Evangeline looked down at her heavy chains and burlap apron. She must seem a specter to them, she realized—barely human.

As she stood with the guards and the other prisoners near the street, a carriage with boarded-up windows, drawn by two black horses, clip-clopped to a stop in front of them. Half shoving, half lifting each woman, one of the guards managed to load them inside, where they sat across from each other, two by two, on rough wooden planks. When the guard closed the door and locked it, the interior was pitch dark. Springs wheezed as he took his place beside the driver. Evangeline strained to hear their voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

The crack of a whip, the whinny of a horse. The carriage jolted forward.

It was stuffy inside the carriage. As the wheels creaked along the cobblestones, Olive bumping against her at every turn, Evangeline felt a bead of perspiration slide from her forehead to the tip of her nose. In an absentminded gesture that had become a habit, she found the edge of Cecil’s handkerchief under her dress with her fingertips. Sitting on the hard plank in the dark, she listened for clues. Finally, the caw-caws of seagulls, men yelling in the distance, the air sharp with brine: they must be near the water. The slaving ship. Her heart began to thump.

Mathinna

We make no pompous display of Philanthropy. The Government must remove the natives—if not, they will be hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed!

—The Colonial Times (Tasmania), December 1, 1826

Flinders Island, Australia, 1840

The early morning air was cool, with a steady rain. Under a weeping pine, Mathinna pulled the wallaby skin around her shoulders and gazed out at the hairy brown ferns and the cloud gardens of moss hanging above, listening to the shirring rain and the chirping crickets. Fingering the delicate shells on the necklace looped twice around her neck, she thought about her predicament. She wasn’t frightened of being alone in the forest, despite the tiger snakes that hid under logs and the venomous black spiders in their invisible webs. She feared more what awaited her back at the settlement.

Before Mathinna was born, Wanganip had told her, Mathinna’s sister, Teanic, had been yanked out of her father’s arms by British settlers attempting to capture him. Teanic was sent to the Queen’s Orphan School near Hobart Town and they never saw her again. It was rumored that she died of influenza at the age of eight, but the Palawa had never been told that directly.

Mathinna did not want to be kidnapped like her sister.

After Wanganip died, Mathinna’s stepfather, Palle, had done his best to comfort her. With one arm around her as they sat near the crackling campfire, he told her stories about the Palawa gods, so different from the one they were now forced to worship. The two main deities were brothers descended from the sun and the moon. Moinee made the land and rivers. Droemerdene lived in the sky, having taken the form of a star. He crafted the first human from a kangaroo, fashioning knee joints so the man could rest and removing the cumbersome tail.