I moved instinctively. Keeping my eyes on the fox, I felt in my pocket for a chocolate truffle, softened now in the heat, and set it on the ground between us as a tribute. It was a disloyal act because the Noffeys hated foxes, but I was already acting from an allegiance to something else. I didn’t want to be like the Noffeys, something I wasn’t; I hoped to be something else that I hadn’t yet defined.

The fox watched me with interest, ears pricked, alert. Taking several steps back, I ceded the ledge and returned the way I’d come. Bea had grown impatient. I didn’t tell her about the fox. Going the rest of the way down, we found the motorbike where we’d left it.

‘It was the washer that was the problem,’ Bea said, lifting it off the ground. ‘Behind the switch lever. It had bent out of shape. That’s why it wasn’t changing gear.’

‘Benny’s good with bikes,’ I said.

‘He’s better than a mechanic.’

It occurred to me to ask why Benny was the way he was.

‘It was an accident of birth,’ Bea said, and I pictured her cousin as a slippery newborn baby, being dropped on his head by a careless doctor, or perhaps by his father. I recalled the rubber gloves I had seen after the night of the twisted calf, bearing the traces of blood and fluids, obvious signs of the sliminess of birth. I said it sounded like a thing that could happen to anyone.

There were truths as eternal as lichen-covered boulders. My parents moved us on almost absentmindedly and I started high school in a different part of the state. The remaining old-growth forests of the south coast were saved; public feeling grew strong enough to take care of that. Bea went away to her new school, still saying twenty instead of twenny. Moses was more successful at the reinvention game. He remade himself as the town’s favourite son: in high school, he was school captain; in adulthood, a member of the Returned Services League club, a ringleader of dirt-biking and pig-shooting expeditions, a go-to organiser of buck’s nights and weekends, and a paintball team commander in full camouflage gear. He worked as a foreman at the mill, which was threatened with closure many times, then rescued by the arrival of cheap plantation pine.