On Ned and the mare walked, staying to the side of the gravel road. Morning wallabies sprang away from them into the trees and bracken. Near the shore the forest had been peeled back to make way for houses, mostly small cottages and fishing shacks, although Ned knew that one long maple-lined driveway led to a convent not visible from the road.

Early one Sunday morning Toby had torn up to its entrance on horseback, hoping to throw some colour into the young ladies of the Lord, before being chased back to Limberlost by a pair of black-brown Dobermans. He’d arrived home sweating and scared—more, Ned had been able to tell, of their father’s reaction than the dogs. Ned didn’t know if Toby had been riding the same horse he now led past the convent driveway. The mare did not show any sign of fear or familiarity.

Down the road fell, past the final reaches of forest, to run alongside the water. Small boats and yachts were tethered to pastel buoys. Ned stared at them and felt his heart prickle. The tide was out, and the exposed shore squirmed with crabs, twisting themselves into the damp sand. They passed the jetty where he and Jackbird fished. The mare paused, taking the weight off her bad leg. Ned rubbed her flank, tried to be gentle, and told her in a soft trill that they did not have far to go.

He’d only visited the vet once, six summers earlier, but he remembered that her surgery, which was also her home, lay in a wet elbow of the valley by a crooked stream. On that first visit he’d been with Jackbird and his father, taking a snake-bitten kelpie for treatment. The boys had found the dog near a frog pond, snarling and frothing at the huge black-backed tiger. They’d fetched Jackbird’s father, who pulled the dog into the yard and decapitated the snake with a spade with the same emotion a man might show when buttering toast. After burying the snake’s head he saw how his son and Ned had crowded around the dog, which had lain down, foam bubbling from its mouth. Jackbird had insisted on accompanying his father to the vet, had dragged Ned along with him.

Ned remembered how sure he’d been that the kelpie would recover. Jackbird had been so confident—the vet knew how to treat snakebites, he’d said, easy as pissing, and that confidence had flowed into Ned. Later, he realised that Jackbird had been filled with the boyish rush of witnessing his father’s bravery and violence. In a moment like that anything seemed possible—steadfast men would save loyal friends, wise doctors would heal grave wounds. At the vet’s the boys had waited outside as his father carried the dog in. Minutes later they heard the bark of a rifle.