He’d had a mind to turn back for Deloraine, be done with it, but they’d come past the halfway by then. The O’Farrell brothers had charged five pounds to bring him up and the paper would want something for the expense.

They sat their horses and waited inside the snow gums, collars up, hats low, watching the hut. Nothing else around for miles. Wind, rain, snow.

THE STORY

‘Nobody’s a hundred and twenty-six years old,’ Gabriel Tait said.

He was twenty-one and there were two or three close friends and his parents in Invermay, and a younger sister as well. And there was a fiancée and there was that he worked for the Launceston Examiner. The two or three close friends had already joined up and the fiancée had been telling everybody how Gabriel was joining up, too.

Gabriel Tait’s subeditor said, ‘Well, that’s what they say, one twenty-six. It isn’t totally impossible, right?’

‘Yes it is.’

‘Anyway, look, it doesn’t matter, I mean, he could be a hundred an’ nine or something, you know? People always exaggerate.’ Lance Landstrom could tell the boy was reluctant, but he thought there was some talent there needed pushing. ‘Like I said, it doesn’t matter. He’s bloody old, full stop. Just make something of it.’

‘Like what?’

‘Jesus, come on, Tait. People love this kind of thing,’ Landstrom said. ‘Or you’d rather stick to shipping news and death notices?’ He went back to the typescript on his desk.

On the way home, Gabriel Tait had a few beers in different pubs, asked around. His fiancée was expecting him at seven-thirty, dinner with the future in-laws and some of their family friends, maybe an old aunt up from Hobart. His fiancée had fought hard to bring her parents around to the engagement and the dinner was important. Tait glanced at his watch. Bought a few more rounds.

Nobody had heard of the one hundred-and-twenty-six-year-old man who lived somewhere up in the Great Western Tiers.

‘Who? John Myer?’ they said. ‘Nah.’

A quarter to eight now, at a workers’ pub in Mowbray, doors locked. Every second man in uniform. The barman said, ‘Sure, I’ve heard of him. The old Kraut who lives up on the Tiers.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. My poppy knew him. Used to stay over sometimes when he was out trapping. All the old guys did.’

Tait leaned a little over the bar. ‘Is he still alive?’

The barman laughed. ‘Yeah, and he’s about a hundred and fifty years old mate, last I heard.’

‘Two ’undred!’ said a drunk next to them, laughing into his beer.

At the Langridge’s, Evie opened the door. ‘You’re late!’

‘Sorry,’ Tait said. ‘It’s work. I’m on a story.’

FIREWOOD