Sound (5 page)

The island glowed golden with the rising sun, its mossy skin bursting with huge boulders. In the sea-blackened saddle between the two hills, surf surged in from the east. Dark shapes moved amongst the rocks on the shoreline. As the day lightened, the seals emerged from their hollows. Two young pups fought, yawning open their mouths to show teeth not yet fetid, yelping and screeching as they gnawed and slapped at each other. Crowning the northern hill, a big male watched over his domain.

Schools of herring drifted around the boat. Billhook found his line in his kit, threaded on some seal meat, threw it over the side. The fish swarmed around his hook and soon he was reefing herring over the gunwales and throwing them into the hollow beside Smidmore and Sal. He'd caught a dozen before a seal swam through the school and the fish peeled away. Sal awoke, slapping the flapping herring from her face. He apologised, but she rose and found a knife and started filleting, using an oar as her board.

Billhook chewed on a piece of raw herring and considered the bull silhouetted at the top of the hill.

“I call 'im down,” said Sal. She put her hands around her
mouth and yelped, calling out to the old bull. She laughed uproariously as the seal cocked his head and started lumbering down the hill. “Took ‘im all night to get up there, I reckon.”

“Keep calling,” said Billhook, strapping his waddy over his back. “Keep him coming down.”

Sal continued her clapmatch call and the bull lolloped towards them, rolls of fat and muscle. Billhook dived into the water, his scalp tightening with the sudden chill, and swam to the rocks. He slipped and crawled over the glossy black algae, hiding himself behind a boulder on the dark side of the island. He heard the ponderous undulations of the seal as it came towards him, and he clenched the whalebone waddy and his short lance, ready for the kill.

Billhook stood on the peak of the island, looking down to where their boat was anchored. He scratched at his hair. Fine and oily, it was laced silver with lice and salt and felt thick with itchiness. He wondered what the women did to rid themselves of lice. Mud? Oil? There was no lice where he came from until the whalers came. Then it was fat that his mother rubbed through the hair of her children.

About a chain from the rocks, he saw movement, a shining flash of wet skin picked out by the low afternoon sun. But we got them all, all their skins stashed, and still the seal are coming, he thought. No, it was not a seal but Dancer surfacing for air. She shook water from her short, frizzy hair and disappeared again beneath the waves. Sal stood above the barnacles on the rocks, her fur frock flapping in the wind. She was holding a woven bag and watched the waves for Dancer.

The skirts of the island were studded with the peeled carcasses of seals bleeding into the sea. Yellow fat melted away from their flesh in the midday sun, revealing dark mounds of meat and bone covered in squabbling bands of petrels and gulls that rose and fell with the wind. Wherever the wind came from in the days the crew stayed on the island, they could smell the evidence of their slaughter, a rancid rotting of fat and flesh. The try-pot stayed aboard the boat – there was no timber for fire to boil down the carcasses for oil and the nearest landfall was a day's sail away. They kept the sealskins and left the bodies to rot on the rocks.

Dancer rose again from the sea and swam over to Sal, her arms slicing through the waves. Billhook could see her toothy smile as she trod water away from the barnacles, holding aloft a wriggling cray and a fistful of the weed that she ate raw. She threw the cray and the kelp to Sal, who stuffed it into her bag and shouted, waving Dancer back out to sea, laughing.

Billhook knew the area from the weeks he'd spent here. He'd pulled a few paua off those rocks but Dancer was the diver, yes.

This is the reason why the Straitsmen used the Vandiemonian women, he thought. Pallawah women are fearless when hunting the sea bottom.

That Sal, she was no diver and not even much of a swimmer. Sal was an estuary woman whose country was the still waters and fish traps across the channel from Kangaroo Island. Like the men, she preferred something solid: planks, stone or sand beneath her feet. Dancer, whose clumsiness around the fireplace angered the men, she who refused to speak their language and who spent her sea miles vomiting into bilge water, Dancer was a seal in the open sea.

Smidmore climbed up the hill stepping over the tussocks and stones. He stood, as he always did, with Billhook on the side of his good eye and ear. “Movin' on tomorrow, Billhook.”

“Yes.”

“You seen a big old Noah hanging around?”

For days, small sharks had been slicing around the island, sniffing out the bloodstained rocks and frightening off the herring.

“No. No big ones. Just those whiskeries. A few bronzies.”

“I saw 'im this morning … Christ …” Smidmore breathed and squinted. “That Dancer down there?”

Dancer dived again and disappeared. Billhook watched Sal shout to Bailey, who was working the boat into shore. Bailey
looked startled, out to where Dancer was diving.

“Fuck,” said Smidmore. His neck muscles tightened as he watched the water intently. “Fuck. There 'e is. Big bastard.”

As each wave rose, the shark appeared in the window of water, its ghostly belly white and the rest of its body shadowy. It did not look to be in a hurry but intent, circling the area where Dancer was diving.

“Where is Dancer?” Billhook called, panic rising in his belly.

“She'll be hiding.” Smidmore gave a short laugh.

The shark slid beneath the water, flicking its tail with a splash, almost a salute. Billhook could hear Sal shouting now. Jimmy and Bailey hopped across the rocks towards her and the three stood dark and ragged against the waves. Minutes … hours passed. Smidmore growled deep in his throat when he saw Sal throw up her arms and turn her face away from the sea and onto Jimmy's breast.

“Dancer!” and he started the run down the hill.

Dancer.

Billhook watched Smidmore's black hair flying around his shoulders, his wallaby-clad feet leaping from stone to stone. Smidmore was half the way down when Dancer crawled out of the sea. The waves scraped her over the barnacles. She grabbed at them and hung on as a wave sucked back. She lost consciousness as her face dropped against the stone and razor-sharp shells.

In the evening they lit a fire of dried grasses and fuelled it with penguin skins, bones and dried kelp to keep warm. Sal packed seal fat and ash into Dancer's wounds and spoke to her swiftly in a creole of Vandiemonian and English.

“She was hiding!”

Smidmore nodded to Billhook. “See, Billhook?”

“Dancer hide under the weed. She pull that kelp right over her, like a skin. She lie on her back and watch the shark,” Sal
waved her arms in circles above her head, “swim all around over top her.”

Dancer spoke to Sal in a low voice.

“If she go up, he get her. She don't breathe long time. A bubble and that shark would see her so she not breathe.”

Dancer's back and arms were lined with deep gashes, scored by her landfall upon the barnacles. Her body shook with shock and her feet and hands twitched. She said her chest was hurting too. Sal held Dancer's hand and looked at it. “Squeeze,” she said. Dancer couldn't move her hand. Sal shook her head. She tore off some canvas and bound Dancer's hand. “She broke her hand. On the rocks.”

“No good for nothing else,” said Jimmy the Nail, staring at Dancer's bare breasts. “Not 'til she heals.” As he did every night when the fire died down, he flicked his finger at Dancer. “Come with me now.”

Dancer groaned and rolled her eyes. Silence fell upon the small group as they waited to see if Dancer would defy him. Smidmore and Bailey looked on with interest. Sal and Billhook both shook their heads and then Sal eyed Dancer with resignation. Dancer didn't move.

“Come, I said.” Jimmy grabbed at Dancer's bandaged hand and jerked her to her feet. He was still clenching her hand, with Dancer's whining pitched almost to a whistle, as they disappeared into the night.

The black easterly wind strengthened through the day. Sometimes they sailed close enough to land for Billhook to see the stain of grey-blue bushes spreading like clouds across the coast hills. By afternoon the land was misted over with dust and spray and the wind beat at their backs until the boat was hurtling down waves and broaching at the bottom.

As the day wore on and the crew wearied, it became a given that they would not make landfall that night. Though they were close to the Doubtful Islands, the onshore winds meant the breakers would be too big. It was safer to head back out to sea and spend the night away from the rocks. The little boat surfed wave after wave with white foam leering at their peaks when Jimmy the Nail gave the order to go about before the next set came through.

The crew knew what it meant. The sails must be trimmed and they would have to beat into the wind just to hold their position. There would be no sleep. A night of listening for the sounds of the sea changing, listening for the reefs and the bommies, watching for the glint of whitewater in the distance, in a sea that was already a knife-like swathe of cold wind and flying spray and the sound of roaring water in their ears.

As the sun set, the sea turning silver with the horizontal light, Dancer pointed her bandaged hand towards a wave on their port side.

Sal started yelling too. “That big old boy, he's after us!”

The shark surfaced near the boat and turned its head up to them so they could see its glossy black eye, then sank beneath the waves again.

“Put that mutt on as bait,” laughed Bailey. Sal hugged the little terrier to her breast and glared at Bailey. “We'd get ourselves a good feed.”

Throughout the night, the shark followed them. Sometimes all they saw was the flick of its tail or its snout rising from the water. Once Dancer saw the shark, she stopped vomiting overboard. Instead, she heaved her stomach into the boat and Sal's dogs licked it up.

“Can you take an oar?” Every hour or so, a tired rower would call to be replaced. They would fall back into the belly of the boat and soon be shivering with the cold and pulling skins around themselves, trying to steal a short nap. Another would row then, or handle the mainsail, their oars sometimes missing the choppy sea, skimming through wind and spray. Sal bailed out the boat until she was scraping the tin against the wooden boards.

The men and women were silent except for the occasional, “Can you take an oar?” or “Can you rest me now?” They stared mutely into the darkness, watching for reefs and the shark. Nobody sang, as they often did on their long journeys. They spoke little.

In the middle of the night, the wind changed. Jimmy looked at his compass, squinting, slanting it towards the light coming off the water. “Sou'-west.” Billhook could smell the rain before it arrived. A chill roared through the air. He sighed, glad that the rain would flatten out the sea a little but when it started, it blew sideways. It was a stinging rain that soon turned to hail. Small shards of glassy hail hit his face. The crew pulled their caps as far over their eyes as they could and kept rowing. Billhook could no longer feel his fingers.

The hail blew over and out to the north and the rain followed too. Over the flapping of the sail, Billhook heard a knocking sound around the boat. He nudged Jimmy, who started upright from his slumber.

“That bastard,” said Jimmy. “He's gettin' cocky.”

The shark knocked again.

“I will put out a line,” said Billhook.

“Then what'll you do? Bastard'll scuttle us.”

“We'll tow him dead.”

The rope twanged against the mast an hour later, rattling Billhook from his reverie. He stowed his oar and checked his knots on the line. Thirty yards away, the water bulged and churned with the fighting creature.

“You'd better get on two oars now, Billhook,” said Bailey. “Makin' us tow the bastard. Givin' him a free ride, you are.”

The rope slackened as the shark swam towards the boat. Then it ripped tight again. For the rest of the night, until the sky whitened with the new day, the rope flicked and loosened and hummed with the might of the great shark. Billhook played, guessing what the shark would do next. His only thoughts were of the shark and the rope and the oars.

The wind dropped just before the dawn. Around Billhook, the crew lay or sat, their faces lined and etched with salt. The oars lay with their handles starred into the centre of the boat. The dogs slept with Sal, the lurcher almost the same length as her body and the piebald terrier lying across her throat. Billhook's hands were crimped into pincers and he could hardly use one to loosen the other. His fingers tingled. He tried to force them straight against the wooden thwart and winced.

Jimmy raised the headsail and they headed for the coast again. Smidmore awoke as the boat's motion changed under sail. “How far off are we?”

Jimmy pointed to the thin strip of land on the horizon. “Morning tea, sir,” he said in a toff's voice, then laughed. “Dunno where the Doubtfuls are, though. We could have blown back to Bass Strait in the night.”

They sailed along the coast until the sun was above their heads. The Barrens, a long range of black mountains, stayed on their starboard. Finally Billhook sighted the islands hunched against the red cliffs of the mainland. As they drew closer, he could feel the air from the previous night's storm, a cool chill, creeping from the land. It was always warmer out to sea.

The wind had freshened again but they were able to sail around through the channel and into a sheltered cove on the north side of the island. The six of them swung their bodies over the gunwales and into waist deep water, their feet hitting hard white sand, and they pulled the boat into shore.