The tribesman could navigate by landforms, winds, and by the night sky. That’s why he left the home place with the keeper. He always went with the keeper to visit the oldest places, walking a full twenty paces behind him so he would not hear the song, but he had heard it despite this precaution, and he had learned it by the time he was thirty, though he dared not sing it aloud. He went with the keeper many times a year, to Nanguluwur, Ubirr, and Burrunggui. Sometimes they did not go to the old places; they went walking across the savanna, or by raft during the wet seasons, so the keeper could listen for information that came from the water, from the dry ground, and from the cliffs. They returned to the people after days, sometimes weeks, with guidance and news. Incorporating the new knowledge, the people would move to the next camp, or they would stay until the eucalypts flowered or the magpie geese took flight.
But the last time had been different; the tribesman knew it right away, even if the rest of the people did not. The keeper beckoned to him in his usual way, and pointed east. The tribesman prepared for a journey but he could not feel the reason for it. The old women talked among themselves: He was going now? With the thunderheads building? They did not understand it but they trusted the keeper, as they should.
The keeper led him to the east. The tribesman thought they would go to Nourlangie, but after a day’s walk away from the camp the keeper turned north. The tribesman’s unease grew. This was not the way toward any ancestor, unless the song had given the keeper knowledge much deeper than anyone knew.
On the evening of the second day of walking the keeper had come to him. Brother. The keeper’s white hair glowed in the nighttime. Brother, we are going to the sea. The tribesman knew he was smiling. It is the sea we need to ask. The keeper’s voice was strange, different. He squatted next to the tribesman, rocking gently back and forth on his heels, twisting a length of his hair between his fingers. The tribesman noticed his eyes were red-rimmed and watery. The keeper was very old. He held centuries of knowledge, but could he walk that far? The people knew the sea only by what they heard in stories. Those stories had nothing to do with life at the home place. Why? whispered the tribesman. We have never gone there. What is the need? We have never gone there for anything. Something is changing, the keeper told him. That is what I know. We must find out what it is and bring the news back. Now is the time to go and get this information.
For four days they walked across dry floodplain, through forests where the rustling of leaves blocked every other sound. They watched thunderheads pass above their heads and drop their rain far to the west. The keeper walked steadily in his uneven gait, limping from his old wound. As they went farther and farther the tribesman’s fear grew, and he mourned. He hated to leave the home country more than anything else in his life. The aunts and grandmothers had always teased him, ever since he was a boy, saying the only reason he learned how to read landscapes, how to mark paths and navigate by the night sky, was so that wherever he was, he could return very quickly to his bed.
As they walked, he tried to keep the home place with him. He saw the men poised ankle-deep in the shallow wetlands, spears raised. Faster than you could see, they speared turtles through the neck. The hunters walked back to the stone cliffs before dusk, watching the wood swallows roosting in the high crevices. The women plucked the last geese of the season, storing the down and stringing flight feathers and hanging them among the rocks. The tribesman wanted more than anything to return, to feel the first drops of the rain on his back. He wanted to walk into the shelter and breathe the scent of roasting bird, of coming storm. But without the tribesman the keeper would be lost. And the people needed a keeper, so the tribesman could not turn back.
The song on his lips tastes metallic, brings a vision of rain and the smell of wet eucalypts. He moans when he feels the wooden floor of the museum under his feet and hears the sound of horse’s hooves and clanging metal harnesses on Broadway. He covers his ears, but nothing helps. He is nowhere, dying, waiting.