Miki felt a surge of passion. ‘I wish I could buy the whole forest and lock everyone out so all the trees could just do their thing and grow up to the light. No one ever chopping them down. Then everything could go back to how it was before white people came.’

‘The Earth is here for us to use,’ Kurt said.

‘But not to wreck. Look at this!’

They’d crossed a boundary into a blitzed area, recently logged. More than a year since the loggers had finished their work, but everything was still a terrible mess. Barely a tree left standing. Only a few exposed spindly specimens and a cluster of scraggly tree ferns. Piles of bark and branches, waiting to be burned. The whole place was a scar on the landscape. And it was quiet, so quiet. Small seedlings had begun to push up through the soil, but not a bird to be seen.

They traversed the logged area then re-entered forest, where the track narrowed and roughened into dirt. Miki’s shoulders eased. This was where she and Kurt liked to come: a place that spoke to her, a hidden patch of ancient trees. Their own private piece of forest.

Kurt pulled up near a grove close to where he’d hidden the hives. On the farm, they’d kept bees to pollinate the apple trees, and Father had stacked the hives up near the bush. Sometimes he’d let Miki help harvest the honey, which they’d sold in recycled jars at their self-serve roadside stall near the front gate. Here in the forest, the sweetest honey came from leatherwood trees, and Kurt knew where to find the best thickets. He said bees had their own language, their own way of talking to each other. One bee could dance out a story telling the others where to find food. All he had to do was put them near flowers, and the bees would do the rest. He admired the clever way they made honey out of nectar and pollen, and he liked the hierarchy of the colony in which every bee had a specific job to do.

Miki loved bees for different reasons—the way they were a huge family and cared for each other, sharing jobs and nurturing their young.

Now Kurt unfolded himself from the ute and tugged out the bee suit. They had only one, so Miki often had to stay in the car. Sometimes Kurt let her have a turn, and she would slide into the suit and slip her hands into the gloves. She loved being close to the bees and hearing the hum of the hive, the energy of it. She liked the excitement of lifting out the frames and peering in at all that activity, the bees crawling over each other.

‘Can I do it?’ she asked.