Ned felt all kinds of heat, all shades of shame. He saw the limping mare as he’d led it through the dawn. Saw the wet stone flying from its hoof. He opened his mouth to call after Maggie, but nothing came out. His fingers tore at the fabric of his shorts.

He was confident he’d get a better reaction from his father, whom he told later that morning, before the day had raked the old man’s mind apart. They were out in the orchard, checking for blight and rot. When Ned finished talking, it was a while before his father spoke. Eventually he asked Ned if he knew how much a vet costs.

‘I’ve fixed it.’

‘Not your horse. Not your bill to pay.’

‘Gonna trap rabbits for the vet. She’s got a rabbit problem.’

‘Does she.’

‘They’re destroying her garden.’

His father’s face began to fracture; furrows dug around his eyes, a twitch played at his mouth. ‘Could have sold it. Lot of things you can do with a lame horse. Plenty of fellas with clever ideas. Plenty of them keen to buy a knackered mare.’

Ned felt the morning swirl. ‘I didn’t know.’

His father clicked his tongue. ‘The things you don’t know.’ He looked away from Ned. Large breaths moved through his chest.

They continued working, and did not speak for the rest of the day.

After dinner Ned went to a bend in the river where he’d once seen a group of ducks. There he combed through the reeds, under rocks, between roots and in the prickling bracken, hoping to find a nest. He knew little of their laying habits, but he didn’t imagine that duck eggs would be too hard to find.

The evening was warm. The work involved a lot of crouching. After an hour he’d found no eggs, and this failure gave him an excuse to become furious, to give in to all the things that were biting and burning at him. He spat and shook. He swore. He slipped on wet clay, he wept, he threw a rock at a sprinting native hen. He wanted to scream. He did not have the language to express the sharpness of what he was feeling. Later, he dropped some dried rabbit into the quoll’s crate, not checking on its condition.

~