The Third Day, The Frost Read Free Page B

time he got it going the ute was a hundred metres
away, bumping slowly across the paddock towards the gate. The boy
tore off after it, his rear tyre sliding around as he accelerated.
I wondered if the men would make him open the gate. I was smiling
as I walked back to the others. Seemed like there was more than one
way to skin a pussycat.

Chapter
Three

    My smile didn’t last long. As we made our
cautious way from property to property we were shocked by the speed
with which the invaders had moved. A disease of colonists had
infected the countryside.
    ‘You know what it must seem like to them?’
Homer said. ‘It must feel like the old days, when the whites first
arrived, and all they could see was this huge country with no one
in it who they cared about. So, after living in pokey little towns
or on ten hectare farms in England, they could suddenly spread out
and help themselves to thousands of square k’s each. You remember
that unit we did in history: selectors and squatters? Well, a
couple of centuries later, here’s history repeating itself.’
    We were all silent, a depressed, pessimistic
silence.
    It took us a few days to work out how things
were organised. As far as we could tell there were two or three
families who’d moved onto each farm. As well, some places had mini
prison camps, thirty or forty people, who were used as slave labour
in that particular area. They were locked up each night in sheds or
shearers’ quarters or workers’ cottages – whatever was available.
Most of these mini camps were guarded at night by four sentries,
one on each corner, and were lit by improvised floodlights. It
wouldn’t have been so hard to stage a breakout, but I guess the
problem for most people was where to go after they broke out. Not
everybody had a convenient bolthole called Hell, with a stockpile
of food and other stores. It was just another fluke, the way it had
worked for us. I still couldn’t decide if it was a good fluke or a
bad one.
    One odd thing was that we didn’t recognise any
of the prisoners. As we spied on them from different vantage points
we thought that most of them seemed like experienced cockies: they
moved stock confidently and handled tools well. They were even
shearing at a couple of places. But we didn’t see anyone we knew
and we decided not to take the chance of talking to strangers. It
might have made us feel good but the risk wasn’t worth it.
    Perhaps that, more than anything else, showed
how much we’d changed. We’d toughened to such an extent that we
chose not to ask about the welfare of our families if it meant any
possibility of danger to ourselves. If someone had told me six
months earlier that’s the kind of person I’d become ... Of course
these prisoners, who we thought were from another area, quite
likely wouldn’t even know our parents, but there had been a time
when we would have asked anyway.
    On our third day we were just about out of the
Wirrawee district, hiking through some scrubby, very poor country,
between Wirrawee and Fletcher East. By staying in the uncleared
stuff we were able to make good progress. There was nothing to
attract colonists there, just cockatoos, galahs and kangaroos. And
an echidna that I nearly trod on as it grovelled in the dirt,
trying to dig its way to China. We had glimpses of both farmland
and the pot-holed bitumen road that wound through the valley like a
confused snake. At about lunchtime we saw something that had
already become familiar: a group of prisoners at work, with a
couple of sentries. It took us a while to figure out what these
prisoners were doing. One of them was operating a front-end loader
and had dug a big pit; the others were wheeling loads to the pit
from a large low brick building a hundred metres further away. We
were due for a meal so we stopped and ate our scanty lunch while
watching them hard at work.
    After a couple of minutes Homer suddenly said:
‘I’ve figured it out.’
    ‘Figured what out?’
    ‘What