Limberlost E-Book

Robbie Arnott

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 290

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2023 'Arnott has an eye and an ear for description that can elevate otherwise quiet moments to something genuinely transcendent... A luminously told, whole-life story of a young boy discovering how to be his own man.' Guardian Ned West dreams of sailing across the river on a boat of his very own. To Ned, a boat means freedom - the fresh open water, squid-rich reefs, fires on private beaches - a far cry from life on Limberlost, the family farm, where his father worries and grieves for Ned's older brothers. They're away fighting in a ruthless and distant war, becoming men on the battlefield, while Ned - too young to enlist - roams the land in search of rabbits to shoot, selling their pelts to fund his secret boat ambitions. But as the seasons pass and Ned grows up, real life gets in the way. Ned falls for Callie, the tough, capable sister of his best friend, and together they learn the lessons of love, loss, and hardship. When a storm decimates the Limberlost crop and shakes the orchard's future, Ned must decide what to protect: his childhood dreams, or the people and the land that surround him... At turns tender and vicious, Limberlost is a tale of the masculinities we inherit, the limits of ownership and understanding, and the teeming, vibrant wonders of growing up. Told in spellbinding, folkloric spirit, this is an unforgettable love letter to the richness of the natural world from a writer of rare talent.

Leseprobe

Also by Robbie Arnott:

The Rain Heron

Flames

First published in paperback in Australia in 2022 by The Text Publishing Company.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Robbie Arnott, 2022

The moral right of Robbie Arnott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

This project was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Parts of the manuscript were completed while Robbie Arnott was the 2021 University of Tasmania Hedberg Writer-in-Residence.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 680 6

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 681 3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For my family

In the economy of Nature nothing is ever lost.

—Gene Stratton-Porter

1

IT WAS BELIEVED a whale had gone mad at the mouth of the river. Several fishing boats had been destroyed in acts of violence so extraordinary they were deemed inhuman. Each attack had come at dusk, while the boats were passing the heads on their way back to port—the same area where plumes of spray were supposedly erupting from the water. Transport ships reported powerful, mournful vibrations ringing through their hulls. Gulls flew strangely; cormorants seemed skittish. Ocean swimmers’ strokes were thrown out of rhythm by a high, ancient melody that rose through the brine. A fluked tail had been seen troubling the waves.

Ned was five when all this happened. In later years he struggled to remember the incidents clearly, but at the time it was all anyone was talking about. The animal had been harpooned far down south, someone’s uncle said, and after fleeing north was now visiting vengeance on any ship it encountered. Another version of that story claimed the harpoon had lodged in the whale’s brain, turning it feral and vicious. Another was that the whalers had missed the beast but not its pod, and the creature had been driven insane after witnessing the slaughter of its family.

There were other theories too, ones that didn’t include whaling, ideas of lunar imbalances and divine judgement, although they weren’t paid much attention. Most held the southern whalers responsible for fouling the animal’s mind. There was talk of writing letters, demanding reparations, getting the council involved.

‘It’s nonsense,’ Ned’s father told his children. He’d caught them whispering about the wrecks at the dinner table, unaware he’d returned from the orchard.

‘There is no whale,’ he said. ‘No monster. Fishermen do three things: they drink too much, and they make things up.’

He took off his coat and hung it on a hook by the door.

‘What’s the third thing,’ asked Ned’s eldest brother, Bill.

Their father levered himself into his chair. ‘Occasionally they catch fish.’

But their father’s words did not convince them; the story of the mad whale had sunk too deep into their minds. Ned’s sister, Maggie, was old enough to restrain herself from contributing to the gossip, but Bill and Toby, their middle brother, talked about it constantly.

Ned heard everything, and their conversations filled him with obsessive dread. All day he thought of the smashed ketches and skiffs, of an unseen giant with a blade snagged in its brain. At night his dreams were flooded with blood-foamed water. For a week he woke sweating and screaming until, when his exhausted father demanded to know the cause of his turmoil, he revealed that his nightmares were of the murderous, hell-sent whale.

‘Right,’ his father said the next morning, toast cooling on his plate. ‘We’re going to the river mouth tonight. I’ll show you the truth of this so-called man killer.’

Late that afternoon he took his sons to a nearby jetty, where they piled into a small boat their father had borrowed from a neighbour, one of the only boats in the area with a motor. Their father fiddled with the greasy machine, and his solemn care gave Ned and his brothers the sense that a large favour had been called in. But none of them said anything. They were all thinking of the whale.

Soon their father got the engine working, got it growling, and for the next hour they motored along the river until the course of the water straightened and the sea beyond it widened to fill the dusk. When they reached the mouth, all that remained of the sun was a half-disc of orange light over the western hills. Their father killed the motor.

They stayed there, bobbing on the light swell. The last sliver of sun vanished and the sky darkened into a clear night. Their father leaned back in the boat, appearing to contemplate the thick pattern of starlight above them. The wind was cold. Ned and his brothers shivered into their collars as they waited for the whale to explode out of the river and paste them into the waves.

2

A DECADE LATER Ned lay on a wet bank watching a rabbit graze. It was dawn. The early light spread through the fibres of the animal’s fur. Ned aimed his rifle, took the shot, missed. The gun’s crack threw his prey into a sprint, and it blurred into the bracken gathered beneath a stand of nearby blue gums. Beyond the trees the land fell away, lowering to meet the river, whose wide teal face was here and there dragged apart by deep and changeable eddies.

Ned had wasted a bullet, and the sound of his shot would have sent any other rabbits into hiding. He stared at the distant water, wrestling his frustration, feeling that he had ruined the morning. His mood eased on his way back to the house, when he checked a trap he’d placed in a run beneath one of the fences.

When he’d set the trap the previous evening, he’d worried that its trigger was too light, that any passing creature would set it off before entering the radius of its jaws. But a fat rabbit lay in the dirt of the run, metal teeth sunk into its neck. Except for the puncture wounds, its coat was unmarred. Ned removed the animal, then reset the trap. He ran his fingers over his kill, noting the thickness of the fur, the rigidity of death. Felt bright heat in his throat.

He resumed walking through Limberlost, his father’s orchard, the rabbit swinging stiff in his hand. Smoke hazed from the house’s chimney. Apple trees in a nearby paddock had taken on the glow of dawn. At Ned’s back the river shone, teal blinking into slate and cerulean, revealing a greater truth of colour.

∼

It was summer, and in the long blond light of the season Ned aimed to kill as many rabbits as he could. Their pelts could be sold to the army, who made them into slouch hats for soldiers. He had no other way of making money. In previous summers his father might have paid him for helping out on the orchard, but with the war on that was no longer possible.

If he killed enough rabbits he might earn enough to buy his own boat—something he’d imagined ever since his father had taken Ned and his brothers to meet the mad whale on that clear, star-rich night. Nothing fancy, just a small, single-sailed dinghy he could run into the river. Out on the water he could sail wherever he liked, from downstream where the current ran fresh to the broad estuary in the north. Squid-filled reefs, forested coves, schools of flashing salmon, trenches of snapper, lonely jetties, private beaches on whose cold sands he could burn hidden fires—all would be open to him if he had a boat. If he killed enough rabbits.

It was already January. Fewer than ten had found his traps or caught his bullets—barely enough to buy an oar, Ned suspected. Yet already his thoughts were wet and salty, his mind roughened by windburn. Always he thought of the boat: how he’d care for it, where he’d pilot it, what he’d feel in the grip of its planks, against the whip of the wind. Most of all he wondered what his brothers would say when they returned from the war and saw him out there on the water, riding the rips, guiding the rudder with a practised palm, not looking back to acknowledge their presence on the shore until he felt ready.

∼

As he neared the house Ned saw his father on the porch, a mug of tea in his hand. Steam lifted from the cup. He was looking out at the trees, but as Ned approached his gaze shifted to his son’s hand. He saw the carcass. Sipped at the steam.

‘You’d be happy with that.’

Ned nodded, held the rabbit out for inspection.

His father took the corpse and stretched it by its rear legs and ears, pulling it taut. He studied the fur, the wounds. Subdued approval showed on his face.

Ned felt pride heat his cheeks. Impressing his father couldn’t compare with impressing Bill, or even Toby—the old man was too strange, too distant in his quiet moods and shifting habits—but the approval was still important.

As the rabbit turned in his father’s hands, Ned thought of what he’d do next: how he would slide a knife into its belly fur and untether the skin from the flesh. He’d drape the pelt over a wire hanger in the empty apple shed—every piece of fruit his father had grown last season had been requisitioned by the army and taken to the new cannery in Beaconsfield—where it would dry, alongside the others he planned on collecting that week. He thought of how he’d harvest these other pelts, his mind roaming across the orchard, remembering paths that resembled the one where he’d set his successful trap. He pictured the bracken that the rabbit he’d missed had run into, thought of ways to position himself closer to the scrub. He imagined himself breathing slowly, squeezing the rifle’s trigger with an ease that approached boredom. He saw more traps springing, more iron fangs. His dreams inched to their inevitable conclusion: the boat. The lap of dark waves against the hull, the hoisting of a stiff sail…

‘It’ll make a fine hat.’

His father’s voice cut through Ned’s visions. The old man was looking down at him, a new crease in his face. His fingers were deep in the rabbit’s fur, combing back and forth.

Ned cooled. ‘I hope so.’

Unease sank through him. He hadn’t told anyone why he was hunting rabbits—not his friends, not his father. When he eventually brought the boat home, he imagined the occasion would be a double surprise: his acquisition of such a thing, and that he’d kept his mission secret. He’d have his boat, and he’d have people’s shock at the casual totality of his competence. Two victories.

But with his father closely inspecting his kill, he realised he hadn’t accounted for how the old man would perceive Ned’s hunting. Now he saw it: how his father’s oldest boys had been pulled to a distant leviathan of a war, beyond scope or comprehension. This very morning—as every morning, wherever they were—their faces were hardening into rough shapes beneath the shade of rabbit-pelt hats. Such smart hats, both stiff and soft, so similar to the one their father had worn in his own war, a quarter-century earlier, on his own foreign battlefields—highcliffed coves, grey worlds of ice-mud—a hat that had darkened his eyes as he was torn apart and recast into this quiet, strange man who remained out of reach and unknowable to his own sons.

And all the while his youngest remained at home, spending his free months selflessly avoiding leisure in order to provide rabbit pelts to the army for the production of slouch hats. Ned saw how it looked, how he had misrepresented his intentions. How he’d drawn a nobler image of himself in his father’s eyes than could ever be true. The tea steam snagged in his nose, bitter in the dew.

His father’s hands were still running over the corpse. He was no longer looking at Ned, or at the orchard, or at anything in particular.

Ned felt a quickening in his blood. His eyes itched. With slow, unspoken statements, he began convincing himself that his father had not been deceived. That he really was going hunting for the sole purpose of producing those proud, necessary slouch hats. That while his brothers were at war, he was playing the only part he could. The pelts were for hats; the boat was incidental.

∼

After breakfast he went to work in the orchard with his father, and the two or so hours he spent among the trees, working with his eyes and hands—checking fruit, looking for blight—slowly reordered his mind. Things became clearer. He was spending his summer hours hunting, and his father approved: that was all that was happening. It did not require overthinking.

That afternoon he went fishing with his neighbour. Jackbird was short for fifteen, even shorter than Ned, with a habit of fidgeting. They’d been neighbours their whole lives, and outside summer they shared a class at school. Ned had once dragged Jackbird from a rip current and squeezed the ocean out of his skinny chest. A year later Jackbird had pelted a rock into the cheek of an older boy who’d thrown Ned to the ground in the schoolyard. Dashed a wet hole in the flesh that whistled whenever the boy breathed, until it healed a couple of weeks later.

They fished from a jetty that pushed out into the river. Ned held a finger on his line, feeling for the tremor of a bite that did not come. Perhaps the day was too clear, the sun too bright. Bill had once said fish didn’t feed in good weather, and Bill was the best fisherman he knew. It was something to do with wind stirring them into action, or rain flooding oxygen into the saltwater, or that direct sunlight made them sluggish. Ned tried to remember, but he’d only ever overheard Bill saying these things to Maggie, or maybe Toby.

Jackbird flicked a thumb against his line. ‘Any bites?’

‘Not a nibble.’

Jackbird kept fiddling with his rod, lifting and dropping his sinker, trailing it across the bottom. He checked his bait. It hung firm on the hook.

‘Be better with a boat.’

Ned flinched. ‘Where would we get a boat?’

‘Just saying. Better with a boat.’

‘Course it’d be better with a boat. But we don’t have a boat. And unless you know something I don’t, that isn’t going to change.’ His voice was flat, even as his blood thumped.

They were quiet for a while after that. Ned hadn’t wanted to think of boats. He remembered his father’s fingers, roaming through the fur. His brothers. He was angry that Jackbird had mentioned it, wished his friend would be content with what they had, with this sunny, windless day.

Jackbird reeled his line in again. ‘You heard from Toby?’

‘Not for a while. He should still be in the reserve force. They’re only meant to be sent in if things get worse.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Jackbird cast out, let his sinker drop. ‘Reckon we’ll get called up?’

‘Papers say it’s winding down.’

‘True.’ He raised his rod to his shoulder. Held it like a rifle, aiming at a cluster of yachts that were tethered to buoys just off the shore. ‘What about Bill?’

Ned was watching Jackbird’s line tangle. ‘What about him?’

‘Anything in the paper about his division?’

‘Not since Singapore fell.’

‘Any letters?’

‘Not that I know of.’

Jackbird jerked his rod, swung his feet.

Ned saw the hesitation in him. ‘If you’re going to say something, say it.’

Still Jackbird hesitated. But he couldn’t stop the question coming out. ‘Your old man all right out there on the orchard?’

The thump returned to Ned’s pulse. ‘You want the Christmas letter in January? You want the family teacake recipe?’

‘All right, all right. Just asking. People talk.’

‘That they do.’

Again they went quiet. The sun lowered and its light began filtering through the trees, shadowing the water. Jackbird got a few nibbles, or convinced himself he did, but didn’t bring anything to the surface. After a while he began talking about how a hawk had been taking their chickens, and how his little sister, Callie, had taken to parading through the paddocks with their father’s shotgun, determined to scare it off or even blast it from the sky.

Ned tried to picture Callie with the iron heft of a shotgun in her arms. She couldn’t have been older than thirteen. Straw-haired, straight-faced. Hard as a walnut. The shotgun almost made sense.

The whole time they were at the jetty, Ned felt nothing trouble his hook. He told himself that he did not mind—this summer he had cast himself as a rabbit hunter. A lack of fish did not matter. But still he felt sour. Twice now he’d spoken sharply to Jackbird. And there was the matter of the slouch hats, of his father’s misplaced pride, of his brothers’ faraway war-shadows. And that he really did want a boat: wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything. The thirst for it was thick in him, and no amount of shame or resolve could shake it from his veins.

So as the river darkened, as the fish remained untempted, Ned’s boat dreams returned to where they had begun: the evening of the mad whale. The memory gave the rest of his afternoon—which was otherwise biteless and golden—a deep pull of terror, of strangeness and starlight.

3

TEN YEARS LATER, Ned again thought of the evening of the mad whale. By then he’d left Limberlost for the forests of the east. He was working in a logging crew to fell a large copse of manna gums—ancient hardwoods ghostly in colour and immense in height, some rising a hundred yards into the air to flail their leaves against the sky’s cheek. Aromatic, bloodlike sap ran from the wounds the men hacked into their trunks.

Ned was the youngest in the crew. He was also the foreman. He’d got the job because he didn’t drink much, and the other loggers drank like they were being paid to. At the end of each day they returned to their bush camp, where the foresters mirrored the violence they’d wreaked on the White Knights—the name they’d given to the pale, towering mannas—in the way they treated their own bodies. They poured lakes of beer down their throats, as well as rivers of brownish, burning rum. Spread out in the shadows of the White Knights, they sang and fought and screamed until they vomited, cried for their wives and crashed into their swags.

When they’d put him in charge, Ned’s superiors had given him a simple mission: stay sober enough to make sure chaos didn’t overwhelm the camp. During the working day he was nominally in charge of operations, but the loggers were experienced men, leathered by decades of warring with the trees. They rarely felt the need to speak to each other, not even when they felled the largest of the Knights, lopped off the limbs and hauled the pale-glowing trunks onto their flatbed truck. None of this required Ned’s oversight, although the loggers usually remembered to squint at the dropping sun and wait for his nod before knocking off for the day.

Ned drove the truck back to camp as the men began drinking in the back. Through the night he’d smile and recline and sip at a single bottle of lager as the men twisted themselves into goblins of the forest, drunk as much on the sweet-sticky sap that leaked from their vanquished foes as the liquor they gulped. Ned woke them at dawn, rolled them into the truck, drove back to the latest patch of mutilated forest and poured them onto their cold axes, their sap-bloody saws.

One night, after a particularly arduous day battling the Knights, the talk at camp turned lewd. There was talk of whores, of cunts, of buggery. It was intimated that splinters suffered in fucking a waxed tree hollow were ultimately preferable to the long-term wounds inflicted by a marriage. Ned did not consider himself prudish, but he did not feel comfortable listening to this talk, especially while sober. After throwing a log on the fire he walked back to his seat, then kept walking into the night, unnoticed by the hollering loggers.

He moved slowly through the trees. With each careful step he could hear less of the raucous conversation. Voices faded to barks and yips. Starlight filtered down, revealing lumpen shapes, wet foliage. Soon he reached a swollen creek, and its heavy trickling washed away the remaining racket of the camp.

Ned sat, hoping the night chill and forest quiet would cool his thoughts. But soon he was disturbed. A harsh growl rang through the bush, a call of animal fury. More followed—deeper, guttural snarls, as well as high-ringing yowls of despair, sounds of fleshy terror. In the cacophony Ned could discern rage, indignation, pain and, most prominently, an anguished message of insatiable hunger. These night-screams bled into his ears. He could no longer hear the water.

He knew what these noises were. The devils had made a kill—or, more likely, stolen one from a quoll—and were fighting over the flesh. He’d heard screams like these many times, and was familiar with the horror the ravenous beasts inflicted upon each other as they fed. But every other time he’d heard devils in the night he’d had company—his father, his brothers, Jackbird. Never before had he sat in cold darkness, far from home, and listened to the bush’s orchestra of terror in such detail.

It was this moment, as he felt again the liquid dread of unseen monsters, that brought him back to the night of the mad whale. The sensation was so similar to that boat trip, brought about by similar circumstances: an evening of demons, the potential for carnage. He shivered, realising he was cold. The forest’s chill had never been a problem by the fire with the other men, but here by the stream it had stripped all the heat off his skin.

He’d shivered at the river mouth too. The wind had been harsh, ocean-cold, and he recalled how at one point he’d curled himself into the folds of a thick woollen jacket. It hadn’t been his, he was sure of that—he hadn’t owned a coat until he was a teenager. And it hadn’t been his father’s—that would have been far too large. It must have belonged to Toby or Bill. Ned couldn’t recollect which of them had given it to him. It made sense, for a variety of reasons, for it to have been Toby, although he was just as likely to have teased Ned for showing weakness.

But Toby had been sitting on the other side of the boat to Ned, with their father between them. Ned had huddled next to Bill as they waited for the whale’s judgement. Surely Bill hadn’t lent Ned his coat? Ned could barely remember his eldest brother ever talking to him. Yet he remembered the warmth of the wool.

4

IN THE WEEK that followed his fruitless fishing trip with Jackbird, Ned killed fourteen rabbits—by far his biggest haul of the season. He hadn’t done anything all that different, although he’d started getting up earlier, often before sunrise, waiting in the darkness until the world warmed and the rabbits twitched out into the open. He learned to let his pulse settle before squeezing the trigger, instead of rushing to fire as soon as they revealed themselves. As his accuracy improved he began to know the shape each rabbit would make in death, just from how they sat on the grass. In the moment before he fired, he saw a premonition of the form the rabbit would fling into when its flesh caught his bullet—snapping and collapsing into stillness.

His traps were more successful too. He’d learned to distinguish between earth that was bare due to a lack of moisture and soil that had been scraped by a rabbit squirming under a fence. He began targeting these under-fence trails, setting traps in the centre of the dirt and concealing them with scatterings of dry grass. Only a few yielded rabbits, but the ones that didn’t were usually triggered. Ned scored these near-catches as ties, and reset each trap with minor variations.

He enjoyed the game of trapping, of finding the runs and outsmarting the animals. But he did not like treading through purple dawns to find rabbits still living in his traps, their legs rent, blood matting their fur, primitive terror vibrating off their whiskers. Usually they were dead, even if the jaws hadn’t closed around their necks or heads; usually the trauma of the trapping would halt the thump of their hearts. But on those mornings where he found them alive, Ned felt a yellow-green surge in his stomach, and couldn’t rush to kill them quickly enough. They were feral, he reminded himself, as he held their ruined bodies firm and placed a boot over their necks. They were pests. The only true use they had was to serve in death as slouch hats. And yet he felt a huge relief when they ceased shivering under his foot. In these moments he would look away from the rabbit to the sky, the glowing trees, the wakening river, as if the tranquillity of the orchard could remove him from what he’d done.

Each morning after breakfast he’d skin the rabbits on an old grey stump. With practice he’d reduced the mistakes he made with each pelt, as well as the time it took to remove them. First he’d take his knife to the hock joints, cutting through the tendons, before twisting off the paws. Then he’d make a small slice into the belly fur, making sure his blade did not slip into the flesh. From here he wriggled his fingers into the aperture and began working the skin from the muscle, freeing the stomach, sliding off the back, reversing both sets of legs through the holes where he’d removed the feet.

He did this carefully, meticulously, at all times remaining conscious of the shape and quality of the pelt. The only roughness came at the end of the process, when the final connection left between the fur and the flesh was at the neck. With a sharp yank he’d pull the pelt over the head, ripping it free. The carcass was left port-ruby and naked. The only hair remaining on the body was around its hacked hocks and on its now huge-seeming head.

Ned had learned skinning from Toby, who had learned it from Bill, who never revealed where he learned anything. While he was showing Ned where to make the incision in the belly, Toby had claimed that Bill could skin a rabbit without a knife.

‘No idea how he does it,’ Toby had said, a confused smile on his face. ‘I tried figuring it out, but it happens so fast. Little twists, a pop, a rip, and the pelt’s off. No blade in his hand.’

∼

Towards the end of that bountiful week Ned removed a skin with such precision and artfulness that he felt the need to show his father, and to ask him something. It was mid-morning. He found his father in the orchard, standing before a juvenile apple tree. As Ned approached he stretched the pelt over his palms, showing his father the untorn skin, the bloodless fur. The neatness of the thing. But his father didn’t appear to notice him. He gazed at the tree, eyes unfocused, until something caught his attention in the sky and he snapped his head up to stare at a cloud, his mouth moving, emitting no sounds.

Ned waited for a minute. When nothing changed he wandered back to his stump and knife.

Later in the day his father came to find him. He praised the skin he’d found hanging in the apple shed, along with the others Ned had harvested that week, and said that it would be a shame to let them spoil in the heat. He told Ned that he’d take him into town so he could sell them.

‘I have some things to take care of as well. We’ll go Tuesday.’

Ned nodded. He tried to remember the weather forecast for the days before Tuesday, tried to calculate how many skins he might add to his collection by then. His father turned to leave. As he began walking away Ned remembered what he’d wanted to ask the old man that morning.

‘Toby said Bill could take a skin off without a knife.’

His father stopped. ‘You don’t want to do that. Not if you want to sell the fur. Looks flash, but it leaves the pelt raggedy, all torn up. Only good if you’re in a hurry. If you need to feed the dogs before they rip into a lamb. You stick to the way you’re doing it. You’re doing it right.’

‘But—’

‘But what? What’s all this butting—you meet a goat?’

‘Sorry. But could he do it?’

His father turned to the orchard. Breathed at the trees. ‘Who do you think taught him?’

∼

The day before the trip to town, Ned’s sister Maggie returned to Limberlost. She had been staying with a distant aunt in Hobart, training to be a teacher. The plan had been for her to spend the whole summer down south, taking extra courses, shortening the time it would take to gain her certificate. But circumstances had changed. Ned didn’t know what circumstances, or how; he only learned from his father that Maggie was coming home the day before she arrived. And then there she was, marching down the gravel driveway, untroubled by the weight of her case.

By the time she’d eaten and washed, it was late. Ned was going to talk to her, but she seemed tired, and although she appeared pleased to see him, he read into her weariness that a conversation would only tire her further. After taking her case to her room he said goodnight.

As he lay in his bed he could hear her talking with his father, but he did not strain to make out the exchange. She was the eldest of the four siblings, the only one with a clear memory of their mother. It made sense for the two of them to talk, as they’d always done.

∼

The next morning Ned found Maggie crouching by the chicken coop. He tried to figure out what she was doing, tried to think of something to say. He saw her fingers dip beneath the wire mesh, her face shifting with discovery.

Her hand stopped on a bare scratch of earth. Furrows were traced into the dirt, and the wire above was frayed and loose. She wedged her hand into the gap and, as she grimaced at the metal raking her skin, Ned must have moved or made an involuntary sound. Maggie glanced up. An expression passed over her face—a look somewhere between annoyance and humour. Ned raised a palm, words evading him.

Sometimes the love he felt for his sister flared so bright within him that he became uncommonly emotional—he’d feel an urge to show her his favourite knife, or to gabble at her without having anything to say. It had always been like this, even before she’d left for the capital, although he’d been too young to know her properly, and Maggie had been focused on school.

Now he felt it again. He also felt powerfully aware that he was the only brother she had left on the orchard. He had to make her laugh like Toby had, had to give her the quiet companionship Bill had somehow provided. He had to distract her from how far away they were. These swells of duty rose within him alongside his unpredictable pulses of love, and yet it was all he could do to stand before her, his palm raised, his mouth and mind a mess.

She withdrew her hand from the coop and stood up, brushing the dirt from her knees. ‘Something’s been at this,’ she said.

‘What was it?’

Maggie toed the scrape of dirt. ‘I don’t know. Cat, maybe. A devil.’

‘Did it get in?’

‘Not yet.’

She began walking around the rest of the enclosure. The chickens clucked at her from within the wire, venturing to peck at the gap she’d been investigating. Ned remembered what Jackbird had said about his sister and her shotgun.

‘Could’ve been a hawk.’

Maggie looked up. ‘A hawk.’

Ned avoided her eyes. ‘A hawk’s been after the chickens next door. Could be the same one.’

Maggie pointed at the scratched earth. ‘You think a hawk landed here, grew paws and tried to dig its way in?’

‘Well. No.’

‘Hawks don’t dig, oh great hunter. They swoop.’

She smiled, not cruelly, but still it twisted Ned’s airways. He felt stupid and ashamed. He was going to argue, or he wasn’t. He was going to push past her and see if he could demonstrate that the lines in the dirt could have just as easily been made by talons, or he was going to turn and walk away as fast as he could. He didn’t know. And before he could do all of these things and none of them he heard his father calling, telling him to fetch his pelts, telling him it was time to go.

∼

They were getting a ride into Beaconsfield with Jackbird’s father. Ned’s didn’t have a truck of his own, and Jackbird’s didn’t mind doing favours like this.