He would not delay, and leave today. He would cross over to the mainland and flee far away from the num.
Trugernanna shuffled her feet and coughed for attention. Good or bad news focused attention on the bearer and she wanted the limelight. Without waiting for her father’s permission she began to relate her story. Wooreddy could have ordered her to shut up, but he too wanted to hear the details.
Trugernanna was sitting on the beach watching her two big sisters diving for sea food. Relaxed and happy, they clambered to the top of a rock and stood looking down into the surf breaking at the base. They laughed for they had little fear from the sea. Then around the point came crawling a dinghy. It came to the rock on which the women stood and stopped bobbing up and down a few metres from the base. A lazy oar stroke kept it in position. Trugernanna, watching from the beach, became alarmed, but the women remained on the rock looking down at the three num staring up. Trugernanna reacted to her fright and dashed into the scrub. Safely hidden, she watched on. One of the ghosts held up a piece of soft skin. It was so soft that it fluttered in the breeze. It was of the brightest red she had ever seen. He flapped it, and his gutteral voice grated across the water to her. She listened, all ears, but couldn’t even separate the individual words.
‘Hey, my lovelies, come to our boat. We won’t hurt you. We have this and more like it for you.’
The bright cloth held Trugernanna’s eyes. She turned her gaze on her sisters and saw them look at one another. She guessed that they too wanted the bright skin. Both suddenly sprang from the rock and disappeared under the water. They came up next to the boat, held on to the side and stretched out their free hands. Trugernanna saw the num grab them by the reaching hands and haul them aboard. They screamed, but she did not see them put up much of a struggle. The boat began moving and disappeared from whence it had come. The girl ran off to tell her father.
Both men heard her out. Their bleak eyes stared into the fire as if a solution to their problem rested there.
2
Seek Allies
I
Many things had happened to the good Doctor Wooreddy since he had left his island home to flee to the South West Nation. Travelling along the coast road towards Poynduc he saw everywhere signs of the num. The Derwent River valley had been taken and from this they surged out to claim all that they wanted. Poynduc, a wide, shallow lagoon of a drowned river valley, was free except for a few timber-cutters, and the surrounding land of deep valleys filled with tangled undergrowth did not attract them.
The population of the South West Nation lived in villages scattered from Poynduc to the northern frontier at Parralaongatek, a large, shallow harbour like Poynduc, where a num enclave existed. The villages were linked by a network of narrow coastal roads and the young man passed along these until he came to a village which knew his family. The future good doctor found the people too welcoming. He was accepted at once into the community as a full adult and even allowed to sit at the feet of the elder men who, even if they did not know everything, certainly projected that feeling. Their religion was much the same as that of the Bruny Islanders, though the presence of the num had modified it somewhat. The world extended far across the forbidden sea to the Islands of Ghosts, and around them, in the gloomy forests, lurked the many shadows of Ria Warrawah waiting to rush towards the humans if the fires began to go out. Ria Warrawah – they emphasised the collective rather than the he, or it, or she – had brought the num from their far islands to plague the humans. This was how things stood!
Wooreddy listened and made notes in his mind. It all seemed plausible and a variant of traditional theology. He was pleased with the knowledge of the older men and they were pleased with his interest in the old teachings. When he wasn’t taking theology lessons, he went hunting. The Elders did not part with their knowledge freely; it had to be paid for with gifts of soft-meated wallaby (if possible) or possum. Wooreddy, an excellent hunter, earned enough to pay his fees as well as to support himself. This proved his undoing, or rather because he appeared to be settling down, it was natural that a woman be linked with him. This would keep him from pestering other women and also supplement his diet with seafood which only women were allowed to collect. One day, Wooreddy became conscious of a girl. How and why he did and why he continued to, he did not know. The girl, on her part, appeared not to be aware of him. His more and more frequent glances found her eyes elsewhere, never on him, and if he moved towards her she ran gracefully away to her home. But somehow she was often in his sight, and he could not help noticing that when she returned from the coast her bag was overflowing. Wooreddy’s education had had nothing to do with women and their ways. He knew that a man and a woman came together to form a basic social unit and he had often felt the physical need of a woman – these were the only two things he knew. Now he found himself noticing a girl, so much so that she was beginning to dominate his mind. He felt that she was wholly or partly responsible for this, though he had no evidence to support this supposition. One thing that he was aware of was that she was a foreign woman and therefore dangerous!
Knowing that the older men knew everything, Wooreddy, finding one of them in a good mood, added to it with the gift of a few plump possum, then casually raised the subject of women. He waited for the answer expecting some sort of involved discourse on the sixteen attitudes of the mind as applied to women or perhaps just a grunt. He received the grunt, but this was followed by the older man shouting in the direction of his house, ‘Lunna!’. His daughter reluctantly appeared and slowly came towards them. Her father smiled and whispered in her ear. This caused her to fling a particularly nasty look at Wooreddy before fleeing to a distant group of women. The father laughed and invited Wooreddy to sit with him. They sat in silence. Wooreddy had been disconcerted to see that the man’s daughter was the one which had been the object of his attention, or the one towards which his attention had been directed.
He did not know, but it had all been arranged. Wooreddy was a good catch. A successful hunter and a thoughtful man who would think twice before putting himself in the forefront of the battles which were becoming more fearful and bloody as the ghosts took more and more land. The South West Nation resisted and were losing too many men. Eligible mates were becoming scarce; the man’s daughter was at the age to be married, and Wooreddy, though a foreigner, available and a proper choice.
The older man kept Wooreddy with him all that afternoon and that evening invited him to spend the night. He accepted the invitation and, when the fire died down to a heap of glowing coals, the girl came quietly to his side. But she only sat beside him for a few minutes before going to sleep with the other women. Wooreddy stayed on and after a few nights the girl remained by his side. He found himself with a male and an extended family. Time passed gently in the village. Changes for him and the South West Nation (except for the constant loss of men on the frontiers) were rumours rather than actualities.
Wooreddy entered into full manhood as the regular rows of scars on his chest and the two irregular healed spear wounds on his side showed. Then, after seven years away from his island home, he decided to return. He longed to see the earth of his birth. The troubles there had become half-forgotten memories. He grimly smiled as he remembered leaving Bruny Island with scarcely a smear of red ointment on his head. Now his hair, plaited into many small rat-tails which swung about his face as he walked, was red with ochre. He had passed through combat and was entitled to hold the short, thick club in his right hand and clutch the long, clumsy spear in his left. Before the num spears were seldom carried, but now, since the crazed blood-thirstiness had affected them all, only a fool went unarmed through the frontier districts.
The South-West men had always been plotting and arranging, postponing, cancelling or marching off to fight the intruders who threatened the borders of their land. Over the twenty or so years since ghosts had settled the Derwent River Valley, participation in an action against them had assumed the status of an initiation rite. A man was not fully a man until he had sunk his spear in
