Sweat cooled his face, stung his eyes. Up the driveway they went, through the gate. Onto the road, turning right, heading towards the highway. The sped-up valley clung at his peripheries. They raced up a hill and around the first, second, third bends. On the fourth he saw the first signs of what Jackbird had told him—grooves cut into the gravel. Around the next corner these markings deepened and took off at crazed angles, snaking over themselves.

One corner remained before the road straightened. A corner everyone in the area knew well. A sudden corner that sneaked up in daylight and reared up alarmingly in darkness. He and the mare crashed towards it, following the swerving pattern in the gravel until it ended at a steep bank.

A copse of gums towered over the road. Ancient, burltrunked hardwoods. The kind whose siblings and cousins had defanged colonial saws, blunting and ruining their iron teeth. Timber that was harder than many kinds of rock. Hard enough to crumple the bodies of speeding trucks while bearing no greater wounds than a few patches of torn bark, a few teardrops of gluggy sap.

A truck hadn’t hit these eucalypts, but its cargo had. From the shape of the churned gravel it seemed the driver had been going too fast, his trailer jack-knifing behind his vehicle. At this final bend it had swung wildly towards the bank, and as the driver had righted the truck the trailer had been yanked roadward, right at the corner’s elbow. This violent correction had caused it to throw its load. Frayed ropes, lying in the dirt, confirmed this theory. So did the presence of the load itself, lying at the base of the unyielding eucalypts in splintered, glowing pieces.

Ned stared at the dry wreckage of his boat. Not his, he numbly thought, feeling for the wrinkled cheque still shoved in the back pocket of his shorts. And though his sense of ownership lingered, what lay before him could no longer truthfully be called a boat. Its meeting with the gums had split it into a number of distinct parts. The bow had broken near the centreboard and been torn from the planks of the boat’s middle and stern. It lay beside the road, bristling with fibrous, delicate splinters at each point of violent separation. The back section of the boat hung in the air, impaled on a large limb that had punched a ragged hole into the hull. The mast had snapped off into the scrub: a polished rod in a gang of crooked limbs. The oars were strewn in the dirt. The oak rudder, hurled by the collision, lay on the other side of the road.