The Medicine Man

“Just take it slow,” The man had stopped to picnic with us without ever taking off his sunglasses, “and you should make it just fine.” And with that the man was on his way. It wouldn’t be the last time we saw him.

The road was marked: 4WD only. As a rule, you’re supposed to go very fast, jumping from crest to crest unless of course you have shitty suspension. We took it slow. 10 Km/h in a 70 zone. It was fairly flat, mostly tiny sand dunes that rattled our car. Clean trucks and huge jeeps would speed past us giving rise to a storm of red dust. All we could do was bob our heads and deal with the slowly passing martian landscape.

Twisted white trees stuck out from tightly packed patches of dried yellow grass indicative of the dry season. Other stretches were burnt down by wildfires, grey ashes and white branches covering the dry rocky red soil. And across all the land stood countless tall brown mounds. Some, perhaps, were waist high, other twice my height. They were all the colour of Mars. Were they the graves, I asked my companions, of those unlucky travellers who never found their way out from this wild country? Were they the eggs, or other such incubator, of some such grotesque creature of this country the word of which does not leave the wild bush? Like the birds who throw fire? We had no answers. All we could do was stare in wonder distracted only by our car asking us for a cup of coffee. “Just a bit further girl,” I patted the dashboard.

The entire campsite was empty except for two brand new looking vans which in turn, were empty. No gear, no people, nothing. Just us and the vans.

Properly traumatised by last night’s hail of mosquitos, we were quick to set up camp, eat, and get ready run at the first sign of a bloodsucker. But there were none. Only flies. Lots and lots of flies. So we trekked for firewood and served ourselves a second helping of beans and rice and sat terrified of all the rustling and jumping around in the tall grass around us. And so, it was there around the fire that, as the sun went down, we all began to see the colour out of space: staining our irises and painting our brains.

By moonlight (and oh what a brilliant moon she was that night) we walked into the thick of the bush. Spiked black silhouettes stood all around us accompanied by those soft white twisted trees growing so high then falling so low to the ground. Even around the brightness of the moon the stars shone so many through that great Hole in the sky so as to become a powdery mess. The brightest stars were clearly the closest and the lines between constellations began to draw themselves.

The dirt path wound itself up into a small dusty bridge and the whistle of wind through all the trees produced the illusion of water cutting through darkness. And so I asked, “Water?”

“Crocs!” Was Emma’s wide eyed reply.

So Dan threw a rock where we supposed the river might have been, and all of us burst into a fit of laughter at the fear we felt just a moment before. Of course, there’s a reason they call it the dry season. We carried on through the dry riverbed of sand, the moon’s bright blue light protecting us. The trees were getting taller and thicker. And so thick was the vegetation overhead that the moon was lost behind them. It was then that it occurred to me that the moon would be setting soon and we would be lost in incredible darkness without the sweet presence in the sky to protect us from…. Protect us from what?

If we continued on we’d be making our way through a tunnel of plants, as the trees seemed to be forming a canopy above. I felt to be looking to the mouth of a cave that kept stretching on as far as... I stopped walking. The other’s stopped behind me. We stood there near the edge of our remaining moonlight, still safe. The sound of the darkness ahead became suddenly so clear to me. Howling birds and screeching insects and silent wings and screaming spirits; spirits so foreign to any religion known to either the western or eastern world. For the first time since setting foot in this country it occurred to me where I really was—still am—and I was overcome with a deep Hobbish urge to yell, “get off the road!” But I didn’t. I said nothing, because I could see nothing.

Emma made an enquiry into my okayness, and my reply filled the darkness with monsters. “I don’t know this land. Everything is unknown to me, and,” I turned to face the setting Luna, great protector, making the red sand of the desert sing out in a chorus of bright faerie blue into the galaxy above. The moon was giving our quaint stolid piece of land a colour unique only to this small corner of the universe, and now…

“We’re not losing the moon,” said Emma, “it’ll come back.” I wasn’t convinced. The insects began to sound louder, and closer, and the soft silhouettes against the sky seemed movier, grabbier, more rigid. “There’s nothing out here,” she continued, “that can hurt us.”

“But…” I just kept staring down that sinister dark tunnel of branches as the moonlight grew fainter and fainter, “we don’t know what’s out here.” And then we shared a moment of silence.

It was then that Dan laughed and ran off into the darkness.

“Dan?” One of us called. I forget which. There was no answer but we heard for a moment the faint patter of his bare feet against the hard sand padding away into silence. So we followed him into the darkness without question.

By the time we reached the radio antlers the moon was gone, she was gone and we were fine. I sat there for a bit, on the ground, in the darkness, which the trees moving about me realising that I was fine. That Emma was right. That darkness and the unknown were not bad things. It was then that we had run into the worst possible imaginable thing to find in the middle of the night in the wilderness. Humans. It was a campsite and people came out of their tents and began moving about. We decided that we were probably scaring the humans more than they were scaring us and so we turned back and made for camp. The only problem was, Emma forgot her shoes, but that’s a different story.

We all fell down onto our backs and looked at the brilliance of the sky on her grandest, moonless, wilderness, galactic powdery scale. And in the stars I became aware of a truly inhuman face, likely some eldritch entity the size of all the sky and still bigger. Whoever it was, whatever it was, it was looking right back at me with wings spread out to encompass the earth. And closer and closer it came. I could feel the pressure, the gravity, the force of this being begin to press me into the black sand beneath me. The stardust from which it was made glowed bright and brighter still and the entire sky began to come closer as the scowl of this being tightened around my chest.

“I think it’s time to keep moving,” Emma sat up with a gasp. Dan and I agreed with Emma that something unspeakable was happening in the sky. 

And so, with great relief I sat up and shook the dust from my shoulders, taking to my feet. I had to keep my eyes on the ground for at least a few moments. Whatever grotesque god had been there was gone when next I looked up. Only a brilliant, unbelievable sky remained. I had half a mind to reach up and lock arms with a spiral of the galaxy and all it’s warbling jewels. 

I hadn’t remembered those branches, before, while on the way out, before. The ones right there, before, hanging down right in the middle of the path and reaching the dusty ground, before. I made with my hand to move them aside but they moved right through, as if the branches were made of smoke, ectoplasm, dark matter, what have you. Though I felt nothing of physical matter, something of the tree was there, it could still be seen and felt but not touched. It was the tree reaching outside of the tree, inviting me to dance with it. And so I danced. “And so it is. And so it is.”

The moon has long since gone, but up ahead was a glowing patch of land rising up to a hill to the left of us, alive with the same brilliance of my sleeping lunar maiden. This, I knew, something deep inside me knew, this was a sacred piece of land. As we approached I stepped light, stepped with reverence, with respect, with a knowing. And as my foot stepped upon the light, and the sounds of the bush creatures, birds, insects, wind, all stopped to watch. Even the screaming spirits held their breath as we moved past. I thought to the land: “Thank you.” For I realised in that moment that the land, not an entity or a spirit but something greater and indescribable, had taken us graciously in. I was no longer a stranger here and would no longer be afraid. When we passed the space the orchestra of insects once again filled the night. I felt so big and so small.

Upon returning to our campsite, we nursed our red coals back to life and huddled around our fire, comforted by the sound of animals rustling through the night, holding onto our tiny island of light so as not to fall into the infinite darkness all around us.