‘Well, to follow him, I guess. Or to stay here and do nothing. I don’t think that’s much of an option. But I’ve also got Pang to look after.’
‘I don’t need looking after,’ Pang said. ‘I look after the other kids all the time at home when Lee’s out.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘When he’s out chasing girls.’
‘Chasing girls?’ I was distracted for a moment and had to shake my head to get my thoughts back together.
‘I can look after Pang,’ Bronte said. ‘Or I can take her to Homer’s. I’m sure she’d be fine there. They’re your guardians, aren’t they?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. Already I was clearing my mind of the Pang Problem. I’ve noticed before how the brain doesn’t keep what it doesn’t need. If Bronte was going to take care of Pang I could erase Pang from my memory for now and concentrate on more important things. It sounds a bit brutal but I suppose it’s the way the brain keeps you functioning efficiently. In Year 9 I’d memorised heaps of stuff about the Myall Lakes Massacre and the Protector guy in Tasmania, but straight after the test all I could remember was the Protector’s name. Robinson.
I ran back into the shed, started up the four-wheel Polaris and moved it to the bowser. ‘Can you fuel it?’ I asked Bronte. She just nodded. I went back into the house and got some warm clothes, for both me and Gavin. I was pretty sure Gavin wouldn’t have thought of practicalities like that in his mad rush towards the action. I grabbed a couple of bananas, three hardboiled eggs and an apple, and filled my jacket pockets with biscuits. I shoved all the other bits and pieces into a backpack and then got the rifle and the ammo. My heart sank when I opened the gun safe, because one of the shotguns was missing. Bloody Gavin was way out of line. He had survived for so long that he thought he was invincible. I suppose the more people succeed, the more confident they become and the higher they stretch. But I knew something that Gavin was too young to understand. That the higher you stretch the closer you get to the crash. If you keep going higher forever you end up as a God. That’s not an option for most people, including Gavin and me. The time to take great risks is at the start, when you’ve got little to lose and you haven’t used up your luck. The time to get supercareful is when you’ve done brilliantly. Every success brings you nearer to the failure. For Gavin’s sake I had to hope and pray he had one more success, one more crop of luck still to be harvested.
Bronte had fuelled the Polaris, checked the oil, cleaned the headlight glass and, most amazingly of all, tied a full water bottle to the luggage rack at the front. I thanked her, said goodbye to her and Pang, and blasted out of the yard at maximum revs, wondering if I’d ever see either of them again.
CHAPTER 5
Basically I took the fastest route I knew to Rawson Road, or, like Lee said, what we used to call Rawson Road. I stopped three times, when I got into muddy sections of the track, to see if I could figure out what was going on. And the third time, about two k’s past the border, I did get a beautifully clear picture of what had happened. It was like reading a story. The two utes were hidden behind a tree. In some places the track was better than the last time I’d come this way, but in most places it was starting to degenerate, and you could see where Homer and the others had swung off the road and parked. Up ahead was a rocky section that would have tested the utes beyond their limits. There was a whole chopped-up area behind the utes with footprints and motorbike tyre marks, where the four of them had obviously gotten on the bikes and ridden away. And although it took me three or four minutes, three or four minutes I couldn’t afford, eventually I found the marks of a third motorbike. They were on the left-hand side, away from the other two, which went down the middle. The same as I’d seen back at the machinery shed with Pang: a chunky tread but with bigger spaces between the chunks than the other bikes. It had made a lighter impact in the mud, as though it had less weight on it, and like the others it was fresh.
I ran a couple of hundred metres back towards my place, looking for more evidence. I needed to know whether Gavin had joined up with them or not. Near a huge gum tree, in another long stretch of soft ground, I saw where his tracks had left the road. I followed them and lost them almost straight away, but when I went to the gum tree I found where he had hidden. There were a couple of oil spots and part of a Fruit Tingles wrapper. I reminded myself to have a look at the bike sometime in the impossible future to see how much oil it was losing. My guess was that he had hidden somewhere further back, waited for the utes to pass him, and then followed. While they abandoned the utes he waited behind this tree then continued to follow. He was too close to home to let them know he was there. If they realised he was dogging their steps they would still send him back.
I set off again. I knew I was a long way behind but there was nothing I could do about that. I rode into darkness. The daylight failed fast. At least it seemed to get a bit warmer as the wind dropped away. At the first crossroads I went left. I had a feeling this road was called Sutherland’s but I wasn’t certain. It didn’t matter much, as I was pretty sure of my general direction.
I was trying to plan my strategy for when I got to Rawson Road. The whole idea of planning for something so out of my control was dumb but I suppose all planning is dumb in a way. Seeing you can’t predict the future, and seeing you can’t control other people, not to mention vehicles, animals, falling trees, the weather and your own self most of the time, planning has got to be… what? A kind of insurance policy. A way of trying to make yourself feel OK, because you can pretend you do have control of your life and the world around you. This is very reassuring when you’re heading into dangerous and horrible situations.
That’s what I thought about, riding along in the cold damp evening, trying not to use my lights. Generally I used a torch instead of headlights, which was not nearly as good of course. Safer in terms of attracting attention but violently dangerous when it came to road safety. I knew the others would be doing the same though, so at least I wasn’t losing more time.
I’d thought I would find Rawson Road pretty easily, but something basic had changed. I don’t want to sound too cosmic and psychic but because it wasn’t our country any more it seemed almost impossibly different. How weird that was, to be in a foreign country where such a short time ago it had been a part of our everyday world. The dirt road I was going down now for instance: not much more than a year ago I could have driven or ridden or walked down here without much thought. Just another dirt road lined with gum trees, a fence that badly needed fixing, a concrete-lined ford across a dip, and in the distance a farmhouse with lights on and people at home. I should have felt at home myself. But a new spirit had spread across the land and I trembled as I pushed forwards, knowing that although it felt like my land it was not. It smelt different. The energy was not the same. I was in alien territory. Instead of getting onto a plane and flying for a zillion hours to get somewhere else, now we could do it by wandering down a track for four hours.
Soon enough though I had to think about stuff that was more down-to-earth. Like self-preservation. All those days back in Wirrawee, going to school, looking after the farm, managing the cattle, trying to manage Gavin: all of that suddenly slipped off me and once again I was the hunter and the hunted. I felt like I’d turned into an animal, a fox maybe, and without any effort I was focused on finding the prey without being shot. I’d seen foxes do terrible things but I’d also admired their cunning. They could grab a duck in broad daylight, when I was working less than fifty metres away. They could find the only hole in the wire; they could tunnel into a chook yard; they seemed to know when you were holding a rifle and when you were only holding a stick; and on the one night when you’d forgotten to lock the gate into the poultry yard, they somehow knew and came sneaking in and killed everything that moved.
Well, I had to be the fox, and somehow I put on the skin of a fox and became a fox on a four-wheel motorbike. You can make a bike go pretty quietly if you keep the revs down and sneak along. I thought my problem at this stage would be more to do with finding Rawson Road than with aggressive enemies. I was trying to picture a map in my head and I thought Rawson Road ran from north to south, from my right to my left, across the flat monotonous country that I was in now. I forced the pace as fast as I could, but the noise of the bike got too loud when I went above thirty or thirty-five. I wondered how the others had done it. Would they have abandoned their bikes and gone on foot? With two bikes — plus one they didn’t know about — their noise problem would be more severe than mine of course.
Time was passing too fast and I felt under pressure to push on. Headlights travelling from right to left showed me I was coming to an intersection. It looked big and busy. Rawson Road? I waited for the headlights to pass, then had to wait for two more vehicles going the other way. Busy road. Maybe it was Rawson. I rode out onto the bitumen and looked around, feeling kind of bold. There was no way to tell what road it was. I rode cautiously
