He repaired the bench seat with offcuts of the rudder, nails, shellac and more tar. For the broken oar, he whittled a new handle from a she-oak pole. Then the boat was missing only a sail. He wanted to take it out anyway, to row it, to test it. Thought he might take Jackbird, but changed his mind; if something went wrong, Jackbird’s crowing and cavorting wouldn’t help. It would just be him. Just Ned and the boat and the river, preparing for the moment his brothers came home and saw him out there, alone and masterful. He thought of Toby watching him from the beach, smiling wide, skimming a rock over the wavelets. Thought of Bill standing there too, looming tall. His face a cloud.

13

13

IMAGINING HIS BROTHERS seeing him on the river sent Ned a memory from years earlier, when Bill had gone to help a friend find a lost ram. This friend’s farm was a few valleys over, near Mount Roland. Bill could not yet drive, so he’d got a lift with a classmate. Their father had been in Beaconsfield for the day. Maggie had told Bill not to go, but he had ignored her. Ned remembered it clearly: Bill climbing into a truck that had pulled up at the end of the driveway as he and Toby watched from the porch, while Maggie turned her back on all three of them.

Bill returned three days later. Fell out of the truck, limped to the house. Didn’t say what had happened. Ned found that out at school, from people who knew the family of Bill’s friend. The ram had gone missing from a far paddock at the start of Roland’s slope, during the hardest part of a hard winter. This hard winter had followed a hard autumn, summer, spring—a bad year. A bad time to lose a ram. So even though the men and boys were sure the animal had frozen to death or slipped from a snowy crag, they struck into the trees and up the trails anyway, holding their collars to their necks.

They split up, pushing through the rising forest of tree ferns and eucalypts for a whole day. Found nothing, not even a strand of wool snagged on a branch. The second day, the search party had halved. The remaining searchers crashed through the forest at dawn and met steep dolerite cliffs, grey and severe in the breaking light. Cutting them apart were gullies and trails, usually easily traversable but now sheeted with snow, sheened with ice. Two members of the party were assigned to each gully. Bill went with his friend, to the farthest gap in the cliffs. They were the ones who found the ram.