Page 17 of Down the Track
‘I’m loving your optimism, Dot,’ he said. ‘But if I was a betting guy, I’d be putting my money on Regina. Besides, I’m hoping my humiliation last year gets me off the hook.’
Hux took a look down to see if there were any landmarks he recognised. The OzRunways chart on his screen was telling him Doonoo Doonoo Road was coming up—perhaps just out of sight to the south—but there were only harsh red-dirt paddocks as far as the eye could see in every direction. No bore tanks. No irrigation pipes. No dams, no stock, no nothing.
The odd power line formed a daisy chain of steel and voltage across the landscape (an ongoing hazard for helicopter pilots who did muster work—especially pilots like him who’d done their hours in the Northern Territory where they were scarce) but, reality was, this patch of Western Queensland was as remote as it got.
Ten minutes later, though, the landscape underwent a change. A fence line. A sheet of old iron that from up here looked like a random bit of rubbish left on a paddock, but was probably a small roof covering a pump to an underground irrigation pipe. The twin red ribbons of a track worn by the regular passing of farm vehicles.
‘Are these the station gates?’ he said into the headpiece as he spied the shine of a cattle grid. A house and outbuildings had come into view, too, a click or so down the track, and he dropped elevation to level out a thousand feet or so above the ground. ‘Coming up on our left.’
‘Oh, yes, pet,’ said one of the sisters. ‘Follow the road up to the house. It’s maybe ten minutes in a ute, so—’
The long sighs behind him made him smile as he reduced altitude until they were hovering at five hundred feet. ‘You two not been out here recently?’
‘No. What with my shingles and everything, we’ve been staying close to town. Sad to see it looking so neglected, isn’t it, Ethel?’
‘Who’s running the sheep?’ said Hux. A largish dam of milk-brown water had come into view and a hundred head or so were gathered by its bank.
‘You know our nephew, Robbie?’
‘Rob Allan? Off Wirra Wirra? Yeah. He was a couple years behind me at school. Haven’t seen him around town much lately.’
‘He keeps to himself these days. He rents the land from us, but since he has his own place, the old homestead isn’t in use.’
From above, the house looked like a functional square block of fibro and galvanised iron, with a round grey shape—a cement water tank—tucked to one side. The ghost of a garden remained within a low fence line, a few hardy shrubs that’d survived not being watered, a washing line that looked like a giant iron spider’s web from above, and the usual work shed, no doubt home to abandoned farm machinery, rusty tools and the odd snake.
‘Look at the old girl,’ said Ethel. ‘She’s in a right state.’
Hux assumed she meant the house; the shed looked indestructible, built to outlast generations of farmers.
‘Nobody’s living there?’ That was Jo. She was the voice in his ear that didn’t sound like it had spent the first forty years of adult life being wrecked by two packs of smokes a day.
‘No, love. We thought about putting a tenant in, but who wants to live out here these days? No-one to talk to, no neighbours within cooee.’
‘Pity,’ said Jo. ‘Especially since this is smack in the middle of fossil country.’
‘And opal country,’ said Hux, Ethel’s comment about no-one being within cooee reminding him of something Sal had said: the missing guy; the drop-off to the middle of nowhere; the abandoned caravan. He’d not seen anything that looked like a mining lease being worked. Even the old blokes who liked to live off grid used gensets and bucket hoists in their mining operations these days.
He did a last circle of the house so the Cracknells could see their fill. ‘Where to now?’
Three people started talking at once, so he kept the helicopter steady and gave them a moment to figure out a plan. He understood: looking down at the ground from this height was different. Whatever memories Ethel and Dot had of their drive out from the homestead to the part of their property they were trying to locate—a fossil-rich part, he assumed, given the presence of Jo, whose only interest in life was (or had been, at least) dinosaur bones—would be difficult to replicate from this new perspective.
‘It all looks so changed,’ said Ethel. ‘Where have all the tracks gone?’
‘If your nephew hasn’t been using them, they’ll have grown over or been eroded by wind, washed out by a big rain dump …’
‘There was a fence line in this photo in the Dirt Girls’ diary,’ said Jo.
Hux looked at his front-seat passenger. Jo had lifted the scrapbook she’d had on her lap and was now twisting in her seat to show a page to the Cracknells. Her hair—a short, fat plait of near black tied off with a pink elastic—swung and clocked him in the shoulder, and—
TYSON: Eyes up, buddy.
Good point. Professional charter pilots didn’t ogle down the blouses of their passengers.
‘You can’t see it in these photos,’ Jo was saying, because apparently it was easy as pie for her to ignore him, ‘but I had them scanned and fiddled about with the exposure, which shows us some silhouettes, if not much detail. Here, take my iPad and have a look, Ethel; swipe backwards and forwards and see if they’re helpful.’
‘The tree in this photo,’ said Dot. ‘Remember, Ethel? The storm birds roosted in the upper branches and they’d make a heck of a racket whenever we turned up.’
‘Show me? Oh, yes, now swipe forwards a couple, there’s one … Yes, that’s it. It’s the same tree but from a different angle, don’t you think?’ Jo said. ‘I’m pretty sure that’s a jump-up behind it. See how the horizon is dead flat until there, then it goes steeply up, flattens off, before going steeply down again?’
