‘Don’t tell him. Or anyone else. Please.’

Callie was still staring. ‘Look at it.’

Ned peered into the crate. The quoll wasn’t doing anything notable; it was just breathing, licking, twitching its nose and whiskers. The circles of cream on its fur had dulled and dirtied. Occasionally it looked up at them; whiteless eyes snagging on their own.

They lingered a few minutes, hooked on the animal, before Callie said she had chores to do. She agreed to not say anything to her brother. After she left Ned went inside to rub iodine on the holes the quoll had put in his hand. The copper liquid stung at the meat of him.

~

Maggie’s wrath hit the orchard like heavy hail. Ned and his father had never experienced anything like it. At any moment she was liable to stop what she was doing and accuse them of laziness, of carelessness, of slug-minded stupidity. Letting a horse become injured was bad enough, but to do nothing about it? To not even notice? Ned was a child, she spat, smart enough to kill wild animals but too thick to care for one already tamed. Their father, on the other hand, was a garden-variety fool. She could barely look at them. More heat blazed in her than in all the months of summer.

Ned felt this blame—at least the part she’d apportioned to him—was unfair. He didn’t go near the horses: the whole family knew that. How was he to know one had hurt itself? But perhaps that was his sister’s point. Still, he felt poorly treated.

When she rounded on him over lunch two days after she’d discovered the limp, saying that Bill would never have let a horse walk wounded, that even Toby would have done something about it, he left the kitchen without responding.

Outside, a breeze that had touched the river rose to cool the blood in his cheeks. Knowing his father would be in the far paddock, he made for the shed, thinking he’d check on the quoll, feed it earlier than usual. Inside he pulled on the thick gloves, tore off a twist of half-dried rabbit meat from a hanging carcass, teased open the lid of the crate and dipped the food into the gloom. He hovered, tense, waiting for the quoll’s jaw to snatch at the meat. No teeth rose. No sound.

He removed the lid completely, letting the subdued light wash the crate’s interior. Inside he saw the creature lying curled and still. Its eyes were closed. There was a stiffness to it that he hadn’t seen before; for a moment he thought it was dead. Then he saw movement—short, uneven breaths that played a ripple across the quoll’s torso.