The dog shuffled and I could smell her coat. The fire had died down. Tarenorerer had been overruled: there would be no assault on Parish’s men. They would swim to Slack’s boat because it was far enough that the men would not be watching it, and north enough that the tide would not rip them away. Poll and Bet Smith would go and wake the hidden children and take them to the east side and the others would rig the boat and sail it round to collect them. They would head for the Pot Boil shoal, because Parish’s lot would never follow them in there. Then they would go to Capuchin, wherever that was.

The women began to file out, some rummaging around for objects in the kitchen: a cup, a plate, a hessian sack. Before long the house was submerged in a quiet that was not entirely silence because the dog breathed and so did my father, and the sea turned up small waves on the beach at the end of the path and those waves fell with a crushing sound on the heavy white gravel sand.

I could no longer sleep, I was so full of trepidation. After the moon had set and the fire was gone and there was near enough to total darkness, a shot rang out near the house. For an instant I thought it is done and I lay in wait for consequences. But a man clumped in ten minutes later, dragging a large roo that slid across the floor in its own blood, and that was all.

He stopped by the table and I could sense him looking around. No women, he would have thought. And maybe he knew enough to understand what they had decided.

I woke again in the night, sometime after the man with the bloodied kangaroo and before the first light of dawn, to discover that a huge hide of stitched-together skins—seals, I imagine—had been thrown over my father and me. It had an animal smell about it, meaty but inoffensive. I looked up and saw Argyle slumped over us in a kitchen chair, his chin in his hand. The hem of his night-dress, dirty and frayed, hung just near my outstretched hand, an embroidered edge that spoke of a fragility otherwise absent in this world. As I drifted off to sleep in the warm shadow of that hide it occurred to me that no one on the island had commented on Argyle’s attire.

THE INDIAN RETURNS

THE INDIAN RETURNS

The dawn revealed to Parish’s men that they had been outwitted, and they were furious. The outward demeanour of piety and acceptance required of them only stoked the rage.