East of Outback (28 page)

The first day’s trail was finished very late and they got back after dark. No one invited them to dinner. No one offered them a place to stay.

“What did Edgar say about accommodations when you made the agreement to come?” Hannah asked.

“I forgot to discuss it.”

“Lovely business manager you are.”

Colin rolled his swag out on the shearing floor, and Hannah slept on the seat of the stakeside truck.

The next morning they rode out in eager anticipation of the vast harvest promised by the many rabbits they had seen about the day before. Nothing. The bait lay undisturbed but for a few pieces kangaroos had gotten into. They found the kangaroos and skinned them.

On the way back that afternoon they passed four apparently healthy rabbits along the paddock line. None of the creatures evinced the least fear or attempted to move away.

Uncle Edgar was crossing from the barn as they drove Max’s Lady into the yard. He coughed violently and paused as they approached. “Any luck today?”

Colin grimaced. “They’re not taking the bait. Not at all. You sure those apples are all right? We never had a problem like this before.”

“Apples is apples, I always thought. Don’t tell me them rabbits have expensive tastes.” He snorted and continued toward the house. Hannah heard him coughing even after the door closed.

“Friendly folk,” Colin muttered. He drove the mare over to the paddock. Hannah jumped down to open the gate.

“Wait a minute!” Colin stood up in the cart. “Look at the paddock there. There’s not a speck of feed.”

Hannah climbed the rails. The naked sheep stood all around, mindlessly bumping into one another, bleating occasionally. “I don’t see any hay at all.”

“Right. I don’t think they’re feeding the sheep enough. If we turn the mare in there and feed her, the sheep will take the hay before she can get any. Let’s put her out behind the barn on the longline.”

Hannah scrambled into the back of the cart and dangled her feet over the side as Colin drove around the barn. Dust rolled high, and they weren’t going fast at all. They rattled past a dried-up old leather shoe. Mrs. Slotemaker would never leave trash like that lying about. Hannah thought about the tidy farm down south, and how peaceful the couple had seemed. Content. She wanted that kind of a life when she grew up—after she’d done with all her adventuring, of course. She tried to imagine Mrs. Slotemaker out adventuring. She could not.

Hannah had an interesting thought just then.
Mrs. Slotemaker enjoys high adventure—spiritually
. To her,
Jesus is an exciting person, a friend to be feared and honored. To her, preparing for heaven is just as immediate a concern as preparing for the next jaunt into Deniliquin
.

Hannah was forgiven. God didn’t even remember Hannah lied to her parents. What a wonderful thought! Mrs. Slotemaker had carefully counseled her not to make light of such forgiveness. Hannah could understand that; her forgiveness had been made possible with a heavy price—Jesus’s life and blood. Hannah could also see how she must not glibly take advantage of such instant forgiveness by lying again. Ah, but it felt good to have the slate clean.

That was it! A great light dawned in Hannah’s mind. The Slotemakers were happy and content, not because they kept their station clean and in perfect order, but because they were forgiven. And they knew they were forgiven because they knew God. It all fit together. They were walking alongside God instead of running away from Him, like Colin, or constantly bumping into Him, like Hannah.

Hannah knew God personally now. That was the first step. She was forgiven. She had every reason to be content. Why wasn’t she? She stood by watching Colin unhitch Max’s Lady, without really seeing him. She was absorbed in her thoughts. She wanted to be home. Suddenly, more than anything else in the world, she wanted to be home!

“Colin? Don’t you ever want to go home again?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve thought about it, haven’t you?”

“Yair.” He stopped and leaned against the patient mare’s rump. She shifted her weight slightly to accommodate him. “I’m thinking I don’t have any way to take you home and know you’ll get there except if I take you to the door. So when I go home, I want to have a pocketful of money. I’m gunner show Mum and Papa that I can make it fine, and do it honorably, too. Not shifty, like Papa thinks I am, or dishonest like my uncles. We’ve got a nice bit from the last jobs, and this will net us plenty more.”

“If the rabbits ever start taking the bait.”

“It must be the apples. I’ll send for more apples; a different kind. There are plenty of rabbits here to make us a very neat profit. I’m gunner walk in the door at home with new clothes on and money in my pocket. You, too. I’ll show Papa he’s wrong, and then I can walk out again any time I care to.”

“Independently wealthy, like they say.”

“That’s it.” Colin snapped the lead line onto the mare’s halter.

“You’re afraid I won’t go home if you just drop me off somewhere.”

“Do you blame me?”

“I guess not.” He was right; Hannah knew that. But she hated to hear him say he didn’t trust her. Being forgiven and being trusted, obviously, were two very different things.

A familiar child’s voice called from the far end of the hospital paddock. Gerald hauled himself over the fence rail and approached at a dragging, slogging pace. He carried a rifle on his shoulder and his left hand gripped at least three dead rabbits by the ears.

He came up to them grinning. “I shot four rabbits. How many’d you get today?” He dropped the rabbits by the barn door and propped his gun against the slab siding.

“Four less than you.” Colin brought out an armload of loose hay. The mare nickered enthusiastically.

“None atall?” Gerald cackled. “Maybe you oughta shoot ’em, ’stead of feedin’ ’em apples. I can take you out tomorrow and show you where they are.” Very grown-up-like, the boy leaned against the siding and pulled a pouch from his pocket. He proceeded to roll a cigarette—in fact, a better-looking cigarette than old Horace Hamm ever rolled. Hannah gaped, dumbstruck.

“We already know where they are. We saw them, all around. They’re not taking the bait. It wasn’t very hard to shoot those you have, was it? They probably walked right up to you and stood in front of the rifle.”

Gerald lurched erect. “They were doing that for you, too?” He frowned. “Don’t suppose they’re sick with something, do you?”

“I don’t know. Never saw rabbits acting like these before.” Colin started in the barn door, Hannah close behind.

Gerald followed them into the soft, musty darkness. Colin wheeled suddenly, grabbed the boy’s cigarette and stomped it out on the barn floor. “Lad, don’t ever take a lighted cigarette into a barn, or a pipe either. Biggest cause of barn fires there is. If you were working the race-course at Sydney you’d be sacked this minute. Out of a job for good.”

“Ain’t your barn, nor your place to tell me what to do. Uncle Edgar and Pop don’t care if I smoke.”

“They care whether the barn smokes, I vow.” Colin threw the mashed bumper out the door into the dust. Gerald stared at it, glared at Colin, and walked with them meekly to the house.

Hannah hoped they would get invited to supper when they reported the day’s lack of success. They weren’t. Uncle Edgar, she learned, had already gone to bed complaining of a headache. Mrs. Colfax acted cross and her husband expressed impatience with his rabbiters. Gerald gave all four of his rabbits to his Mum. The luckless rabbiters ate their last two cans of food—a can of beef and a can of green beans—and retired to their respective places in the shearing shed and the stakeside.

Hannah thought about praying, but somehow didn’t have the courage to this time. She mused about the carefree way Mum and Mrs. Slotemaker went about prayer. She thought she’d only just drifted off to sleep, when Colin whomped on the door of the truck. Time to get up already! There was the faithful sun.

She washed up in the sheep’s watering trough and wished someone, anyone, would invite her to breakfast. They ate four apples apiece as they hitched up the mare.

Beyond the grove of acacia trees to the north of the house they heard a faint gunshot. Gerald must be out hunting again.

“We should get a gun, Colin, or borrow one. At least we’d have breakfast.”

“We’re borrowing a dozen horseshoes I found in the tack room. With the rabbits acting like they are, we can knock them down with horseshoes and catch some breakfast.
Then
we’ll run the bait trail. I’m starving.”

“So much of adventuring seems to be going hungry.”

Gerald appeared from the far side of the property, waving wildly and shouting. He ran into the house. Moments later Mitzy burst out of the house. “Hannah!” she squeaked. “Come look!” She came running up to them. “Let me ride with you, can I?”

“Where to?” Colin climbed into the seat and took up the lines. Hannah and Mitzy hopped in the back.

“Beyond the coolibah trees to the northeast, Gerald says. Do hurry!”

“Me too!” Six-year-old Bryan bounded out the screen door and intercepted them. He clambered aboard bright-eyed for so early an hour.

Colin kept the mare at a trot out to the rise a mile beyond the house. On all sides—behind them in the dust, ahead of them crossing the track—rabbits hopped. A constant run of rabbits, scores of them it seemed. Without exception they flowed east, determinedly, mindlessly. As the horsecart topped the gentle slope Hannah heard the stake-side’s motor rumbling behind them.

Colin drew the mare in twenty feet short of the east paddock fence. From beyond the trees, from behind the bushes—rabbits, rabbits, and more rabbits.

“They’re everywhere! Hundreds of them. Colin, look along the fence!” Impulsively, Hannah jumped to the ground. With Mitzy at her heels she stepped up beside the horse’s head. Rabbits passed within a few feet of her. The wire net fence had stopped the silent, inexorable migration. Rabbits crowded against it, milled along it. They continued forward, pressing against each other, pressing into the fencing.

Just this side of a great gum tree a mass of rabbits had surged against the fence. The ones on the bottom had stopped struggling. Others continued to squirm on top of them, and still others scrambled and struggled onto the heap. Hannah stared in disbelief as the pile grew. When the mound reached the top of the fencing, some began to fall over onto the other side, only to continue to the east on their mindless journey.

To the south of where Hannah stood, the fence crossed a dry creek. Another seething mound of rabbits was piling high against the wire in the same fashion as the others. The center post, merely a crooked stick thrust in the sand, cracked under the weight, and snapped in the middle. The wire fence bulged and sagged. The uppermost layer of the scrambling mound of animals tumbled over the top to freedom. The fence collapsed to a barrier two feet high at most, trapping rabbits within its folds.

Waves of rabbits continued to pour over the hill and across the ravine, over the fence or against it. It looked like oceans of rabbits flowing eastward.

Duncan Colfax had pulled his truck abreast of the horse-cart. He stood on his running board and leaned on the door, gawking. “I heard about these migrations when I was a youngster, and rumors of them now and then. Never knew I’d see one. Crikey! Ain’t it something!”

Hacking and coughing, Uncle Edgar opened the passenger door, but he didn’t stand. He sat there in his pajamas, staring at the incredible spectacle. Mrs. Colfax huddled in the middle of the seat between the men. She held baby Hilda in her lap and balanced four-year-old Ruth on her knee. She was pointing, trying to interest the baby in the sight, but not even young Ruth grasped what she was seeing.

Neither did Hannah, really. “Colin, why? Why would God allow this?”

Mr. Colfax wagged his head. “Good luck for us, Bad luck for you kids. God’s sweeping my place clean of rabbits, but I guess that puts you out of a job.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-TWO

T
HE
R
AINS

Colin wiped the sweat from his forehead with his arm. This was a messy job. He tossed another rabbit skin into the back of the stakeside.

Hannah pinched a tuft of fur on a rabbit corpse and tugged. The hair came out easily in her fingers. She flung the carcass aside. “Colin, there aren’t many good ones left. Most all the rabbits that were buried under the others are spoiled.”

“Yair. Musta been the warmth. The skins have to stay cool or they slough off right away. We might as well just go with what we got here.”

“Subtracting the cost of the petrol, and what Mr. Colfax is charging us to use the truck, we’ll still make—” she stood a moment, frowning. “Seven pounds four, at least.” Hannah climbed into the passenger side. Colin drove. He stopped a little farther on to skin a few more carcasses, but the sun had pretty much taken its toll on the rest. The damage done, the orange ball retreated behind a thickening overcast.

Flies droned everywhere. Already, tiny maggots infested some of the bodies, and the musty-sweet odor of death hung in the air. They encountered not a single live rabbit in the mile and a half back to the Colfaxes’.

Seven pounds? More like five pounds ten, by Colin’s reckoning. This wasn’t near the money he’d hoped to bring to Sydney. Perhaps they ought take one more job. He drove into the yard and parked the stakeside.

Mitzy and Bryan sat under the gum tree arguing about who should feed their baby sister. Little Hilda, oblivious to their banter, lay on her back between them, fussing for her bottle. Hannah plopped down beside them, seeking to settle their disagreement.

Colin rapped on the screen door before entering the house. He pulled his hat off as he stepped into the dimly lit room.

“In the kitchen,” Mr. Colfax’s reedy voice called out.

Colin found his way there. The messy condition of this shack, untidy beyond primitiveness, bothered and irritated him.

Mr. Colfax sat at the lonely end of a long, rickety table. He stared at his cup. “Tea on the stove. Help yourself.”

“Ta.” Colin found a mug on the board and poured from the battered kettle. He looked in vain for any sign of sugar. He sat down near Mr. Colfax and reviewed the day’s work. “We loaded about all that’s salvageable. We don’t have a whole lot there. I’d like to get started soon.”