The Pioneers

by Katharine Susannah Prichard

A man was busy in the interior of the wagon, moving heavy casks and pieces of furniture. He lifted them out, piled them on the ground and spread a couple of sheepskins over them. Then he threw a sheepskin and a blanket of black and brown tweed on the floor for the night's resting.

It had been climbing the foothills for days, this heavy, old-fashioned vehicle, and the man and the woman had climbed with it, she driving the cow and calf, he giving his attention to the horses and clearing the track. So slowly had it toiled along that at a little distance it looked like some weary, indefatigable insect creeping among the trees. The horses—a sturdy young sandy-grey mare and a raw, weedy, weather-worn bay—seemed as much part of it as its wooden frame, ironshod wheels, and awning of grimy sailcloth.

They tugged at their load with dull, dumb patience and obstinacy, although the bay had stumbled rather badly the whole way. The man had put his shoulder to the wheel, helping the horses up the steep banks and long, slippery sidings. He had stood trembling and sweating with them when heavy places in the road were past, the veins knotted in his swarthy forehead, the bare column of his throat gasping for the mountain air. There was the same toiling faculty in him that there was in the horses—an instinct to overcome all difficulties by exertion of the muscles of his back.

The wagon had creaked garrulously on the long slopes, and stuttered and groaned up the steep hill sides. It had forded creeks, the horses splashing soberly through them and sending the spray into the air on either side. It had crashed over the undergrowth that encroached on the track, an ill-blazed stock route among the trees, and again and again the man had been obliged to haul aside fallen timber, or burn it where it lay, and cut away saplings, in order to make a new path.

The wagon was filled with boxes and bags of food stuffs and pieces of furniture. Inside it smelt like a grocer's shop; and it had trailed the mingled odour of meal, corned meat, hemp, iron, seed wheat, crude oil and potatoes through the virgin purity of the forest air. Beneath its floor, in wrappings of torn bags, straw and hessian, were lashed a wooden plough, a broad-bladed shovel, and half a dozen farming and carpentering tools. The fowls—a game rooster, a buff hen and a speckled pullet—hung in wicker baskets from wooden pegs at the back. They and the cow and her calf had wakened strange echoes in the forest, the rooster heralding every morning at dawn this advance guard of civilisation.

When the vehicle had reached the summit of the foothills, the track fell wavering into the green depths of the forest behind it, a wale of broken ferns, slain saplings, blue gums and myrtles, mown down as with a scythe by its wheels. The timbered hills fell away, wave upon wave, into the mists of the distance, and the plains stretched outward from them to the faintly glittering line the sea made on the dim horizon. Somewhere to the west on those grey plains, against the shore of an inlet, was the township of Port Southern from which they had come.

Donald Cameron, after studying a roughly-made plan and the wall of the forest about him, had taken the mare by her sandy forelock and turned the wagon in among the trees on the far side of a giant gum, blazed with a cross, on which the congealing sap had dried like blood. Steering a north-westerly course, the wagon had tacked among the trees and come to the clearing.

And now that all preparations for the night were made, he took the animals to the creek for water. It ran at the foot of the long, low hillside and could be heard crooning and gurgling under the leafy murmur of the forest.

Leaving the fire, the woman went to a fallen trunk, sat down and gazed into the shadows gathering among the trees. A rosy and saffron mist hung between their thronging boles. The peace of the after-glow held the hills, the chirring of insects and the shrill sweet calling of birds had quivered into silence. Only a leafy whispering stirred the quiet.

For a moment the fire of her clear spirit burnt low. Hope and courage were lost in dreams. There was wistfulness in her grey eyes as they went out before her, wistfulness and heartache. She seemed to be reading the scroll of the future, seeing a dim, mysterious unrolling of joys and sorrows with the eyes of her inner vision.