Still Jackbird hesitated. But he couldn’t stop the question coming out. ‘Your old man all right out there on the orchard?’

The thump returned to Ned’s pulse. ‘You want the Christmas letter in January? You want the family teacake recipe?’

‘All right, all right. Just asking. People talk.’

‘That they do.’

Again they went quiet. The sun lowered and its light began filtering through the trees, shadowing the water. Jackbird got a few nibbles, or convinced himself he did, but didn’t bring anything to the surface. After a while he began talking about how a hawk had been taking their chickens, and how his little sister, Callie, had taken to parading through the paddocks with their father’s shotgun, determined to scare it off or even blast it from the sky.

Ned tried to picture Callie with the iron heft of a shotgun in her arms. She couldn’t have been older than thirteen. Strawhaired, straight-faced. Hard as a walnut. The shotgun almost made sense.

The whole time they were at the jetty, Ned felt nothing trouble his hook. He told himself that he did not mind—this summer he had cast himself as a rabbit hunter. A lack of fish did not matter. But still he felt sour. Twice now he’d spoken sharply to Jackbird. And there was the matter of the slouch hats, of his father’s misplaced pride, of his brothers’ faraway war-shadows. And that he really did want a boat: wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything. The thirst for it was thick in him, and no amount of shame or resolve could shake it from his veins.

So as the river darkened, as the fish remained untempted, Ned’s boat dreams returned to where they had begun: the evening of the mad whale. The memory gave the rest of his afternoon—which was otherwise biteless and golden—a deep pull of terror, of strangeness and starlight.

3

3

TEN YEARS LATER, Ned again thought of the evening of the mad whale. By then he’d left Limberlost for the forests of the east. He was working in a logging crew to fell a large copse of manna gums—ancient hardwoods ghostly in colour and immense in height, some rising a hundred yards into the air to flail their leaves against the sky’s cheek. Aromatic, bloodlike sap ran from the wounds the men hacked into their trunks.