Denmaar

The man was dead within a week.

Dutton wanted to give him a proper burial—not that the man particularly deserved one—but Julia Percy Island was not a good place to die. Clumps of shearwater and sooty oystercatcher eyed him as he slogged around in knee-high guano and everywhere he put his shovel down he hit hard volcanic rock. He thought about rolling the body into the shallows and letting the sharks do the work for him; but then, to be torn to pieces by a frenzy of teeth was not a fate one would wish even on the dead. The best he could do by nightfall was scrape a shallow recess into a slab of hardened guano and cover the body over with fresh droppings.

The next day Dutton looked at the shape of the man’s body in the shit. He tried to sing a Christian hymn but he did not know it and faltered after a verse or two. So instead he sang a workaday chantey he had sung often enough with the man and said the simple words ashes to ashes and dust to dust. He felt easier as he sat upon a rock and surveyed the storm clouds on the offing and the saltwater spraying up as the swell thickened and pounded against the outcrop where their whaleboat was moored. By the time the wind was howling and the rain falling in horizontal sheets Dutton was safe inside the cave they’d chosen, his back against the wall and a little set of smoky coals on the go. As he warmed his cracked hands against the fire and scratched at his clotted hair through his red and white sealer’s cap he could hear the dumb gambolling of the seals and the deeper, oafish wail of the sea lions from without. Already once a beast had blundered into their cave and he had woken to a slimy and whiskered face in the dark.

For three weeks Dutton worked to a steady rhythm. By day he clambered over the island in search of seals and cubs and, as the late wind picked up, dragged the blooded carcasses in twos and threes back to the cave. After a meagre repast of turtle and damper he took up his flensing knife and started the grisly work of gutting and skinning his way through the pile. At first light he collected what had dried, staked out the fresh skins and began the cycle all over again. But each day there were less seals and they grew wary, slipping into the sea at the first sign of his approach.

One morning Dutton climbed the cliff face by handfuls of saw-sedge and thistle and from the top of the ridge found himself looking down on a jagged spit of rock swarming with cubs. With a knotted a length of rope he lowered himself into this undiscovered rookery and went about clubbing the unsuspecting pups. He could not carry the corpses up and over the cliff so he knelt and skinned them then and there with the living looking on nervously and barking for the dead. That night he ate the last of the turtle they had brought from Kangaroo Island and turned to scavenging shellfish, shucking oysters and sucking them raw from their shells or throwing handfuls of black mussels onto the coals and stirring them with a stick until they hissed and popped. Shivering in the wet cave he took comfort in the sweet, muggy taste of his pipe and chided himself for not having prepared a store of mutton bird earlier.

Sometime in the night it stopped raining. A string of brutally hot days followed. Dutton tried to drink sparingly but it was thirsty work scaling the cliff. They’d been warned about the lack of fresh water and had planned, if they ran out, to row across to the mainland and nose out a creek. But the whaleboat was a six man—a mighty thing stitched from planks of Huon pine—and Dutton doubted he could handle it alone in the treacherous waters of Portland Bay. The captain had said he would return in a month. Yet there was no guarantee of it, for quite often these Hobart or Launceston men would forget about the sealers they’d landed or where they’d landed them or they’d simply shirk their duty for another more promising venture. One need only mention the profits to be made on the Nanking and Shanghai markets to send a vessel spiralling off in another direction in search of skins and oil.

Dutton stopped sealing and stayed in the cool dark of the cave. In a bucket he collected a drip from the cave roof. The water was briny and the more he drank the thirstier he became. Smoking helped, but it dried out his mouth and drove him back weak-kneed and willing to the unsteady drip of the bucket. He squatted in the cave taking small, hesitant sips from the rim of his bone china mug and wiping his scaling tongue on the side of his forearm. He began to piss salt, he was sure of it. He’d lost his place in time and could no longer interpret the shadows that shifted, flattened and flickered on the cave wall. Having burnt the last of their wood he gathered up petrel bones left over from a previous expedition and lay there uncomforted by the blue-green flicker of the flames. He spoke to himself and, at one stage, thought he heard a voice crying back to him such that when he emerged, panicked, from the cave mouth, he half expected to see the dead man risen and dancing on his grave. Thankfully, the mound of dung lay still, but backlit in the moonlight Dutton saw a Grey Wanderer drifting on the sea breeze like a frigate or a spectral man of war.

And then his mother came to him, a slattern in a pink dress, Hobart sailors all around her, sucking at her body. Her neck bore a locket, inscribed with a likeness of his father but warped beyond recognition. He tried to recall the old man’s face yet saw instead a huddled, featureless mass being stretched across the triangles and flogged until its spine showed. A long line of captains, including the first he had ever served, laughed at him and demanded to be shown the hair sprouting at his navel. He was spat on by the Mills Brothers and Reid and a dozen other Kangaroo Islanders and only when he reached for his ear and fingered the missing piece did they give him leave to speak with the black boy who’d been his friend. Dutton tried to explain, the others had goaded him into it, had promised the fight would make him a man, but the boy had turned his back and was signing aboard a Yankee whaler to be marooned in the South Pacific or flung onto a Galapagos spire or simply tipped overboard for the sake of one less lay. Renanghi was there too, in the same pink dress, and with her boyish curls and her flattish nose she took him by the hand and led him to a sawgrass clearing where together they made the beast with two backs.

When Dutton awoke it was midday and his mouth had turned to ash. He scanned for shrouds on the horizon but the only thing that greeted him in the looking-glass was the mainland and the forbidding chalice of the bay. Grabbing every empty canister he stumbled out and unmoored the whaleboat. He’d rigged it lugsail thinking it would be easier for the two of them that way. But by himself, and with the westerly blowing cheerly and the sea rising to meet it, he didn’t dare raise the halyard more than halfway. He made sure the sail sat fore of the mast and took to the oars. All day long he drew and drew until his arms were dead to him. The bay heaved and sucked and the whaleboat tipped and span and all the while Dutton rode it like a horseman does an angry steed. He saw that the sun had fallen from its meridian but barely noticed the beach until a six-foot roller picked him up and sent him sheering down its face and had he not reacted quickly and flung his oar blade to larboard he would have broken upon the rocks. As it was he felt the keel bite into sand and sprung from the thwart as if he had never been affixed there and guided the whaleboat in by hand. There was a runnel not far from where he landed and he fell to his knees like a man whose noose has just been shot out from above his head and drank.

Dutton looked up to see three blacks standing over him. His first thought was repentance, in case the words of priests were true, but then he saw they had no waddies in their hands and another man a few yards off was holding their spears. He stood and rubbed at his streaking eyes. He tried to fixate on their faces but the world was revolving and he fell face forward into the sand. He felt strong hands roll him over and raise him to his feet.

Denmaar!

What? he rasped.

Denmaar! Denmaar!

They pointed to Julia Percy Island low and crab-like on the horizon and Dutton wondered groggily if they had been watching his approach the whole time from the cover of the trees. He did not know, as he would much later, what it was to them; that they thought him a blackfella jumped up again all white. Amid chatter and curious pats he was mantled in possum skin and steered towards the edge of a gathering in the centre of which was a bloated whale. The mob had already cut in and they slapped a hunk of charcoaled meat into his fist. At first Dutton thought he could not eat. But soon he found he could, the whalemeat soft and rich in his mouth. He sat there on the sand silently gnawing whatever they gave him and watched as they shouted and danced and built their fire up so that it licked at the stars. At some stage they must have dragged him into a humpy because he sat upright during the night and started to see the strange figures sleeping alongside him.

Come morning Dutton filled the canisters, stowed them in the whaleboat and signalled his intention to return to the island. Now many hands were up and down the gunwale, their bare feet splashing in the shallows as they dragged him out and stood there grinning as he plucked up the oars and started to row. As Dutton looked back on the mob and the shrinking cut of coarse grey sand on which they stood he thought again of Renanghi. If ever he made it back to Kangaroo Island he would tell her of this place. He’d never seen such land: here they could start a life with nothing but sea and sky and the breaching backs of a hundred whales to lure them from each other. And he thought of the man, still sleeping there, and how he would bury him, would dig until his hands bled to make sure he got below earth.

Copyright David Mence 2011