I passed the terrace where our orchard used to be. A lawyer from town bought the land about five years back. Nana Ailsa and Great-uncle John agreed we really needed the money; milk prices were way down. But everyone hated selling it, Dad and Uncle Sholto especially. Now there’s a concrete-and-glass house with a pool, and even a small vineyard where the grapes won’t grow properly, ha ha.

When the contractors started dropping the old fruit trees, Dad and I went down to watch. Mum wouldn’t come; Nana Ailsa stayed inside her cottage. I quite liked the bulldozers ripping at the ground, the branches thrashing, the way the roots seemed to try to hold onto the soil, then tear out as the whole tree crashed down. The air was full of dust and leaves. Magpies screeched and skidded all over the place. The contractor guys wore hard hats; from the look of the magpies, they might need them.

After about twenty minutes, Dad said ‘Come on, Callum, son. That’s enough.’ I was going to ask if I could stay, but when I heard how his voice sounded and looked at his face, I kept my mouth shut.

The morning after the trees were all down, and the bulldozer had shoved them into a huge pile waiting to be burned, I went down by myself to search around. Magpies like shiny stuff; one of them went for the silver bracelet that Nana Ailsa was wearing while she picked fruit years back, and someone found a piece of paua nearby that might have come from a carving or something.

I picked my way around the broken branches and drifts of leaves. It was still hard to believe we’d never get any more plums or apples or pears from there again. OK, there’d been almost none for years; the trees were so old. But Nana Ailsa and Great-nana Beth said the orchard used to be a real treasure.

People have called all sorts of things around here ‘treasure’. The swamp of course, and what they found there. Those ones who came here 130 years ago — what treasure did they imagine we’d find? Mr McDougall’s book, the one in the time capsule, says it was the new land. Aunt Maggie wrote how just being alive was the most precious thing you could find. I’ve even heard Mum call my sister Meg ‘Treasure’. (She’s more like something from the $2 Shop, if you ask me.) But I realised a long time ago that there’s nothing special to find around here.

Except … that morning after the orchard came down, I did find something. A pair of magpies were perched on the pile of smashed trunks and branches, squawking and flying up and watching me come. I didn’t have a stick then like the one I carry now, but there were plenty I could grab if I needed to.