Read Online Our Sunshine: Popular Penguins by Robert Drewe - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Robert Drewe
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bulletproof hut and get out of there.
It presses on my hip as I ride. The gold-rimmed circle. The watch. Christ, who needs another watch! Not a scratch on it, though
.
The time’s just after midnight. Fog rolls through the valleys of white quartz headstones, the creek is running deep and fast and rain starts hurling down.
F or three days the rain pelts down and when they come out on to the Murray Plain the river is in flood. He sees that New South Wales has vanished and everything north of the Victorian bank churns under a muddy sea. Already dead sheep and cows and bush animals and sheds and trees and fences are whirling by in a stewy surge of topsoil. Two possums float past on their backs, legs outspread, neat genital purses exposed and vulnerable, and at once he thinks of his baby brothers, Danny and Jimmy, bobbing in their tin bath.
But now they’re bony Dan and hairy Jim, who’ve been to gaol
. Big crows, their feathers in a sheen, flop along the crumbling loamy banks and eye the possums too.
He can’t risk swimming the horses so they bring them along a spongy length of bank to Bungowannah, to take the punt across. But their appearance – four armed, washed-out and wary horsemen on dog-tired mounts, and with laden packhorses – plus their apparent intention to make a border crossing in dangerous weather, attracts the attention of a middle-aged woman coming towards them in a pony trap. Despite the rain she gives them a close scrutiny, and the urgent way she trots her ponies up after she passes arouses his suspicions.
‘Split up and we’ll meet a mile back downriver,’ he tells the others.
He guesses right about the informer. Only by tethering the horses among some field hacks in a muddy paddock and hiding in a lagoon do they escape the six-man police patrol that clatters down to the punt twenty minutes later.
So they spend three hours up to their necks in muddy water while the patrol splashes officiously back and forth along the bank. The police are uniformed and well-armed and their noisy orders carry over the water. There is much bold swearing and gesticulating in their oilskins and checking of guns and dispersing and trotting off through the puddles and then regrouping. Perhaps they intend their voices to carry. Down in the lagoon the feeling is that the police will never make up their minds, also that some of them might be keener to keep the gang at a safe distance than to catch them. Up to their chins in ooze, they’re grateful it’s late October, with a hint of humidity in the north wind. Anyway, it’s not much colder and wetter than being out in the weather. So they hide among the flotsam – well camouflaged too, with the four of them all soon as wrinkled and clay-stained as swamp-gum roots – until the patrol eventually rides off at dusk.
In the scummy eddies of the lagoon, platoons of ibises stride and peck and big groggy fish bob by. When they trudge out of the water at nightfall Dan and Steve scoop up two Murray cod each in their arms. These fish are monsters, three feet long. Gills full of muck, they’re too stunned and soggy to fight or swim away.
‘What do you want those bloody whales for?’ the leader complains. ‘We’re nearly drowned and travelling light anyway.’
They’re all shivering and waterlogged, but with silt clogging his eyebrows and browning his cheek-fuzz and downy moustache, his brother looks like some nappy water rat. Still he’s beside himself, grinning while his teeth chatter. ‘These cod are a delicacy,’ Dans says, as proud as if he’s caught them after a two-hour tussle. ‘And getting rarer in the river with all the new steamboats churning about. They’ll make a great meal on the other side.’
He feels like a weary parent, suddenly a generation older than this adolescent. And for that reason unable to refuse him. So, lugging cod, they squelch back to the horses, heave their bodies up, and ride back to the punt. It’s unguarded now but resting on the
It presses on my hip as I ride. The gold-rimmed circle. The watch. Christ, who needs another watch! Not a scratch on it, though
.
The time’s just after midnight. Fog rolls through the valleys of white quartz headstones, the creek is running deep and fast and rain starts hurling down.
F or three days the rain pelts down and when they come out on to the Murray Plain the river is in flood. He sees that New South Wales has vanished and everything north of the Victorian bank churns under a muddy sea. Already dead sheep and cows and bush animals and sheds and trees and fences are whirling by in a stewy surge of topsoil. Two possums float past on their backs, legs outspread, neat genital purses exposed and vulnerable, and at once he thinks of his baby brothers, Danny and Jimmy, bobbing in their tin bath.
But now they’re bony Dan and hairy Jim, who’ve been to gaol
. Big crows, their feathers in a sheen, flop along the crumbling loamy banks and eye the possums too.
He can’t risk swimming the horses so they bring them along a spongy length of bank to Bungowannah, to take the punt across. But their appearance – four armed, washed-out and wary horsemen on dog-tired mounts, and with laden packhorses – plus their apparent intention to make a border crossing in dangerous weather, attracts the attention of a middle-aged woman coming towards them in a pony trap. Despite the rain she gives them a close scrutiny, and the urgent way she trots her ponies up after she passes arouses his suspicions.
‘Split up and we’ll meet a mile back downriver,’ he tells the others.
He guesses right about the informer. Only by tethering the horses among some field hacks in a muddy paddock and hiding in a lagoon do they escape the six-man police patrol that clatters down to the punt twenty minutes later.
So they spend three hours up to their necks in muddy water while the patrol splashes officiously back and forth along the bank. The police are uniformed and well-armed and their noisy orders carry over the water. There is much bold swearing and gesticulating in their oilskins and checking of guns and dispersing and trotting off through the puddles and then regrouping. Perhaps they intend their voices to carry. Down in the lagoon the feeling is that the police will never make up their minds, also that some of them might be keener to keep the gang at a safe distance than to catch them. Up to their chins in ooze, they’re grateful it’s late October, with a hint of humidity in the north wind. Anyway, it’s not much colder and wetter than being out in the weather. So they hide among the flotsam – well camouflaged too, with the four of them all soon as wrinkled and clay-stained as swamp-gum roots – until the patrol eventually rides off at dusk.
In the scummy eddies of the lagoon, platoons of ibises stride and peck and big groggy fish bob by. When they trudge out of the water at nightfall Dan and Steve scoop up two Murray cod each in their arms. These fish are monsters, three feet long. Gills full of muck, they’re too stunned and soggy to fight or swim away.
‘What do you want those bloody whales for?’ the leader complains. ‘We’re nearly drowned and travelling light anyway.’
They’re all shivering and waterlogged, but with silt clogging his eyebrows and browning his cheek-fuzz and downy moustache, his brother looks like some nappy water rat. Still he’s beside himself, grinning while his teeth chatter. ‘These cod are a delicacy,’ Dans says, as proud as if he’s caught them after a two-hour tussle. ‘And getting rarer in the river with all the new steamboats churning about. They’ll make a great meal on the other side.’
He feels like a weary parent, suddenly a generation older than this adolescent. And for that reason unable to refuse him. So, lugging cod, they squelch back to the horses, heave their bodies up, and ride back to the punt. It’s unguarded now but resting on the
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