The Ballad of Desmond Kale by Roger McDonald

Botolph’s, for Sunday observance. Soon they were in his employment, to make ends meet. When their potato crops failed, their isolation drove them spare and they walked off their farms despondent. Stanton called them his poor strugglers. Claiming their land back for grazing, he petitioned the governor for many thousands of acres more: if the governor would not give it to him, he would sail to London, he publicly declared, and get it from the king.
    â€˜And I have met him, this great man,’ mused Rankine, ‘lying in the dirt, scratching his cods, and my horse’s hooves kicking pebbles in his face, as he lay there and not speaking.’
    Rankine rode on, splashing into duck marshes, no way around them. He watched two emus stalk through a chewed grassland on the other side. For a time he was lost. Then some familiar ridges reached down. ‘Look for the ones like five fingers of a hand,’ Kale had reminded, and Rankine was then able to follow particular kinds of tree, as Kale had instructed him, so far with the stringybarks, higher up with the boxes, all the rest of the way along into the ones called ash, then the woollybutts, growing wide apart enough for a bullock waggon to fit between comfortably, if it ever pushed through. Leaf tips glittered like mirrors in the winter light. Termite mounds, high as a horse, stood forward, looming like pale hoods of flagellants.
    For many miles Rankine found himself travelling up what constituted a long, low hill, three days long, and to an estimated height of three thousand feet he went above sea level. The country was ever sandier, scrofulous, poor, but you might not think so from the varieties of hardy vegetation that grew there. Ferns, heath-flowers, and paper daisies growing in cold winter light, sometimes sheltered by large trees with an understorey of coarse, reedy grass, and hardy-foliaged types of shrubs that made no sort of feed for a horse. By the end of each day Rankine arrived where there was water. On the third day he watched for the signs of black smoke on a white tree, and of two saplings twisted into a hieroglyph where the first time they came along they located a blazed trail. (When Kale found that trail he knew he was right. It had been lying in the bush ten years growing over like a scar.) Here was the grassy flat by the clear stream that Kale remembered. It was named ‘the duck mole reach’ by Marsh. Sheoak trees with fine needles. Clear running water with platypus bills breaking the surface like small black floating sticks. Three axe blows in an arrowhead shape pointing a way: ‘Go sixty degrees off the angle pointed for the true bearing.’ These axe blows were grown into bark, and hard to find, but once found, most essential.
    It was there that Rankine had turned back, and the others gone on ahead. Now he went on ahead to find them.

THE DAY OF THE ESCAPE they had run the few miles west from Mundowey, forded the biggest river, bidding good day to indentured farm hands watching them pass. It was there Kale lifted the long-haired dog by the hind legs, declared it unwanted, and would slit its yelping throat, he said, unless it was cast from them. Those hardened convicts at a word from Kale trampled over their tracks as best they could with the help of such cows, pigs, and horses as they were providentially tending. A boy took the dog and said he would look after it. Moreno was downcast at losing his heart’s treasure. ‘Or else he kills my dogs,’ he said, explaining its fate to the dog itself, as he slobbered a kiss on its nostrils.
    Kale directed them on. Rankine wore rags and took orders from Kale. He was the complete unknown, the willing accomplice incognito. When descriptions were made later he was not there among them.
    On then to the western ramparts of broken, golden sandstone. Dry creeks smashed in tumbles of stone from an obscure plateau in a series of tangled gorges. After raking the sheep through thornbushes