The wind has died off now, but the swell’s still trundling in. Solid slabs of it are pushing in from the south in triangular peaks that hit the tessellated reef and throw out so round you could drive a truck through them. Well, maybe they’re not quite that big, but they’re pitching double overhead at least—maybe triple on the peak of the sets—and they’re spitting fucking hard in jets of spray that burst from the barrel and cut horizontal through the streams of rain.

Jem’s paddling back out, heading for the green water between two peaks, when he sees it all happen. He sees some blow-in from Hobart or somewhere paddle into a bomb, but it feathers, then breaks a bit further out and so doesn’t barrel to begin with, it just crumbles into a big wall. The bloke takes off and drops to the bottom of the wave and does this big lazy bottom turn, sweeping around until his board is facing vertical. Jem’s always thought you know it’s bloody big when you’ve got time to surf up the face of the wave, and this bloke does, smooth as poo. But when he hits the top of the wave his movement becomes out of sync: as he kicks his back foot, pivoting the nose of his board and jamming the tail into the curling lip, he swivels his torso too late, and so rather than charging down the line, he comes unstuck. He falls what would have to be a good three to four metres from the top of the wave to the bottom. The wave, by now, is hitting the bed of rocks properly and really starting to suck water up off the reef. At first, Jem thinks it’s just a lump or furrow in the reef causing the irregular water, like a rapid, but he sees—in the brief glimpse he gets of it, just before the wave engulfs it—a dead cow, bloated and rolling. The bloke falls square on it with a whump then everything disappears in an explosion of white water.

Jem shakes his head, thinking he must be tripping balls, and keeps paddling out.

Then he hears the bloke bellow.

He looks in to shore and sees one of the most fucked-up sights he’s quite possibly ever seen: the bloke has been washed into the shallows inside a cow. When he hit it, he must’ve burst its skin and been washing-machined into the shore in the cage of its bones, covered in a slough of rotting meat and gizzards, like he’s riding some kind of white-water rapid ride at a theme park, but with a horror-movie twist.

Jem thinks about paddling in, but there’re already a half-dozen other blokes helping the guy out of the cow. They half carry him up the rocks, and up the path, and a bit later, Jem thinks he hears the wail of an ambulance siren in the air. The cow must’ve done a bit of damage then.