‘Get that thing off me!’
‘Just relax and let them finish up,’ Molly says. ‘Besides, just think of all the trouble they went to crawling up those long pins of yours. They probably haven’t eaten for days and now you want to just rip them away from their grub. What sort of monster are you, Greta Maze?’
‘Molly, get them off me, dammit!’ Greta screams.
‘All right, all right,’ says Molly, who has already found the paring knife in her duffel bag. ‘Don’t chuck a willy.’ She scrapes the paring knife gently and carefully beneath the narrow head of each fat-bodied leech, flicking them in turn from Greta’s pale skin.
‘You’d better move away,’ Molly says. ‘I think those leeches have got a taste for German rump.’
Greta rushes across the flat rock, slipping her dress back over her shoulders, zipping it up at the back. But then she freezes because she hears something moving in the wall of scrub fringing the freshwater spring.
‘You hear that?’ Greta asks.
‘Hear what?’ Molly replies, finding the place in the scrub where Greta’s eyes have been drawn.
Stillness now. A bird whistle. A trickle of spring water. And the actress and the gravedigger girl staring at a wall of palms and cycads and banksias.
More a feeling than anything else. No evidence for it. Just a chill down Greta’s spine.
‘You think he’s following us?’ Molly asks.
‘Who?’
‘Yukio.’
‘You guys on a first-name basis?’
Molly shrugs. ‘I’m just saying his name.’
‘I think we’d be dead by now if he was following us,’ Greta says.
Molly turns back to the rock beside the spring just in time to see something she has to look at twice to be sure it’s not an illusion, not deep-country magic: the wide, black-brown wings of a wedge-tailed eagle plummeting downwards.
Greta spots the bird now, too. ‘Ahhhh!’ she screams.
Molly is frozen by the silent predator and keeps watching as it swoops down to her flat rock and, without ever touching ground, claws two large clumps of her corned beef in its large talons and then arcs back up and out of the clearing as gracefully as it entered it. It’s an act so bold it could only be the work of a queen. Close up, Molly could see how beautiful she is, how regal, how strong. If she’d wanted to, Molly tells herself, she could have lifted the whole duffel bag in those deadly talons – food cans and rock heart included – taken it high into the sky and back to her family to inspect her plunder from Horace Hook’s pantry.
Molly can push only one word out of her voice box. ‘Wait!’ she calls to the eagle.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Greta says. ‘What the bloody hell was that?’
‘She was beautiful,’ Molly says. ‘Have you ever seen anything so pretty?’
‘Scared the shit out of me,’ Greta says. ‘Cheeky bitch stole your lunch.’
‘She needs it more than me,’ Molly says and shrugs. She thinks to herself for a moment. ‘Imagine being that brave, Greta. Only mums are that brave. Mums with kids to feed.’
Then a thumping sound from beyond the spring. It sounds like it’s coming from deep beneath the forest floor. A thunderous drumming in hell. Thump. Thump. Thump.
‘What is that?’ Greta asks.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Something heavy pounding into earth.
Molly has no answer for Greta. She reaches for her friend, the shovel she calls Bert because Molly and Bert are on a first-name basis.
*
The gravedigger girl follows the thumping sound along the silver road that runs through an avenue of blue cycad trees with leaves the colour of the moon. Thump. Thump. Thump. Louder now. A thin walking trail branches off the road of shimmering mica and Molly and Greta branch off with it, Molly leading the way, gripping Bert’s handle ever tighter as the thumping grows ever louder.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Something being crushed. Something breaking into pieces. Rock.
Then a noise so loud it hurts Molly’s ears and makes her shoulders jump. An explosion inside a cave.
‘Gelignite,’ Greta says.
Molly quickens her step, follows that sound along the thin trail, which breaks through a screen of ferns and hanging vines into a clearing where Molly stops before what she can now see is a small mine built deep in the heart of the deep country. Thump. Thump. Thump. Molly and Greta kneel behind the cover of a thick fern bush to assess the scene. There is a rudimentary crushing plant housed beneath a triangular shed of rusting corrugated-iron sheets leaning on poles made of the blue cypress pines Molly and Greta have been passing since the Clyde River. A tin mine most likely, Molly tells herself, built against a sloping wall of dark grey rock crawling with weeds and vines.
Two men in blue singlets and wide-brimmed hats are overseeing the crushing of hulking chunks of white quartz. The rocks are being placed under a motorised crusher made out of three heavy, rusting steel-block stamps that are being raised and dropped by a series of rusting camshafts.
Thump. The steel stamps pound so hard upon a quartz boulder that the rock breaks into four pieces. The miners then feed the pieces into a rattling jaw crusher that mashes the stone into a gravel that will be transferred to a sluicebox, which Molly figures must be somewhere close to this mine, beside a natural waterway. Cut along the upper side of the rock slope is a small rail line about fifty yards in length that extends from the crushing plant to the mine entrance, a hole blasted into the side of the rock face, just like the ones Molly remembers her father showing her on Top End bush camping trips not so long ago when Horace Hook still walked in light moods. Horace told her most of those blown-out mine shafts were only useful now to the ghost bats who call them home during the daylight hours. ‘But there’s fellers still finding their riches all across this country,’ Horace said. ‘And they guard those treasure holes the way a magpie guards its nest. Every bastard is
