Ned’s boot was heavy. He felt a tremor in his balance. He wanted to put his foot back on the ground. He wanted, he realised, to stop the quoll from hurting itself. It was the pelt, he told himself: he wanted to stop it ruining the pelt. But as he watched it tear into itself, as he heard its rasping chirps of pain, he wasn’t thinking of fur or money or Maggie. He just wanted to put an end to the scene before him.

But there was the matter of the quoll’s teeth. Of its fear, its rage. Before he’d thought too hard about it he was marching to the apple shed, where he grabbed an empty wooden crate and the lid of a metal bin. Back at the coop he approached the creature and placed the crate over it. The quoll snapped and barked and writhed, but it couldn’t reach Ned, nor could it escape the descending crate. When it was an inch off the ground Ned began sliding it away from the coop, feeling the quoll’s body catch on the far side of the wood. The exposed trap began to drag along with it. He pushed down on the centre of the crate with his right hand, securing the animal within the box and leaving its ruined leg and the trap outside. Higher, louder screams revealed how this heightened the quoll’s pain, but it allowed Ned to use his free left hand to lever open the trap and unglue the bloody paw from its fangs.

He threw the trap onto the grass and pressed the injured paw through the gap between the crate and the ground. The screams had stopped. He grabbed the metal lid and slowly slid it underneath the crate, allowing the quoll to climb onto it as he used it to seal the aperture. With the sun now round in the sky he carried the crate to the shed, upended it in a dark nook behind a stack of other crates and weighed the lid down with two bricks. He did not allow himself to think; he retrieved his gun and the rabbit he’d shot earlier, and went to breakfast.

5

5

THE QUOLL FOLLOWED him for years, its jaw gaping through his mind whenever he found terror and fury in the same place. It came to him when he watched a boy throw a rock at his mother in the main street of Beaconsfield. When, in a pub after a football match, he saw two drunk ruckmen brutalise each other on the whorled grains of a myrtle table. When he was rouseabouting on the hell-hot sheep stations of the mainland, and witnessed overheated kelpies turn froth-mouthed and savage. And once, when he was twenty, close to home.