Too Close to the Wind by Richard Attree

Author:Richard Attree [Attree, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-01-17T23:00:00+00:00

In the end, I stumbled across the camp by chance. Late in the afternoon on the second day I came round a corner above a canyon and there they were below me. The tribe was living in some caves around an oasis, in a remarkably picturesque setting. It looked like a brochure shot for a tropical paradise. There was a small lake, with palm trees growing around it and shacks constructed from the fronds. Sounds and smells drifted up to me: children, dogs, a didgeridoo, bongos, the aroma of meat smoked over a wood fire ... It was all rather reminiscent of Nicole’s pueblo in the Dominican jungle, and I felt at home already.

Nobody seemed bothered as I wandered into the camp. Most of them smiled and a few even waved hello. I doubted they saw many visitors out there, so it was an extraordinarily warm welcome. A familiar old man loped out of one of the huts, moving with lithe agility, and greeted me:

“G’day Nick. We’ve been expectin ya.”

He smiled at my astonished expression—the same radiant smile that had lit up the library. It had been six months, and three thousand kilometres since our brief meeting, but here he was, in the middle of nowhere, treating me like an old mate who’d just stepped outside for a smoke.

I shook his hand and returned his greeting:

“G’day Mandu. You’re not an easy man to find. I hope the time is right?”

“Nobody said it’d be easy, mate. But y’made it, like I knew y’would. Welcome to our Shangri-La.”

We sat outside his cave hut and he introduced me to the tribe. There were about thirty of them, mostly middle-aged, some like him as old as the hills, plus a few children and dogs. Mandu told me that his people, the Karjaganujaru, had been living in the area for twenty-thousand years. He was trying to maintain their connection to this ancient landscape but the young people were drifting back to the towns. Those in the camp still lived the traditional way for part of the year and went ‘Walkabout’ for the rest of the time. The time was indeed right to find him there, he told me, smiling.

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