One of the visitors in the aftermath of Charlie’s passing was agricultural inspector Bluey Edwards. Bluey had always personified the taciturn bent not uncommon among lifelong Top Enders. He and I had never had much interchange. On this day, he spent a few moments inside, speaking with Sara and the girls. When he re-emerged, he caught sight of me engaged in some manner of unfocused tinkering.
“Quite a bollocks, eh mate?” said the government man quietly. I nodded my assent. He asked, “Hey, have you ever fired a .308?”
I hadn’t; in truth, other than figuring it was a rifle, I had no idea what a .308 was.
“Let’s go,” said Bluey, gesturing towards his truck. As we rolled towards the river, Bluey related adventures he and Charlie had shared.
The stories revolved around flying, and drinking, and pursuing throughout wide stretches of the outback various feral critters, of both the two- and four-legged variety. The details would be theirs to elaborate, not mine. The distillation? I’ll simply point out that saints often live solitary lives, whereas neither Charlie nor Bluey ever lacked for company.
“Top bloke he was. The best damn bush pilot I ever saw. I had some good times with that fella…” Bluey’s voice trailed off, the distant look in his eyes focused on better days.
At the river, Bluey set his parking brake, then reached behind his seat and extracted a gun case. Inside was a handsome hunting rifle.
“This here is a Winchester .308 semi automatic, eighteen-inch barrel with a twenty round clip of 150 grain Winchester Super X ammo. Redfield three-by-nine forty millimeter scope. This is what the fellas use when they’re going for big game; bears and such. It’s got a good little kick, so set it square against your shoulder and have a go.”
I cradled the substantial piece of weaponry. “Semi automatic, eh? So I just squeeze ‘em off?”
“Right-o. Draw the bolt and release. Your safety is there on the trigger guard. Red means go.”
I clapped the earmuffs Bluey offered onto my head, spread my feet, braced the rifle against my shoulder, and grasped the front stock securely. I peered through the crosshairs on the hunting scope and selected a thick dead branch rising from the river, the better part of a hundred yards distant. I inhaled deeply, released my breath slowly. Just as my lungs exhausted themselves I gently squeezed the trigger and watched the deadwood explode into sawdust. A mighty report spread across the plain, chasing a flock of Red-Headed Galaghs from nearby trees.
“Holy shit! This thing packs a punch!” I exclaimed, adrenaline surging through my body.
“That it does, mate. That it does,” Bluey said in a low tone, gazing into the distance. “Set yourself between shots but fire off a couple. Put the rest of that bastard underwater.”
I did as the stockie suggested, then handed it off to him and watched as he obliterated various targets in the distance. Then, as we emptied the second of two clips between us, I caught myself smiling, and realized I had not thought of Charles Ahlers for a full fifteen minutes.
Within the miasma of grief in which we were all muddled, those fifteen minutes of oxygen seemed forever.
“Sara says you lot need a killer. You game?” asked Bluey.
What in hell else was I doing which meant anything? “Sure.”
We drove along the road until Bluey spotted a fat bullock. “That buckskin’s a good ‘un. Your shot.”
I took the rifle from Bluey’s hands, and, with an unfamiliar calm, sighted up the beast. Nothing seemed to carry any gravity in these senseless, amorphous days. We needed a killer—at least that was something I could hang my hat on. I lined up the castrato and calmly pulled the trigger. Before the concussive sound sent his herdmates running, the creature collapsed where he’d stood, dead.
Amidst darkness, even the slightest ray of light brings warmth. I’d accomplished a clean kill, partnered with Death to serve — for this moment, at least — a comprehensible purpose. And neither end of the exchange, the survivors nor the dead, suffered in bringing that end.
Working together, Bluey and I quartered the animal, and we — he and I and the bullock and Death — filled Bullo’s freezer with food for the living.
One of the rubs of a life filled with great responsibility is that obligation yields itself to no one, no event. Those of us tasked with perpetuating the life of Bullo River had two more musters to organize and execute, in addition to handling the myriad daily chores of station life. Though we lost Marlee for a good while as she regained herself, then flew to Queensland for Charlie’s funeral, the rest of us plugged away as best we could. There is no replacing a man such as Charlie. Danielle and Erik and Tazzy and I joined Uncle Dick and Stumpie to simply work around and through the obstacles presented by Charlie’s loss. When Marlee sullenly joined us again, ten days after the fact, her tenacity and expertise filled additional gaps. The workdays had become quiet affairs. Each of us kept to our own thoughts. Communication was clipped, devoid of jocularity. There were no more manure fights.
Given this muted atmosphere, the sharp cry which went out one evening was particularly jarring.
“King Brown!” It was Marlee’s voice.
We’d just returned from the day’s work. I was washing up for supper, Sara was in the kitchen putting together our meal. I ran to the front of the house where Marlee and Danielle were standing.
“Big fella!” said Marlee. “He’s in that wood pile. I saw him go in there.” She pointed at a stack of fireplace logs propped against a small tree, twenty feet from the open front of the house.
Few people come to Australia without being aware of the great variety and potency of the venomous animals on that island continent. Australia has no apex predators—grizzly bears, mountain lions, timber wolves. Instead, it is crawling and slithering with critters large and small which can do you in with a single bite. My first night at Bullo Sara warned me to keep from placing my hands underneath the metal frame of my bed, where “Redback spiders like to live.” This potential presence was no more pleasant to contemplate than the monster which lived under my bed when I was four years old, with the added disadvantage of being real. Redback spiders inject powerful toxins which attack nerve cells, causing the caliber of pain which makes their victim wish that the dying would hurry up and get over with.
King Brown, aka Mulga, snakes inject a different manner of entertainment into the dying process. Their myotoxins paralyze muscles. So after the eight or ten foot adult grabs ahold of you, often chewing for a bit, and not uncommonly while you’re minding your own business sound asleep, they squirt a massive load of juice into your bloodstream which will soon enough tell your diaphragm to take the afternoon off. With assistance two plane trips away—the flight to Bullo and the return to town—and even with the incipient nausea, vomiting, and internal bleeding to take your mind off your breathing problems, King Brown bites make for a long day.
That I had managed to work in the outback for months without coming across a King Brown or a Redback or any of their friends in the gallery of horrors—the Funnel Web or Trap-Door spider, Taipan, Death Adder, or Common Brown snake—was just fine with me. That bit of Australian local color I could do without.
But all that changed with Marlee’s cry at last light. While Sara kept an eye on the wood pile Marlee went to get her shotgun, and I fired up a ute. I alerted the stock camp, and within minutes we had four vehicles parked in a semi-circle, shining their headlights upon the firewood. With palpable tension in the air, the greenest and most naïve of the crew—that would be me—moved in and began deconstructing the wood stack, log by log. Marlee was standing, armed, in the open doorway of her mother’s bedroom, twenty feet away. Sara stood behind her daughter’s shoulder. Everyone else arranged themselves clear of Marlee’s potential field of fire.
I’m not sure why I didn’t use a garden implement to disassemble the pile; it seems an obvious choice looking back. But I didn’t, and no one suggested it. I simply set my feet wide and with extended arms reached into the pile, starting at the top, and began removing and tossing to the side bits of wood, one by one. Each extraction played out like a round of Russian roulette—rising tension, decisive moment, brief de-escalation when the fatal strike failed to occur, then rising tension with the renewed potentiality. This must have gone on—I don’t know how long—but eventually there were fifty logs scattered about, and six remaining in the stack.
Again, a long pole would seem to be indicated in this moment. Had Charlie been there, I like to think he would have suggested such a thing. But somehow in the fog of his recent loss it didn’t occur to any of us. I simply walked boldly if stupidly into the certitude confronting us and grabbed the nearest of the few remaining logs. A six-foot-long King Brown emerged and, by Grace, headed the opposite direction from where I was standing. He slithered quickly away until he ran into the wall of the homestead. Had he turned right he would have been in the open grass heading towards the airstrip. Marlee likely would have run him down and blasted him, but it would have been his best opportunity for escape.
Instead, he turned left, traveling along the length of the wall towards a corner of the house. At the corner he turned left again and within eight feet reached the open doorway to Sara’s bedroom. Marlee and Sara retreated as he headed their way. When he reached the doorway, he turned, seeking refuge inside. Marlee, now standing on her mother’s bed, aimed and fired. With a powerful report the great snake was smoted, blown to smithereens, along with several pairs of Sara’s shoes left in the doorway.
Under less morose conditions the demise of the dangerous creature would have been a cause for lighthearted celebration, with gesticulations and re-hashing of the play-by-play and animated commentary all around. But in the grim haze of Charlie’s passing, there was no such gaiety. Oddly wearied as the adrenaline drained from my system, I re-stacked the wood pile. Stumpie, Dick, and the boys climbed in their vehicles and drove back to camp. Marlee set the shotgun in its rack and returned to her room. Sara began cleaning up the scene of the killing.
That evening took a surreal turn when, about an hour later, another cry arose, this time from Sara in her office. A great brown bat had flown in while she was doing some paperwork. It was flapping chaotically about, crashing into the walls. When it settled itself for a moment Danielle trapped it under a hat and removed it to the outdoors.
Bats are not particularly dangerous to people. But the two intruders, and the women’s cries of alarm, imparted to the night a sense of menace unknown thus far during my stay. It seemed as if nature itself sensed the void left in Charlie’s wake, felt freed to fill the vacuum with malevolent spirits. Before turning in I grabbed a tinny of Emu and sat out back contemplating the dark turn my trip had taken.
What can we make of such a thing as untimely death? Some people believe that all things happen for a reason, as if every life is laid out in advance. I’m not one of those people. I find such an idea incomprehensible, inconsistent with logic and the notion of a good God. Free will and luck most certainly have roles to play in any worldview which aspires to make sense to me. I can’t imagine we’re puppets acting out another’s script, however elevated the author. And even if we are, I still don’t wish to live with that understanding. I’ll act as though a free moral agent, and if I’m proven wrong in the afterlife; well, the joke’s on me. But at least I will have had some good years aspiring to noble aims, made available through living a purposeful life.
There is an entire branch of philosophy called theodicy, which grapples with the question of why bad things happen to good people. Hindus are deterministic on the issue; they essentially believe that we earn all the good and bad we experience in life. Besides turning compassion on its head by making it narcissistic at core–I help others so that I don’t come back as a rat—I just can’t accept that we’re sufficiently powerful beings to control our own destinies, either here or in the everafter. We are beings too fierce to make ourselves our own slaves, even to our best intentions.
Buddhists would say that bad is itself a notion imposed on a situation by our own understanding, born of our desire for things to be a certain way. Lose the desire, the bad ceases to exist. Sorry Siddhartha; I have no desire to lose the sense of loss I have at Charlie’s passing. I’d rather live with the grief than in a state of elevated indifference.
Christians would say that God made the best of all possible worlds, which must necessarily include predictable physical phenomena, and humans with a free will to seek the righteous path. That’s all good and well when we’re pursuing moral virtue and seeking immutable truth. But it’s scant comfort when we are pursuing half-broken brumbies and hit an immovable object. Charlie had no ill intent. He was simply moving at a certain speed before colliding with an object of a certain mass. His head weighed a certain amount and his vertebrae could withstand a certain specific force. When the collision exacted upon his head a force greater than his vertebrae could handle, the vertebrae fractured and the signals from his brain to his vital organs ceased. Predictable physical phenomena, all. And no comfort whatsoever.
But perhaps it’s foolish to seek comfort in philosophy. Philosophy explains, no more. Comfort is, perhaps, born of a warmer impulse, a need more human than clinical. Perhaps everything doesn’t happen for a reason, but reasons—understandings, lessons—can be drawn from every happening. I have to imagine that the life lessons I learned from working with Charlie Ahlers would have stayed with me without the vivid juxtaposition of his pointless death against the great purposefulness of his living. But it may be that the lessons I learned from him are more deeply ingrained as a result of his death. That’s not to say that he gave his life that mine might be better; that would be a miserable trade-off in the cosmic scheme of things. Rather, it may simply be that his death compelled upon those of us who knew him an obligation to have his life and, especially, his manner of living, continue through us.
Perhaps even these words are a reflection of that obligation.
There was plenty to write about of my experience at Bullo River without the drama of Charlie’s death. But the fact of it made it a virtual obligation that I let the world know about this good man, and the optimized life he lived. Contemporary life is, for all of us, a hailstorm of imperatives and confoundments and hair fires. Yet here we are nonetheless, flawed creatures all, attempting to comprehend the way forward. In such a world, those rare individuals who are complete in their mastery of their domain should never disappear without their example being honored. This fragile orb can not afford to lose such a precious thing.
So if my words can preserve some measure of the excellence which prevailed in that remote place, enacted by a magnificent cast of unique human beings, led by a man in full, then perhaps with these reflections the merciless Outback sun has, at last and with some small measure of usefulness, finally released its grip on my being.
Barking in Nutwood 