Jake looks up. The truck is driving off and the eco-warrior is striding along the jetty towards them. He’s blond, medium height, and has the broad shoulders and thick chest of a surfer.

‘G’day, fellas,’ he says when he reaches them. ‘How’d you go out there?’

‘Just the one albacore, ay,’ Pete says. ‘Jakey here got it,’ he adds, clapping Jake on the shoulder.

‘Landed a tuna at your age? That’s a bloody good effort,’ the eco-warrior says, grinning at Jake. Then he holds out his hand for a high five.

Jake isn’t sure what to do, so he gives it to him.

‘Few tuna about then?’ the eco-warrior asks, peering down into the boat. ‘Give us a squiz?’

‘Sorry, mate, already got her filleted and on ice,’ Jake’s father says.

‘That right?’ the eco-warrior says, raising his eyebrows. Then he asks: ‘Didn’t hear anything out on the water, did you?’

‘Like what?’ Pete asks.

‘Gunshot,’ the eco-warrior says, all of a sudden looking angry. Angry and, it seems to Jake, a bit sad. ‘We saw a dead seal, washed up at Cape Hauy, and two more beside it that were still half alive, poor buggers.’

‘Nope, didn’t hear anything,’ Pete says.

‘You didn’t, did ya?’ The eco-warrior eyes them sceptically.

‘Nope,’ Pete says. ‘Quiet as a whistle.’

The eco-warrior puffs out a sigh. ‘Bloody bastards, hey,’ he mutters sadly, as he wanders back to his boat.

‘Dad,’ Jake says uneasily, once the man is out of earshot.

‘It’s all right, Jakey,’ his father says, looking up at him from where he’s still standing in the boat. ‘Wasn’t us that did that. We’d never leave one half alive. That’s just cruel.’

Jem and his deckie, Steve, had been cruising by Cape Hauy—that splintered headland of towering dolerite pillars—on their way into Fortescue Bay, when they’d spotted the two emaciated fur seals, panting on the rock ledge. Birds leered above them. If left, they would die slowly by gnawing beak, if not festering wound or gradual starvation. Jem had called up Parks and Wildlife to come and dispatch them, but still.

But still.

It’s not just the plain fact of the cruelty that bothers Jem, although that does, obviously, bother him. It’s also the way he imagines this cruelty was committed—the flagrant disregard for animal welfare, and for the rules that guide Jem’s interactions with the natural world, and the rules that, in his opinion, should also guide everyone else’s.

The rules, for Jem, are implicit to the point that they’re not stated things. They’re not a document he brandishes, rather, they’re what’s buried inside him, knitted into his commonsense and his spark of self, which is what he would have called his soul, if he believed in that crap. They’re foundational to the logic of who he is, and he just can’t understand how other people cannot, or, more insidiously, how other people choose not to see the world the way he sees it and act with according decency.