grip of her hands although they were damp with sweat. She wiped them on her shirt and began to lower herself down again, her hands taking most of her weight.