Their father levered himself into his chair. ‘Occasionally they catch fish.’

But their father’s words did not convince them; the story of the mad whale had sunk too deep into their minds. Ned’s sister, Maggie, was old enough to restrain herself from contributing to the gossip, but Bill and Toby, their middle brother, talked about it constantly.

Ned heard everything, and their conversations filled him with obsessive dread. All day he thought of the smashed ketches and skiffs, of an unseen giant with a blade snagged in its brain. At night his dreams were flooded with blood-foamed water. For a week he woke sweating and screaming until, when his exhausted father demanded to know the cause of his turmoil, he revealed that his nightmares were of the murderous, hellsent whale.

‘Right,’ his father said the next morning, toast cooling on his plate. ‘We’re going to the river mouth tonight. I’ll show you the truth of this so-called man killer.’

Late that afternoon he took his sons to a nearby jetty, where they piled into a small boat their father had borrowed from a neighbour, one of the only boats in the area with a motor. Their father fiddled with the greasy machine, and his solemn care gave Ned and his brothers the sense that a large favour had been called in. But none of them said anything. They were all thinking of the whale.

Soon their father got the engine working, got it growling, and for the next hour they motored along the river until the course of the water straightened and the sea beyond it widened to fill the dusk. When they reached the mouth, all that remained of the sun was a half-disc of orange light over the western hills. Their father killed the motor.

They stayed there, bobbing on the light swell. The last sliver of sun vanished and the sky darkened into a clear night. Their father leaned back in the boat, appearing to contemplate the thick pattern of starlight above them. The wind was cold. Ned and his brothers shivered into their collars as they waited for the whale to explode out of the river and paste them into the waves.

2

2

A DECADE LATER Ned lay on a wet bank watching a rabbit graze. It was dawn. The early light spread through the fibres of the animal’s fur. Ned aimed his rifle, took the shot, missed. The gun’s crack threw his prey into a sprint, and it blurred into the bracken gathered beneath a stand of nearby blue gums. Beyond the trees the land fell away, lowering to meet the river, whose wide teal face was here and there dragged apart by deep and changeable eddies.