Shadow of the Osprey Read Online Free Page A

earth was warm beneath the warrior’s feet even as the sun cooled in the shadow of the range of low and broken hills that rose from the drought-parched plains. Beyond the hills once sacred to his people the plains stretched to a limitless horizon that petered out to the great desert marking the desolate and lonely heart of the ancient continent.
    To Wallarie, the last full-blooded Nerambura clansman of the Darambal people, the sun was a spirit that marked each day of his tenuous freedom from the men who hunted him across the length and breadth of the colony of Queensland – a spirit fire that had marked the land for the twelve dry seasons he had known since the slaughter of his people by the Native Mounted Police under the command of the devil he had come to know as Morrison Mort. Since then the former police lieutenant had moved on to command a blackbirding ship belonging to the Macintosh family. But his evil went with him and its shadow still fell on the place where his small troop of heavily armed Aboriginal police had attacked and slaughtered the peaceful Nerambura clan by the waterholes one early December morning in 1862. No-one was to be spared and only a tiny group managed to flee the killers. Even they were gone now. Only Wallarie lived to remember the horror of that day: the screams of the women and children as the bullets scythed them down; the sickening crunch of bone shattering under the impact of a police boot and the sobbing of the survivors begging for mercy – to no avail. A dispersal was the name the white police called the brutal massacre.
    The Nerambura warrior was also known to his hunters as the myall who had once ridden with the notorious Irish bushranger Tom Duffy. But Tom Duffy was long dead to the bullets of the Native Mounted Police.
    Wallarie was alone to face the wrath of the British legal system. He had eluded his hunters until the younger Mounted Police recruits began to doubt that he actually existed; he was just a figment of the older troopers’ imaginations, used to colour their stories of past exploits. Nobody could remember what he looked like and the wild bush blackfellas never spoke his name for fear that his spirit would come for them in the night.
    But Wallarie was flesh and blood and felt the weariness of the hunted man. Nothing really mattered in his lonely life anymore except returning to the sacred site that nestled in the folds of the ancient volcanic hill. For there lay the timeless spiritual heart of his people.
    And the beating heart could be felt in the place where the giant slab of rock concealed the cavern that held the fossilised bones of the mystical giant creatures that once roamed the land: the carnivorous kangaroo and the tiny, ferocious marsupial lions. Wallarie had seen the bones and marvelled at the strange creatures that had existed in the time of the Dreaming.
    In that sacred place his people had recorded life and death, things witnessed and events unexplainable as far back as the original Dreaming. Even the coming of the white squatter and his shepherds had been faithfully recorded by the last of the Nerambura elders. That was before they too fell to the guns of the invaders and destroyers of the land.
    Wallarie faltered in his stride as he drew close to the hill. He could see the evil spirit which fed on death watching him with its reptilian eyes. Instinctively he raised a long hardwood spear to defend himself. But the crow cawed a lazy defiance at the frightened warrior’s gesture, and hopped arrogantly away from the rotting carcass of a cow, to flap its wings and rise with a shimmer of purple-black light into the darkening sky.
    The warrior lowered his spear and muttered a frightened curse on the crow as it flew on and up towards the craggy hills starkly outlined by the setting sun. This was not a place to be when the night came. The vengeful spirits of the dead roamed the bush in the dark hours. Although Tom Duffy had tried to convince him the night was