Suddenly, however, their posture changed and the game ended.
They went as rigid as black statuary six figures, lean and tall and angular, went still.
Their heads were in the air sniffing.
They all swung at the same instant in the same direction.
They saw it before I did, even with my binoculars.
It was nothing more than a tiny distant rain squall, a dull gray sheet which reached from a layer of clouds to the earth.
In the 360 degrees of horizon it obscured only a degree, no more.
A white man would not have seen it.
The aborigines fastened upon it with a concentration beyond pathos.
Watching, they waited until the squall thickened and began to move in a long drifting slant across the dry burning land.
At once the whole band set off at a lope.
They were chasing a rain cloud.

They went after the squall as mercilessly as a wolf pack after an abandoned cow.
I followed them in the jeep and now they did not care.
The games were over, this was life.
Occasionally, for no reason that I could see, they would suddenly alter the angle of their trot.
Sometimes I guessed it was because the rain squall had changed direction.
Sometimes it was to skirt a gulley.
Their gait is impossible to convey in words.
It has nothing of the proud stride of the trained runner about it, it is not a lope, it is not done with style or verve.
It is the gait of the human who must run to live: arms dangling, legs barely swinging over the ground, head hung down and only occasionally swinging up to see the target, a loose motion that is just short of stumbling and yet is wonderfully graceful.
It is a barely controlled skimming of the ground.

They ran for three hours.
Finally, avoiding hummocks and seeking low ground, they intercepted the rain squall.
For ten minutes they ran beneath the squall, raising their arms and, for the first time, shouting and capering.
Then the wind died and the rain squall held steady.
They were studying the ground.
Suddenly one of them shouted, ran a few feet, bent forward and put his mouth to the ground.
He had found a depression with rain water in it.
He bent down, a black cranelike figure, and put his mouth to the ground.

With a lordly and generous gesture, the discoverer stood up and beckoned to the closest of his fellows.
The other trotted over and swooped at the tiny puddle.
In an instant he had sucked it dry.

The aborigine lives on the cruelest land I have ever seen.
Which does not mean that it is ugly.
Part of it is, of course.
There are thousands of square miles of salt pan which are hideous.
They are huge areas which have been swept by winds for so many centuries that there is no soil left, but only deep bare ridges fifty or sixty yards apart with ravines between them thirty or forty feet deep and the only thing that moves is a scuttling layer of sand.
Such stretches have an inhuman moonlike quality.
But much of the land which the aborigine wanders looks as if it should be hospitable.
It is softened by the saltbush and the bluebush, has a peaceful quality, the hills roll softly.

The malignancy of such a landscape has been beautifully described by the Australian Charles Bean.
He tells of three men who started out on a trip across a single paddock, a ten-by-ten-mile square owned by a sheep grazer.
They went well-equipped with everything except knowledge of the "outback" country.

"The countryside looked like a beautiful open park with gentle slopes and soft gray tree-clumps.
Nothing appalling or horrible rushed upon these men.
Only there happened -- nothing.
There might have been a pool of cool water behind any of these tree-clumps: only -- there was not.
It might have rained, any time;
only -- it did not.
There might have been a fence or a house just over the next rise;
only -- there was not.
They lay, with the birds hopping from branch to branch above them and the bright sky peeping down at them.
No one came".

The white men died.
And countless others like them have died.
Even today range riders will come upon mummified bodies of men who attempted nothing more difficult than a twenty-mile hike and slowly lost direction, were tortured by the heat, driven mad by the constant and unfulfilled promise of the landscape, and who finally died.

The aborigine is not deceived;
he knows that the land is hard and pitiless.
He knows that the economy of life in the "outback" is awful.
There is no room for error or waste.
Any organism that falters or misperceives the signals or weakens is done.
I do not know if such a way of life can come to be a self-conscious challenge, but I suspect that it can.
Perhaps this is what gives the aborigine his odd air of dignity.

The family at the boulder

seeing an aborigine today is a difficult thing.
Many of them have drifted into the cities and towns and seaports.
Others are confined to vast reservations, and not only does the Australian government justifiably not wish them to be viewed as exhibits in a zoo, but on their reservations they are extremely fugitive, shunning camps, coming together only for corroborees at which their strange culture comes to its highest pitch -- which is very low indeed.

I persuaded an Australian friend who had lived "outback" for years to take me to see some aborigines living in the bush.
It was a difficult and ambiguous kind of negotiation, even though the rancher was said to be expert in his knowledge of the aborigines and their language.
Finally, however, the arrangements were made and we drove out into the bush in a Land Rover.
We followed the asphalt road for a few miles and then swung off onto a smaller road which was nothing more than two tire marks on the earth.
The rancher went a mile down this road and then, when he reached a big red boulder, swung off the road.
At once he started to glance toward the instrument panel.
It took me a moment to realize what was odd about that panel: there was a gimbaled compass welded to it, which rocked gently back and forth as the Land Rover bounced about.
The rancher was navigating his way across the flatland.

"Do you always navigate like this"?
I asked.

"Damned right", he said.
"Once I get out on the flat I do.
Some chaps that know an area well can make their way by landmarks, a tree here, a wash here, a boulder there.
But if you don't know the place like the palm of your hand, you'd better use a compass and the speedometer.
Two miles northeast, then five miles southwest that sort of thing.
Very simple".

He was right.
The landscape kept repeating itself.
I would try to memorize landmarks and saw in a half-hour that it was hopeless.
Finally we approached the bivouac of the aborigines.
They were camped beside a large column-shaped boulder: a man, his lubra, and two children.
The sun was not yet high and all of them were in the small area of shade cast by the boulder.

There was also a dog, a dingo dog.
Its ribs showed, it was a yellow nondescript color, it suffered from a variety of sores, hair had scabbed off its body in patches.
It lay with its head on its paws and only its eyes moving, watching us carefully.
It struck me as a very bright and very malnourished dog.
No one patted the dog.
It was not a pet.
It was a worker.

"The buggers love shade", the rancher said.
"I suppose because it saves them some loss of body water.
They'll move around that rock all day, following the shade.
During the hottest part of the day, of course, the sun comes straight down and there isn't any shade".

We drove close to the boulder, stopped the Land Rover, and walked over toward the family.

The man was leaning against the rock.
He gazed away from us as we approached.
He was over six feet tall and very thin.
His legs were narrow and very long.
Every bone and muscle in his body showed, but he did not give the appearance of starving.
He had long black hair and a wispy beard.
The ridges over his eyes were huge and his eyelids were half shut.
There was something about his face that disturbed me and it took several seconds to realize what.
It was not merely that flies were crawling over his face but his narrowed eyelids did not blink when the flies crawled into his eye sockets.
A fly would crawl down the bulging forehead, into the socket of the eye, walk along the man's lashes and across the wet surface of the eyeball, and the eye did not blink.
The Australian and I both were wearing insect repellent and were not badly bothered by insects, but my eyes watered as we stood watching the aborigine.

I turned to look at the lubra.
She remained squatting on her heels all the time we were there;
like the man, she was entirely naked.
Her long thin arms moved in a slow rhythmical gesture over the family possessions which were placed in front of her.
There were two rubbing sticks for making fire, two stones shaped roughly like knives, a woven-root container which held a few pounds of dried worms and the dead body of some rodent.
There was also a long wooden spear and a woomera, a spear-throwing device which gives the spear an enormous velocity and high accuracy.
There was also a boomerang, elaborately carved.
Everything was burnished with sweat and grease so that all of the objects seemed to have been carved from the same material and to be ageless.

The two children, both boys, wandered around the Australian and me for a few moments and then returned to their work.
They squatted on their heels with their heads bent far forward, their eyes only a few inches from the ground.
They had located the runway of a colony of ants and as the ants came out of the ground, the boys picked them up, one at a time, and pinched them dead.
The tiny bodies, dropped onto a dry leaf, made a pile as big as a small apple.

The odor here was more powerful than that which surrounded the town aborigines.
The smell at first was more surprising than unpleasant.
It was also subtly familiar, for it was the odor of the human body, but multiplied innumerable times because of the fact that the aborigines never bathed.
One's impulse is to say that the smell was a stink and unpleasant.
But that is a cliche and a dishonest one.
The smell is sexual, but so powerfully so that a civilized nose must deny it.

Their skin was covered with a thin coating of sweat and dirt which had almost the consistency of a second skin.
They roll at night in ashes to keep warm and their second skin has a light dusty cast to it.
In spots such as the elbows and knees the second skin is worn off and I realized the aborigines were much darker than they appeared;
as if the coating of sweat, dirt, and ashes were a cosmetic.
The boys had beautiful dark eyes and unlike their father they brushed constantly at the flies and blinked their eyes.

"That smell is something, eh, mate"?
The Australian asked.
"They swear that every person smells different and every family smells different from every other.
At the corroborees, when they get to dancing and sweating, you'll see them rubbing up against a man who's supposed to have a specially good smell.
Idje, here", and he nodded at the man, "is said to have great odor.
The stink is all the same to me, but I really think they can make one another out blindfolded".

"Here, Idje, you fella like tabac"?
He said sharply.
Idje still stared over our shoulders at the horizon.
The Australian stopped trying to talk a pidgin I could understand, and spoke strange words from deep in his chest.