They watched the whales float in the murk, blowing spray into the air. After a minute, the mother showed them her eye again, unblinking and huge. Then she and her calf dipped back under the surface. It was an impossible thing: so many tons of flesh, disappearing in an instant. Their tails emerged fifty yards away, saluting the stars. Hanging high and wide. Ned’s father started the motor.

‘She’s as interested in us as we are in dragonflies.’ The engine smoked to life. He let it idle. Turned to his sons. ‘If you’re going to fear something, boys, it’s best to understand it.’ He laid a hand on Ned’s scalp, his rough skin stilling Ned’s shivers. ‘To come right up against it.’

23

23

WHEN THE SUMMER died, it went quietly. There was no final exclamation of heat, no furious storms, no flourish of violence. The season just came to an end, and lay down. Instead of constant stifling dryness the days began to hold whole catalogues of weather: dewy mornings, warm lunchtimes, gusty nights. Skirts of rain drifted over Limberlost on little skips of wind, greening the grass, brightening the leaves. The sky shifted from brittle blue to something softer, a pale colour interrupted by streaks of thin, uncertain clouds. At dusk, it glowed peach and salmon. Beneath it, the river lay steely and waveless, cut only by the eternal rhythm of its whirlpools. The sun retreated. Autumn’s grace crept forward.

Ned had a week left on the orchard. At the end of it he’d be on a bus, heading south to Launceston, to a new school term. To cricket matches played on ovals covered in sheep shit. Later, in winter, he’d play football on those same ovals, and have his body brutalised and numbed across long patches of stubborn frost that lingered on the turf until noon. He’d have lessons, tests, exams. Trigonometry that came easily to him—the unvarnished honesty of numbers—and English composition that didn’t. French that evaded him like a fistful of fog. There would be girls—not at his school, but girls in town, girls on the bus, girls at sister schools. Jackbird’s elbow in his ribs, Jackbird’s whistles in his ear. Ned’s eyes bouncing off necks and ankles onto grey gutters.

It had been ten days since the sale and destruction of his boat. In that time he hadn’t left the property. He’d helped his father in the trees and fetched eggs from the chicken coop. He’d scrubbed and peeled potatoes. Callie and Jackbird had each come by a few times, but he’d fobbed them off with lies about chores. Most afternoons he’d taken the mare out, sometimes riding, sometimes walking beside her. Moving over the orchard’s hills and gullies, skirting its boundaries. Going nowhere near the water.