The Complete Stories by David Malouf Page B

minutes more and I stopped, told myself sternly not to panic and, standing with my eyes closed and the whole landscape shrilling in my head, took half a dozen slow breaths.
    The shot came from closer than I would have expected, and from a direction—to my left—that surprised me. How had I gone so wrong? It was only when I had got over a small rush of relief that it struck me that after the first shot there had been no other. I quickened my pace, then began to run, my boots sinking and at times slipping on the swampy ground. When I arrived back at the clearing Stuart lay awkwardly sprawled, white-lipped and holding his shirt, which was already soaked, to his bloodied thigh.
    “Hi, Angus,” he said, his tone somewhere between his old, false jauntiness and a dreamy bemusement at what had occurred and at my being the one who had arrived to find him.
    “Better get someone. Quick, eh?”
    He glanced down to where blood, a lot of it, I thought, was flooding through the flimsy shirt.
    I fell to my knees, gaping.
    “No,” he said calmly. “Just run off as quick as you can, mate, and fetch someone. But be quick, eh? I'll be right for a bit.”
    I wasn't sure of that. I felt there was something I should be doing immediately, something I should be saying that would make him feel better and restore things, maybe even cancel them out, and I was still nursing this childish thought as I sprinted towards the camp. Something I would regret for ever if he bled to death before I got back.
Was
he bleeding to death? Could a thing like that just happen, without warning, out of the blue?
    In just minutes I had shouted my breathless announcement and we were back.
    He was still sitting, awkwardly upright, his back against the log. I took in the rifle this time. It lay on the ground to his right. There was also the heap of dull black feathers that was a scrub-turkey He was no longer holding the soaked rag to his outflung leg. A pool was spreading under him. He was streaming with sweat. Great drops of it stood on his brow and were making runnels down his chest.
    “It's all right, Dad,” he said weakly when the old man and Matt and the others reached him. “Bugger missed.”
    It took me a moment to grasp that it was the bullet he was referring to.
    They got his boot off and Matt slashed the leg of the scorched and bloodied jeans all the way to the crotch and worked quickly to apply a tourniquet. “You'll be right,” he told Stuart. “Bugger missed the main artery, you're a lucky feller. Bone too.” Blood was seeping out between his hands. There was a smell that made me squeamish. Seared meat. Stuart, bluish-white around the mouth, was raised up on his elbows and staring, fascinated by the throbbing out of the warm life in him. Like a child who has borne a bad fall manfully, but bursts into tears at the first expression of sympathy, he seemed close to breaking.
    I was dealing with my own emotions.
    I had seen Stuart stripped any number of times, in the changing room at the pool, in the noise and general roughhouse of the showers afterwards. A naked body among other naked bodies, with clear water streaming over it and a smell of clean soap in the air, is bracing, functional, presents an image too common to be remarkable or to draw attention to itself. But a single ravaged limb thrust out in the dirt, the soaked denim of the jeans that covered it violently ripped and peeled away, black hairs curling on the hollow of the thigh and growing furlike close to the groin, has a brute particularity that brought me closer to something exposed and shockingly intimate in him, to the bare forked animal, than anything I had seen when he stood fully naked under the shower. I was shaken. His jockeys, where they showed, sagged, and were worn thin and greyish. A trail of blood, still glistening wet, made its way down the long ridge of the shank bone.
    Not much more than half an hour ago I had walked out on him. Exasperated. Worn down by the demands he put on