E-text prepared by Christine Bell and Marc D'Hooghe
(http://www.freeliterature.org)
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 clearingof the scrubby undergrowth. Two horses had drawn it all the way from thecoast. 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 sweaton them. The mongrel that had followed at their heels lay stretched onthe sward beside them. A red-dappled cow and her calf were tethered to awheel of the wagon, and at a little distance from them were two batteredcrates of drooping and drowsy fowls.
On a patch of earth scraped clear of grass and leaves, the fire threwoff wisps of smoke and the dry, musky incense of burning eucalyptus anddogwood. It had smouldered; and a woman, stooping beside it, was feedingit with branches of brushwood and sticks that she broke in her hands oracross her knees.
A man was busy in the interior of the wagon, moving heavy casks andpieces of furniture. He lifted them out, piled them on the ground andspread a couple of sheepskins over them. Then he threw a sheepskin and ablanket of black and brown tweed on the floor for the night's resting.
It had been climbing the foothills for days, this heavy, old-fashionedvehicle, and the man and the woman had climbed with it, she driving thecow and calf, he giving his attention to the horses and clearing thetrack. So slowly had it toiled along that at a little distance it lookedlike some weary, indefatigable insect creeping among the trees. Thehorses—a sturdy young sandy-grey mare and a raw, weedy, weather-wornbay—seemed as much part of it as its wooden frame, ironshod wheels, andawning 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 hadput his shoulder to the wheel, helping the horses up the steep banks andlong, slippery sidings. He had stood trembling and sweating with themwhen heavy places in the road were past, the veins knotted in hisswarthy forehead, the bare column of his throat gasping for the mountainair. There was the same toiling faculty in him that there was in thehorses—an instinct to overcome all difficulties by exertion of themuscles of his back.
The wagon had creaked garrulously on the long slopes, and stuttered andgroaned up the steep hill sides. It had forded creeks, the horsessplashing soberly through them and sending the spray into the air oneither side. It had crashed over the undergrowth that encroached on thetrack, an ill-blazed stock route among the trees, and again and againthe man had been obliged to haul aside fallen timber, or burn it whereit 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 offurniture. Inside it smelt like a grocer's shop; and it had trailed themingled odour of meal, corned meat, hemp, iron, seed wheat, crude oiland potatoes through the virgin purity of the forest air. Beneath itsfloor, in wrappings of torn bags, straw and hessian, were lashed awooden plough, a broad-bladed shovel, and half a dozen farming andcarpentering tools. The fowls—a game rooster, a buff hen and a speckledpullet—hung in wicker baskets from wooden pegs at the back. They andthe cow and her calf had wakened strange echoes in the forest, therooster heralding every morning at dawn this advance guard ofcivilisation.