Soon the women and children, loaded with everything they could possibly carry, came streaming out from camp, hurried by their fifteen guards. The warrior Burradella stopped them and ordered the oldest twenty women to stand fast. Then he called the guards, as he pointed away from the Porcupine ridges out towards the open country.

“Take the women and children as if you were only making for the Mooki River to form a camp there. Your tracks leading away from this camp will be plain to see, going right away in the opposite direction to our Secret Camp. But when you get well out in the long thick grass spread out, then turn south back towards the Black Hill. And so on up to the Porcupine Ridges and big scrubs and the Secret Camp. That will puzzle their scouts in sunset time, and delay them for a time at least. And remember—we need all the time we can gain. Now go!”

As they moved off he turned to those women silently waiting. None of these twenty were under sixty years of age, several were eighty.

“It is best you women do not travel with the others,” he said kindly. “The way is long and rough. For you can be sure there will be a lot of twisting and turning to deceive our enemies. And those impatient young guards will hurry the women and children along. In the dark hours you might never reach the Secret Camp. So easy also to snap an ankle, to stake a foot, to drop exhausted in urgent flight at night. The enemy would hunt you down in daylight, when my few scattered guards will be fighting elsewhere, and will not be there to protect you. Have no fear, though. We shall get you to safety by a slower, but a sure way.”

He smiled at their lined, anxious faces. They were ready to just sit there and wait what might befall them should he order it, and for a moment they had thought he meant to. For it is a law of every tribe that, if hard pressed, the weak ones must not hinder the safety of the tribe. When a man or woman becomes too weak to keep up with the tribe then his or hers is the choice—to meet swift death at the hands of the tribe or to wait there and perish by thirst or slow starvation and weakness in drought time, or by the rough clubs of a pursuing enemy in war time.

Yes, these old twenty were ready—it was the law. But life, unless one is suffering too much, is sweet almost to the very last—when we may welcome it, or just don’t care, or just don’t know.

And hope dawned again in the hearts of these weak old ones who had toiled all their lives for the tribe, came surely as their eyes that had seen so much gazed up into the warrior Burradella’s face.