The Pioneers

Excerpt

The wagon had come to rest among the trees an hour or two before sunset.

It was a covered-in dray, and had been brought to in a little clearing of the scrubby undergrowth. Two horses had drawn it all the way from the coast. Freed of their harness, they stood in the lee of a great gum, their flanks matted with the dust which had caked with the run of sweat on them. The mongrel that had followed at their heels lay stretched on the sward beside them. A red-dappled cow and her calf were tethered to a wheel of the wagon, and at a little distance from them were two battered crates of drooping and drowsy fowls.

On a patch of earth scraped clear of grass and leaves, the fire threw off wisps of smoke and the dry, musky incense of burning eucalyptus and dogwood. It had smouldered; and a woman, stooping beside it, was feeding it with branches of brushwood and sticks that she broke in her hands or across her knees.

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....