Friday in Summer

Through the trees we could see the dog and Hamish, but the strangers were hidden from our view. It was obvious that they were happy when they caught sight of our fellow-travelers. But that’s about all I could tell. There was a lot of chatter, but it was incomprehensible to me.

‘What are they saying, Dodge?’ He shrugged back at me. I didn’t really expect anything else, but you never know unless you ask. No miraculous translation then, so I concentrated on the non-verbal cues. Hamish’s voice sounded raised, whether in anger or to be heard above the rest I didn’t know. There was a quiet stretch. Someone with authority speaking perhaps. Then several raised voices. Seemed more like surprise than anger. And then all the voices were silenced and Jasper barked. Foes. Hide. I looked at the Dodger. Yes, he had understood that message too. We slipped further into the supple jack behind the trees.

Maybe it was ignominious, but I was happy to be safe. The Dodger started to pull his way out of the vines, but I grabbed his sleeve. At that moment I heard raised voices and then Hamish and the dog came running past. The dog snarled softly as he went past. My dog said, Stay to me! I looked at the Dodger bemused. Then more people were hurtling past.

There were about five dark-skinned warriors chasing Hamish and Jasper. We didn’t get a good look at their faces as they went racing past. A couple of them could have been women or young men from the slightness of their builds, but they all had long black hair flowing or in one case, plaited. They were all dressed in much the same way that Hamish had been, although their clothes looked a lot more worn out. On their backs a couple of them carried small soft packs made of cloth. They didn’t appear to have weapons of any sort, although several lethal-looking sticks were being waved about, apparently in anger. They shouted as they chased Hamish and Jasper through the forest, so we could hear their progress as they got further away from our hiding place.

‘What was that all about?’ I asked when it seemed the chase was far enough away. ‘Did you catch anything?’ But the Dodger had his own agenda.

‘My dad told me that one day he was destined to come here and free the people from the McKenzie yoke.’ The Dodger had obviously been bursting to get something off his chest the whole time Hamish had been telling his story. ‘I never believed him, you know, and then one day I came home and he had killed himself in the old tool shed. The note he left said McKenzie had driven him to it. McKenzie told the police that my dad had snapped over a long-standing argument about land, but when I went to see Hamish’s father for an explanation, the old man just told me what you heard Hamish say: That I and my father were nothing. He said that my dad’s suicide just proved it.’

I would have felt safer at this stage if the Dodger had been crying, but he wasn’t. He was really stony-faced. This was the most I had ever heard the Dodger say in one conversation. I tentatively put a hand on his shoulder and then cast about for a non sequitur. ‘You’ve got really nice eyes. Can you see without your glasses?’

‘What. What?’ The second ‘what’ was a bit worrying really. He could certainly see me without his glasses. ‘My father killed himself because of this bloody place, and you want to know about my eyesight? What are you? Some kind of featherbrained flirt?’

I was stung. I was past annoyed. My loud button had been pushed. ‘I am not a flirt, Jonathan. I don’t know what to say about your dad. I’m sorry he killed himself. I’m sorry Hamish’s father is a nut-case, but I don’t know anything about this place and I just want to go home.’ I stopped for an indrawn breath. ‘You can have it out with McBloodyKenzie and save the whole bloody world, but I want to go home.’ So there you have it. My normal upbringing had left me with no moral fibre. I continued. ‘And your bath robe is open.’

The Dodger looked at me. I looked at him. He pulled the edges of his bathrobe together, and tied the belt again, still looking me in the eye. He spoke again, but this was said so quietly that I had to almost get off my high horse. I leant slightly towards him. ‘You can’t go home. There’s something Hamish doesn’t know. It wasn’t your dog that got you in, it was your history. You are a part of all this.’ He indicated the trees around us. ‘Because you’re a Rhodes.’

I was happy that he was more composed, but now, he was talking nonsense. I was still operating in loud. ‘I’m a Rhodes because my dad was a Rhodes. My mother was a Carson. Is that important too?’

‘Not here I don’t think so. But you’re a Rhodes, and you’ve got a border collie that is sentient in this land. I don’t think you should tell Hamish your last name yet.’ His quietness was contagious. It’s hard to argue with someone who won’t argue back.

‘What about your last name? You need to tell me why your name is so unimportant here.’ Even though there was lots I didn’t understand, I did understand that. And I didn’t like it.

‘Hamish’s family think that Douglass was an alias Jock McKenzie used. In fact, he used the name McKenzie as an alias when he left Australia. He went back to his legal name when he returned to Australia in 1857. That was after he had been convicted of sheep stealing in …’

‘Hold on.’ I interrupted, ‘Do you mean we are talking about some sort of actual historical figures here? Historical in the normal world.’ The Dodger nodded. I didn’t like the twists that were finding their way into my trip home. ‘Where did all this happen?’

A soft yip came from the path. Safe. The word was in my head. I gave the Dodger my mum’s Later look, and stepped out onto the trail again. Hamish was looking a little disheveled as he came to a stop in front of me, but still pleasant to the eyes. The Dodger strolled out and stood beside me asking, ‘What happened there, McKenzie?’ Jasper rubbed himself against the Dodger’s leg.

‘Well, it was going alright. I told them I was a traveler from the Overland. They said they had been sent to catch a thief, but that they were looking for four people. When they saw Jasper they got excited and asked if I was Jock’s son. They don’t distinguish the generations here, so of course I said I was, but when I told them my name they yelled at me and started in with the usual stuff about me being responsible for the land ailing and the rape of the seed. I tried to explain to them that it was The Clan who was stealing the seed, but things started getting nasty, so I ran for it. Don’t know how they would have reacted if they’d seen you two.’

The Dodger spoke. ‘We’ll never know now, will we?’ Nasty suspicious mind the Dodger has.

Hamish chose not to be provoked. You could see it in his face. ‘Shall we go then.’ he said as he turned to look at the sky through the heavy foliage of the trees. I could feel the Dodger’s version of the land mixing itself up with Hamish’s off-hand references to an ailing land and rape seeds. The repercussions were starting to give me goose bumps. I began to nervously fiddle with the stone at my neck.

‘Yeah, lets. I really would like to be wearing my own clothes very soon.’ The Dodger’s eyes followed my fingers and widened.

‘We should get to the cairn just as the lights go out. This way.’ and Hamish lead off further into the forest, with Jasper beside him.

We walked with the breeze blowing on us from behind. I found I had enough breath to ask some questions. I began with: ‘Why do you say “lights out” instead of sundown or moonrise?’

Hamish replied over his shoulder. I missed some of it, but the path widened, so I walked up beside him with Jasper between us. ‘.. so there’s no sun or moon. There’s just a time when the light gets dimmer. The light doesn’t really go out, but it’s usually a good time to be somewhere safe.’

We walked and talked for a good distance. Jasper fell back to walk beside the Dodger. Sometimes to make myself heard, I went so close to Hamish that our shoulders touched, and sometimes Hamish bent his head to me when the wind threatened to steal his words away. At any other time I might have thrown my whole heart at his feet. He was obviously the sort who was used to it, but the Dodger had given me such a different explanation of our presence that I kept my heart to myself.

The trees were starting to thin out when the Dodger called me back to walk beside him. He let Hamish and Jasper get a good few yards ahead, and then turned to me. ‘Janice, you’ll have to take off your necklace. Hamish hasn’t seen it yet, but when he does, he’ll know who you are.’

I touched my neck where the green stone attached to a long fine gold chain rested. ‘I can’t. I promised Grand-dad I never would. He said it was mine because I was special and only the girls in the family were allowed to wear the stone.’ The Dodger didn’t look convinced. I was almost in tears. On top of everything else, the only thing I had from home… It was at that thought that I stopped and looked the Dodger full in the face. ‘How did it get through? Nothing else came, but this did. Why?’

‘I don’t know, Janice, but I think it’d still be a good idea to keep quiet about it until we know more.’

I looked at the two way ahead of us. Jasper looked around, but continued walking close beside Hamish. There was silence as I considered the implications of the presence of the necklace. The wind blew on our backs. In the trees, in the leaves I seemed to hear voices. One voice.

‘Can you hear that?’

The Dodger was silent as he looked me in the eye. ‘Constantly.’ The breeze lifted his hair, and he turned towards the source of the wind. ‘In here it is clearer, but I’ve heard her voice the whole time we have been on her land.’

‘Who?’ He was walking backwards to the left of me. With his hair writhing about his face and his eyes closed, I could catch a glimpse of the man he would become. I could see how he would grow into the high cheek bones and nose too big for the boy’s face. His hair made a full red beard possible. Then I made sense of the words on the wind: ‘Jock’s son will close the gate. George’s girl will heal it. Friday’s pup will stand a guard forever more to seal it.’

I tugged the bathrobe closer around my neck. Not just my dog talking in my head, now I was hearing voices in the wind. I touched the Dodger on his chest, and he opened his eyes, still walking backwards. ‘What’s that all about, Dodger?’

‘There’s a prophecy. I thought my Dad made it up. It’s carved it into the old crook in my shed. ’

I’d been in Dodger’s shed, and I’d seen the crook. Once when we were playing hide and seek in the Douglass’s back yard, I went into their garden shed. It was full of spooky corners where old tools and broken-down furniture whispered to each other. The scariest thing was the old shepherd’s crook on the back of the door. No, I tell a lie. The scariest thing was actually when the Dodger’s normally mild-mannered father started roaring at me to get out of his shed, but the crook was spooky.

‘So who are the people in the prophecy: Jock’s son and George’s girl? And what about the pup born on Friday?’

‘I’m not absolutely sure. I’ll have to think about it.’ That was all the Dodger would say. The voice in the wind faded as the trees thinned further. We were almost out of the forest. The light was strengthening, without there being more or less brightness.

I prattled on, ‘Jasper’s not a Friday pup, anyway. He was born on a Sunday. It was our last year on the farm and I remember getting home from church and Chrissie had had three pups. The two bitches were trained as farm dogs, but when we moved into town, Grand-dad said we could take Jasper because he was useless with sheep.’ I didn’t want to know what the prophecy meant anymore, I decided. None of this was my business, no matter what the Dodger said. Me and my necklace and my dog would be home soon, and then I could think about having been here. But getting home was the first priority.

Hamish was gesturing for us to catch up. We left the soft leaf litter and my feet nestled into a bed of fragrant heather. The small new leaves, not the old tough branches. The sensation in my feet was the first thing I noticed. The view was the next. Hamish was standing in the lee of a large grey rock. Ahead was a rocky hill with here and there outcrops of heather and tussock. The mountains that had been distant from the knoll where we started were somewhat closer and higher. It looked as though we were now in the foot hills and that in the forest we had climbed a good way towards a pass between the mountains. At the top of the rocky hill, still some distance away, I could see a large pile of stones. Hamish pointed towards it. ‘That’s the Cairn, where we are headed, but we’ll have to watch for the Clan. They’ll be traversing in for the last of the harvest.’