Chapter 2

I was on my belly, rifle c****d at the beast. When I saw the headlights, I cursed under my breath. The deer froze, alert, sensing. As the vehicle crested a rise and entered the hairpin on its way up to the next, its engine grunted angrily, wheels emitting a screech. The deer bolted. I didn’t need to turn and watch as the station wagon drew closer. The noise, the manner of driving, were predictable. It was Con. It was always Con, disturbing the peace up in those foothills. He was on his way up the mountain. He’d be back down in an hour or two. Pat had sent him. He never did a thing without her say so. I couldn’t begrudge him his time out in the wilderness, away from the suffocating clutches of that mother of his. She was a piece of work, that one. Moved down from the ranges when her husband died and ushered her only son into his slavish existence at the roadhouse. Rumour had it she’d received a widow’s payout from the company as a salve in lieu of the proper compensation she might have got if she’d taken them to court. They knew and she knew that was never going to happen. Besides, it wasn’t the company’s fault Igor had fallen to his death. He was standing where he shouldn’t have, on the edge of the dam wall, while behind him two men were walking by, holding a length of timber. As they passed the wind picked up. The men struggled. The foreman tried to warn Igor, but he spoke no Hungarian and Igor no English, so down the buttresses he tumbled. Con would have been about twelve at the time. Pat—I doubted that was the name she was born with—installed Con in the café serving customers and waiting tables, and when he wasn’t doing that at weekends and before and after school, he was at the bowsers pumping gas. Soon after, she pulled him out of school altogether and had him baking pies. In his twenties, he half-finished a couple of apprenticeships, one for a baker, the other a mechanic, and he’d scarcely left the area since. The roadhouse was Con’s prison. I felt sorry for him. He looked a bit strange with his cleft chin and his foot that jutted out sideways, but I didn’t think he meant any harm. You couldn’t begrudge the guy a nocturnal trip up the mountain, even if he had been sent out on a mission. It was all the freedom he had. Although there was no escaping he did get in my way. I waited for the sound of his engine to fade and scanned the knoll up ahead, but the deer was well and truly gone. I picked myself off the ground. As I brushed myself down, my nose received strong whiffs of the eucalyptus oil I’d squirted on my clothes to mask my own, human smell. With the rifle in the crook of my arm, I headed off to my shack. I’d been squatting in the abandoned timber cutter’s shack for about three years. When I first found the place, it was in a sorry mess and stank of stale piss. One of the windows was smashed, and the floor festooned with animal droppings. Looked like no one had been inside for many months. The surrounding forest had long since been logged out of all its old-growth ash, and the forest-r****g, timber industry had moved on. The shack didn’t seem to belong to anyone, so I cleaned it up a bit and moved in. No one to bother me up there. I hadn’t done much to it since, other than repair the window, and oil the floorboards to brighten them up. I never planned to stay long enough to care. I bought a small diesel generator to power the lights, but the noise obliterated the sounds of the bush. I only cranked it up when ageing a deer in the fridge, which lately had been more often than not. It was too early for bed, so I broke open a beer and sat back in the only chair I had, a battered wing back I’d found on the side of the road. Someone had replaced the webbing under the seat pad with a few planks of Oregon. Not that comfortable but I wasn’t fussed. I rested my feet on an upended milk crate that served as a coffee table and tuned into nature’s chorus, loud enough to obliterate the steady thrum of the generator. More cacophony than symphony, especially after the light seasonal rain, when the frogs tried—and failed—to drown out the cicadas and the crickets. It was autumn, and the bush chorus had quietened down after its raucous summer zenith: mating season for the cicadas. I tuned into the various tones; I heard the faint yap of a sugar glider echoing through distant trees. Nearby, a possum burst forth its croaky growl. I was halfway through my beer when another sound cut in, jarring. Faint at first but soon it threatened to drown out the competition. The critters were struck dumb for a while. All I heard was the vehicle, screaming down the fire track that coursed the waney ridge above my place. I knew it wasn’t Con. Different engine, and Con never used that track on account of the humps and deep swales that had been bulldozed into existence to prevent erosion. Not to mention the debris. Only a complete i***t would barrel down the old logging tracks in the dark. Con could be accused of many things, but he was not an i***t. I next heard the shriek of brakes and knew the vehicle had reached one of the track’s many hairpins. There was a dull thud. Had the driver come a cropper? Hit a deer, or a kangaroo maybe? I slugged my beer and waited. There were no more engine sounds. I toyed with the idea of checking out the damage, when the high-pitched whine of spinning wheels hit my ears and I felt my top lip curling in response. Not long after, the vehicle thrummed its way to the main road. Whoever it was had come as if from nowhere. I wanted to hear where they were headed. The engine noise faded as the vehicle dipped behind a saddle for a stretch and I pictured the road, its uncompromising path through the rough terrain, all the wooded gullies and nature-made rock dumps, the termite mounds and stringy barks left to rot where they fell, the old-growth logged, saplings poking up in the undergrowth like hope, the blackened trunks of the larger trees where a fire had gone through. It was terrain supporting an uneasy alliance of wild and feral life. The vehicle drew closer. It had to be a ute or station wagon, and it was heading for the town. The hotel would be in for a fun night. With the vehicle out of earshot, I thought no more of it. The bush came back to me in all its complexity, an aural pleasure of harsh and pleading calls. The capacity for survival out in the wilderness amazed me. It had been a scorcher of a season and the ground was still baked dry despite the recent showers that had freshened up the undergrowth. Summer wouldn’t let go. The birds, the bandicoots, the snakes and goannas were all thirsty. Plenty of water in the river, but up at the shack I was on tank water and couldn’t spare much. I did put out an old dog bowl now and then of an evening, and it was drunk dry by morning. I didn’t have a dog. Cassie said I should have a dog. Maybe she was right. Still, nature had other methods for taking care of its guardians. All summer a copperhead had taken up residence under the floorboards, until it was chased away by the largest goanna I’d ever clapped eyes on. The snake was not impressed but no amount of angry hissing put off that mother of a beast. I left them to sort it out between themselves. No point interfering in nature’s course unless I had to. I made my living hunting deer. Deer were feral and had no right to occupy the bush. I had no qualms helping the cull. I had a twelve-gauge slug gun with a rifled barrel, and I was a good shot. I skinned and hung and butchered too, selling the best to a truck-driver mate with connections in the city. Rick had a refrigerated van. I gave him a fair cut and we did good business selling to high end restaurants and the odd luxury hotel. Places where they knew how to spell ‘venison’. Word had it my venison was the best on the south coast. It was all in the killing. Fear toughens the flesh. I adopted a softly-softly approach. Even as a kid I was a caring sort, too caring according to my mother. Back then, she reckoned I ought to toughen up if I wanted the world to treat me well. ‘You’re a big softy,’ she would say. She wanted me tough. She wanted to make up for the fact that I didn’t have a dad. Then my stepdad, new on the scene, would follow on her tail with, ‘Nah, Frankie’s just a big girl.’ I took that as an insult. Howard was a pig of a man with a pork-fattened belly, which sort of completed the swinish circle in my mind. Good fortune rained on me and my mum the day he was decapitated by a sheet of roofing iron while working on a building site up north. I would’ve been about seventeen at the time. We were told he was bending down to pick up the hammer he’d dropped when a magpie swooped a plumber on the roof. It was all instinct after that. The plumber raised his hands to protect his head, letting go of the sheet of iron in his grasp in the process, and that was the end of my stepdad. What was it with men and construction sites? Howard Potter, deceased. They put his head in a bucket and called the ambulance. When the plumber, and then the project manager, came around to apologise, it was all my mum and I could do not to invite them in for tea and cake to celebrate. Mum kept a straight face, and I had to stifle the laugh bubbling in my tummy. Maybe it was the shock as well. No one wants to be confronted with news like that, but it has to be said that we never mourned his loss. We’d have been hypocrites if we had. The old bastard hit my mum so hard she only had half her teeth and she had to have a hysterectomy because of the pounding he’d given her guts. I would have been about fifteen when that happened. The year was 1974 and the Vietnam war had come to an end by then. That mongrel of a man was American by birth. He’d bolted to Australia in ‘72 and married my mum, who was practically the first woman he’d met since back then she had a job as a cleaner at the airport. He did all that to avoid the US draft after Whitlam had abolished it in Australia. Mum said they got the first letter wrong when they named him ‘Howard’. I drank the last dregs of my beer and wiped my mouth, before pulling on my boots and heading outside to check on the moon rise. Through a clearing in the trees I saw the forest down below, stretching towards the southern coast. Short flashes of headlights took me by surprise. I thought it might have been that same hoon. I knew my instincts agreed when my top lip reared again.