The Pioneers

by Katharine Susannah Prichard

Deirdre's spirits rose as White Socks climbed the steep track of the foothills. She drew the strong, sweet leafy smells of the trees with eager breaths. Tying her hat to the saddle, she threw back her head to the sunshine, exclaiming with delight to see the red and brown prickly-shrub blossom out among the ferns, sunlight making the young leaves hang upon the saplings in flakes of translucent green, ruddy-gold and amber.

She talked to Socks and called to the birds that flitted across the track. It was so good to be in the hills again, climbing the long, winding path through the trees. She wanted to catch the sunshine in her hands; it hung in such yarns of palpable gold stuff across the track. She sang softly to herself, gazing into the blue haze that stood among the near trees.

The valleys were steeped in sun mists. Her little horse ambled easily through them, and when he climbed the steep hill sides, she slipped from his back and walked beside him, asking him again and again, if it were not good to be going to Steve's, to the paddocks where Socks himself had flung up his heels an unbroken colt, and all the gay, careless days of her childhood had been spent. She felt as if they were leaving the reek and squalor of the Wirree River for ever.

And yet the vague uneasiness McNab's words had evoked hovered in her mind. His eyes, gestures, ugly writhing smile, kept recurring to her. She was anxious to get to the Schoolmaster and give him McNab's message, to know what he would make of it. What harm was it McNab could do her father? She knew that Dan feared him, in a curious, watchful way. And the trouble that was coming to him. What had McNab meant by that? This business Conal was on, what was it? Why had she been told nothing about it? The way McNab had talked to her, too, disquieted her.

All day a premonition of trouble haunted her. She urged the chestnut on. When they splashed through a creek at midday, she let him stand for a few minutes in the middle of it, dip his patchy white nose into the clear, cold water, and sough it up noisily. A little further on, near a gully in which the mists were unfathomable, the trees, grey as sea lichen in its depths, she sat down by the roadside and ate her sandwich of bread and cheese and had a drink from her bottle of milk.

Davey and she had often made excursions to Long Gully when they were children to hear the bell-birds. They dropped mellow notes through the stillness of the trees that climbed the gully's steep sides. Davey and she had crept warily through the undergrowth, on the look-out for snakes, and had sat still for hours behind a fallen tree, listening for the plomp, plomp, plomp of the shy birds' notes of purest melody thrown into the pool of the silence.

A dead tree stood near the edge of the track. Deirdre remembered that there had been a magpie's nest in it, and that the "maggies" would swoop down on her and on Davey in the springtime, if there were young birds in the nest, screaming and flapping their wings, and sometimes getting in a peck which brought the blood to her freckled face or to Davey's. She glanced up to see if the magpies were about that day; but they were not.

So gaunt and tall the dead tree stood. Its branches seemed to strike against the sky. They rattled with the sound of bones in the wind. The sun and thrashing winter storms had bleached it, and there were black wales and scars where a fire had eaten into the wood above the hacked zone that the axe of a settler had made when he ring-barked it years ago. As long as she could remember the dead tree had stood there, gaunt and ghostly, with the tangle of living trees behind it. They were clad with their shifting, whispering garment of leaves all the year round, and decked with flowers in the springtime. But the dead tree was naked. It might have been an avenging spirit of the wilderness, it stood with an air of such tragic desolation by the wayside.

There were dead trees all along the hill roads; scores of them in the paddocks. The ripping crack and thunder of their crashing to the earth could be heard in the dead of night sometimes. When they thought of it, country folk moved from under a dead tree. Deirdre looked up at this one. It seemed to waver in the wind. She shook the crumbs from her skirt, and caught the chestnut's bridle.

Scarlet-runners were overhanging the bank on that turn of the road, near where the school had been, when she passed. The chimney of the hut was still standing, though the wild creepers had thrown long vines about it. Supple-jack had clambered over the half-dozen twisted fruit trees; it threw its shower of feathery, seeding thistle-down over the dark-leafed apple branches.