They were quiet after that, all three of them. But the conversation had sent a rattle through Ned, and he felt the need to justify himself. I was there long before you were born, he wanted to say. I’ve known this kanamaluka longer than I’ve known your mother. And as he cast around for what that meant, how important his connection to the river was, his mind snagged on the little boat he’d once owned. How he’d freed it from a prison of thick lead paint. He wanted to tell his daughters about the glory he’d restored it to. How intoxicating the sight of it had been. How the scent of its timber had put him under a spell he had never truly recovered from. What discovering Huon pine does to a person. How it had rode the river so cleanly, so joyously, like a wish come true. How short his time with it was, how hard the summer had been, how he’d sold the boat to a rich little man, a stranger whose name he soon forgot. How it never carried him to the river mouth. I didn’t get to go back, he wanted to tell his daughters. I didn’t get to return to the place my father took us, your uncles and me, where the mad whale—do you remember the mad whale, do you remember the stories, did anyone ever tell you?—raised its twelve-foot tail above our borrowed boat, hiding the moon’s light, poised to smash us into red flotsam. Only it didn’t, he wanted to say. It could’ve, but it didn’t. With colossal gentleness it lowered its flukes into the water beside us. Loosed a spray of vapour from its blowhole. Rolled onto its back and exposed to us the creamy striations of its belly. Twisted through the water so that the hugeness of its eye was close to us, a couple of yards from the boat. An eye shockingly familiar in its mammalian warmth. An eye filled with starlight: an eye lit by a half-dark heaven.

20

20

THE MORNING AFTER the sale of the boat found Ned on the porch, rinsed with gloom. He would no longer sail the river, tracing its contours, learning its truths. No longer would he know weightless adventure as he skipped across the water. Perhaps never again. He’d likely never see the boat again, either. If he wanted to explain its uncommon beauty and the effect it had on people, including himself, especially himself, he would have to use the blunt tool of description—could not show it to anyone, and allow it to speak for itself. He didn’t even have a photograph.