Her plan to lug stuff from the four-wheel drive to the campsite had made a lot more sense when she was sitting in the cool of the aircon. Out here, the temperature had to be pushing forty, and there was no breeze. Insect song hummed and clicked from within the spinifex leaves, and a shrill yip sounded, but when she looked for where it might have come from—a bird? An endangered western quoll? Were there dingoes out here?—she saw and heard nothing more.
Wishing she had a hanky to wipe the sweat off her face, she quickly gave the grass tree a double wraparound with the bright tape, then headed back to the vehicle. The heat had decided her: she’d be driving the four-wheel drive as close to the camp as she could possibly get.
Which wasn’t, as it turned out, anywhere near close enough.
The track petered out into a rocky scree that looked too unstable to drive over. The tyre marks she’d been following were nowhere to be seen on the harder ground, and if the police had cut the fence and driven through, then they’d repaired it so well she couldn’t make out where they’d gained entry.
The good news was she had phone coverage. But the bad news was carrying swags and camp cooking gear in forty degree heat with a ten-year-old who was clearly beginning to wonder if his idea of an ‘outback adventure’ and his mother’s idea of the same were two very different things.
‘I just ate my third fly,’ he said, as she lifted the top strand of barbed wire so he could climb through a fence more rust than wire, with filthy wool snarled on the barbs. She’d be prepared to bet her doctoral dissertation on imaging techniques for the non-destructive investigations of fossilised bones that the rusty barbs were a hotbed ofClostridium tetani.
‘Of what?’ said Luke.
Jo realised she’d been muttering aloud. ‘Tetanus. It’s a nasty infection that can kill you. It loves hanging out in sheep poop and getting access to us humans via a deep scratch, so watch that bottom wire doesn’t spring back at you when you lift your sneaker off it.’
‘You know, you didn’t mention killer sheep poop and snacking on flies when you were telling me about this great camping adventure we were going on.’
She looked at Luke’s face to see if he was upset. ‘I’m sorry. Do you wish we’d stayed in Brisbane?’
He shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
She sighed. ‘I know it’s hot, but it’skindof fun, isn’t it?’
‘It’s too soon to tell, Mum.’
‘Somewhere in the boot there’s some fly nets to wear over your head.’ Hopefully two of them. ‘You want me to try find them?’
‘Nah, I’m good. I just want to get there and stop walking.’
‘Right. Come on then,’ she said, picking up some of the items she’d already slung over the fence. ‘We’re going to walk on this side of the fence for one kilometre, and then take a sharp right for like two hundred metres, heading for the jump-up—that’s the hill we’ve got rising above us—and then we’re done. Fifteen minutes, I reckon.’
She had her swag roll, the tripod and cookpot, and the backpack she’d stuffed with enough food for dinner. Luke had his swag roll and an IGA cooler bag with some of their ice, two cans of Fanta they’d both agreed theyreallywanted to drink but would save as a reward for when they got to the campsite, and a sixpack of pork sausages. Annoying to carry over a long distance, but she’d made it as light as possible. And she could leave him to enjoy his Fanta while she returned to collect the tarpaulin and posts to put up the shade lean-to.
She wondered if she ought to break it to her son that ‘there’ was going to look exactly like where they currently were, other than having a whacking great ditch dug next to it.
‘Fifteen minutes, you reckon?’
‘Yep,’ she said. ‘Like two water polo quarters, only not as wet.’ Although she could already feel sweat running down her back—by the time they got there, she’d be soaked. She tried to find a better position for the tripod, but the darn thing dug into her shoulder no matter which way she turned it, and her pack weighed a ton.
‘So what are we looking for out here, anyway?’ said Luke.
‘Evidence.’
‘Like, of a crime?’
She laughed. ‘You really have been getting stuck into those graphic novels, haven’t you? No, evidence of a different sort. A long time ago, when I was on a dig site closer to Winton, the two women who own this station came to our site and introduced themselves to Jedda Irwin. You know my friend Jedda?’
‘Sure. She’s in hospital.’
‘Yes. Anyway, they brought a fossil with them. Part of a leg bone, in fact, of a small dinosaur. Jedda was keen to find out if there were any other bones to be found, so she led a team out here a few years later, to this station, Corley.
‘Anyway, they found nothing, apparently, and the project money dried up and that was that, but Jedda had promised the Dirt Girls—that’s what Ethel and Dot Cracknell call themselves—that she’d come back when she had more funding and could organise a wider search. And that’s why I’m here. Plus, the bone the Dirt Girls found had a tooth in it that came from a crocodylomorph and they’re my favourite prehistoric animal.’
‘Like … a croc?’
‘A crocodile ancestor, for sure. And the question that tooth leads us to, is this: was the crocodylomorph a scavenger who’d come across the carcase of a dead dinosaur and taken the opportunity for a feed—’
‘Like roadkill.’