He Who Tries The Hardest Achieves The Least
I set off for the survey base station, which was nothing more than the position where I had made my first reading of the day. I knew that they would have no trouble finding it, as it was right beside the road. I had arranged to wait for the trio there and had promised them that I would give them a ride to their vehicle, which they'd left several miles down the road. While waiting, I settled down in the shade of a gidgi gum and began to read. By the time the three straggled in, I had managed to make my way through several chapters of a novel, which was intensely interesting but paled in the light of what happened next.
"What took you so long?"
"Well we sort of got ourselves lost," Sammy said with a shrug.
"Bush fella, too long time city dwella, you betcha," I said.
"No, No," said Fred, the senior member of the party. Jim and I got lost and Sammy got us back safely."
"How did you manage to do that, Sammy?" I asked. "This is not your country. How did you figure it out?"
"To tell you the truth, I sat down under a mulga bush and told myself to relax because the harder I tried the worse things got. The next thing I knew, I had started chanting a map chant. Where that came from, I'll never know. Well yeah, I do. When we were kids growing up oh about two hundred miles south of here, at a place called Urapunga, we had to learn the map chants of the area."
"How the heck did you chance upon this one?" I asked.
"The chant goes something like this:
A rock, a tree, twisted by the wind,
A pool, a cliff,
Walk beside the pool,
It's narrow, but you can do it.
Don't start climb just yet,
Wait for the big white rock
The rock is on your right.
Sammy paused to pour himself a cup of tea from the billy that was steaming on the mulga coals.
"I don't know why this particular chant came into my head because I've forgotten most of them."
"Sing it for us," I said.
"Go ahead," the other two said.
I grabbed two mulga sticks, as hard as iron, and began to beat them as Sammy began his chant. It didn't last long because Sammy said that he only remembered a fragment of that chant.
"Map chants were used by Aboriginals to
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