In the morning, Kurt arrived home in a new twin-cab, four-wheel drive ute. He parked it in the lane behind the shop, the shiny silver paint job glittering in the sun. Miki was stunned. They didn’t need a new car—the other ute had been less than two years old and still in good condition. Aren’t we saving for a farm? she wanted to say, but she was too afraid of his anger. From the kitchen she watched him fuss over a few squashed bugs on the windscreen. The new ute had yellow fog lights and a bullbar almost as big as a truck’s. What did Kurt think he was going to plough into with that? And how much had the ute cost, enough for a deposit on a farm?

He was keen to take the new car up to the forest to try it out on dirt tracks, and Miki was invited because who else was there for Kurt to show off to? He drove fast, testing the steering and tyre grip around corners, while she sat quiet and still in the passenger seat. When he whooped and hollered and slapped the steering wheel, she smiled to appease him. But inside she felt ill. He should not have spent all their money.

He swung onto their usual side road, and they hadn’t gone far when they came to a sign: Logging Operations. Miki’s heart kicked. Ahead she saw open space, several four-wheel drives parked along the verge.

Kurt drove to the sign and stopped. ‘What the fuck?’

Miki couldn’t believe it. Beyond the sign, the landscape was unrecognisable. Where there used to be forest, a bomb might have been dropped. The tall trees and spreading ferns were gone, and now there was only wide-open space and white sky. The ground had become a rubbish-tip of stripped bark and broken branches, leaves wilting in hummocky piles. The air was heavy with crushed eucalyptus and freshly churned dirt.

Miki was devastated. Everything had been normal last week, but now her haven had been converted from peaceful trees to ruin. Part-way up the hill, she could see the perpetrators: two huge growling machines that crawled around, knocking down trees. As she watched, the falling-machine grasped a tree with a mechanical claw and cut through the trunk as easily as a knife through cheese. Miki felt as if she’d been cut in half too. She shuddered as the tree whooshed to the ground with a thump. The machine topped and tailed it like a carrot before the skidder took over, skimming off the side branches and dragging the tree down the hill, revving and clanking as it grumbled over mounds of debris. It was appallingly fast: in a matter of minutes, a tree had become a log. The machines would eat their way through the forest until nothing was left.