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At the Landie we set about constructing a new hideaway for the vehicles, so that they’d be better concealed from anyone using the track. It wasn’t easy to do, and in the end we had to be content with a spot behind some trees, nearly a k further down the hill. Its big advantage was that to drive in there you had to go over rocks, which meant no tracks would be left, as long as the tyres were dry. Its big disadvantage was that it gave us a longer walk to get into Hell, and it was a long enough walk already.
Fi and Homer were going to wait up there for the other four, whom we were expecting back from Wirrawee at about dawn, but I didn’t want to leave Lee at the campsite on his own for the night. So, for that charitable reason, and no other, I filled a backpack to the brim, took a bag of clothes in my hand and, laden like a truck, put myself into four-wheel drive and trekked back into Hell on my own. It was about midnight when I left Fi and Homer. They said they were going to stretch out in the back of the Landrover for a few hours’ sleep while they waited.
That’s what they said they were going to do, anyway.
The moon was well up by the time I left. The rocks stood out quite brightly along the thin ridge of Tailor’s Stitch. A small bird suddenly flew out of a low tree ahead of me, with a yowling cry and a clatter of wings. Bushes formed shapes like goblins and demons waiting to pounce. The path straggled between them: if a tailor had stitched it he must have been mad or possessed or both. White dead wood gleamed like bones ahead of me, and my feet scrunched the little stones and the gravel. Perhaps I should have been frightened, walking there alone in the dark. But I wasn’t, I couldn’t be. The cool night breeze kissed my face all over, all the time, and the smell of the wattle gave a faint sweetness to the air. This was my country; I felt like I had grown from its soil like the silent trees around me, like the springy, tiny-leafed plants that lined the track. I wanted to get back to Lee, to see his serious face again, and those brown eyes that charmed me when they were laughing and held me by the heart when they were grave. But I also wanted to stay here forever. If I stayed much longer I felt that I could become part of the landscape myself, a dark, twisted, fragrant tree.
I was walking very slowly, wanting to get to Lee but not too quickly. I was hardly conscious of the weight of the supplies I was carrying. I was remembering how a long time ago – it seemed like years – I’d been thinking about this place, Hell, and how only humans could have given it such a name. Only humans knew about Hell; they were the experts on it. I remembered wondering if humans were Hell. The Hermit for instance; whatever had happened that terrible Christmas Eve, whether he’d committed an act of great love, or an act of great evil ... But that was the whole problem, that as a human being he could have done either and he could have done both. Other creatures didn’t have this problem. They just did what they did. I didn’t know if the Hermit was a saint or a devil, but once he’d fired those two shots it seemed that he and the people round him had sent him into Hell. They sent him there and he sent himself there. He didn’t have to trek all the way across to these mountains into this wild basin of heat and rock and bush. He carried Hell with him, as we all did, like a little load on our backs that we hardly noticed most of the time, or like a huge great hump of suffering that bent us over with its weight.
I too had blood on my hands, like the Hermit, and just as I couldn’t tell whether his actions were good or bad, so too I couldn’t tell what mine were. Had I killed out of love of my friends, as part of a noble crusade to rescue friends and family and keep our land free? Or had I killed because I valued my life above that of others? Would it be OK for me to kill a dozen others to keep myself alive? A hundred? A thousand? At what point did I condemn myself to Hell, if I hadn’t already done so? The Bible just said ‘Thou shalt not kill’, then told hundreds of stories of people killing each other and becoming heroes, like David with Goliath. That didn’t help me much.
I didn’t feel like a criminal, but I didn’t feel like a hero either.
I was sitting on a rock on top of Mt Martin thinking about all this. The moon was so bright I could see forever. Trees and boulders and even the summits of other mountains cast giant black shadows across the ranges. But nothing could be seen of the tiny humans who crawled like bugs over the landscape, committing their monstrous and beautiful acts. I could only see my own shadow, thrown across the rock by the moon behind me. People, shadows, good, bad, Heaven, Hell: all of these were names, labels, that was all. Humans had created these opposites: Nature recognised no opposites. Even life and death weren’t opposites in Nature: one was merely an extension of the other.
All I could think of to do was to trust to instinct. That was all I had really. Human laws, moral laws, religious laws, they seemed artificial and basic, almost childlike. I had a sense within me – often not much more than a striving – to find the right thing to do, and I had to have faith in that sense. Call it anything – instinct, conscience, imagination – but what it felt like was a constant testing of everything I did against some kind of boundaries within me; checking, checking, all the time. Perhaps war criminals and mass murderers did the same checking against the same boundaries and got the encouragement they needed to keep going down the path they had taken. How then could I know that I was different?
I got up and walked around slowly, around the top of Mt Martin. This was really hurting my head but I had to stay with it. I felt I was close to it, that if I kept my grip on it, didn’t let go, I might just get it out, drag it out of my begrudging brain. And yes, I could think of one way in which I was different. It was confidence. The people I knew who thought brutal thoughts and acted in brutal ways – the racists, the sexists, the bigots – never seemed to doubt themselves. They were always so sure that they were right. Mrs Olsen, at school, who gave out more detentions than the rest of the staff put together and kept complaining about ‘standards’ in the school and the ‘lack of discipline’ among ‘these kids’; Mr Rodd, down the road from us, who could never keep a worker for more than six weeks – he’d gone through fourteen in two years – because they were all ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’ or ‘insolent’; Mr and Mrs Nelson, who drove their son five kilometres from home every time he did something wrong and dropped him off and made him walk home again, then chucked him out for good when he was seventeen and they found the syringes in his bedroom – these were the ones I thought of as the ugly people. And they did seem to have the one thing in common – a perfect belief that they were right and the others wrong. I almost envied them the strength of their beliefs. It must have made life so much easier for them.
Perhaps my lack of confidence, my tortuous habit of questioning and doubting everything I said or did, was a gift, a good gift, something that made life painful in the short run but in the long run might lead to ... what? The meaning of life?
At least it might give me some chance of working out what I should or shouldn’t do.
All this thinking had tired me out more than the work hiking up and down the mountains. The moon was shining brighter than ever but I couldn’t stay. I got up and went down the rocks to the gum tree and the start of the trail. When I got back to the campsite I was disgusted to find Lee sound asleep. I could hardly blame him, considering how late it was, but I’d been looking forward all evening to seeing him and talking to him again. After all, it had been his fault that I’d been going through this mental sweat-session. He’d started it, with his talk about my head and my heart. Now I had to console myself with crawling into his tent and sleeping next to him. The only consolation was that he would wake in the morning and find he had slept with me and not even known it. I think I was still smiling about that when I fell asleep.