Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan Page B

marginal paddocks of the soldier settlers whose hope sagged even more than their post-and-rail fences. The meadows gave way to button-grass plains and scrub, then, as they slowly climbed, to a wonder world of pencil pine and King Billy pine forests, wide and open, interspersed with lawns of undamaged moss, the occasional deciduous beech copse orange in its final autumn show. Harry had never been to the hut before, and was surprised when he first had it pointed out to him by Boy. They stood at the head of a thickly forested valley, and down below them in a small and pleasant grass clearing sat a hut built of split timber and roofed with wooden shingles, the whole long silvered in the rain and sun, each plank finely etched with tiny tendrils and tufts of dry moss. To the left of the hut was a more roughly built shed, which Boy explained was for storing the skins.
    Harry learnt to lay the thin twisted brass-wire snares out along the wallaby runs. He set them so that they dangled just above the track, near invisible. When a wallaby or possum came scurrying along their customary track it would run straight into the snare. The wire loop would slip around the animal’s neck and, released from its peg in the ground, spring into the air, tightening as the desperate animal struggled and thrashed to be free. ‘It but bothers them little,’ said Boy to Harry, but Harry was never quite so sure. The small shit that hung out of their arses and the dried blood line down the side of their mouths said otherwise. But Boy was not one for killing anything unnecessarily, and all his family were as soft as warm dripping when it came to killing things that didn’t need killing. Boy’s brother George would lay a piece of wet bark down the side of the logs burning in the fire to allow the ants to escape, and only shot just what was needed for his pot. Harry learnt to kill quickly and cleanly. He learnt to cook wallaby stew, to not cook the delicate meat for too long lest it became dry and papery to the tongue, learnt to cook his father’s favourite meal, roo patties, and he learnt to make bread in a fire. He learnt also to love his father, who until that time had been a distant figure, often away for months at a time snaring, or working on the huge threshing machines that went from farm to farm up the coast, returning to sleep, drink, and fight with Rose, sometimes hitting her when he had drunk too much. At such times Rose would cry, though it was evident even to Harry that she cried as much out of sadness as physical pain. When she held her children to her belly and Harry’s head pulsed in and out with the sob of her body, Harry knew, though he would not have been able to say it, that she wished for something better between her and Boy, and that she knew it would never happen.
    In the hut and out on the snaring runs Harry found Boy neither distant nor violent, but quiet and happy and warm and open to his son. He pointed out the ways of the animals and the birds and plants and smiled more than Harry could ever remember him smiling. One morning Harry asked Boy why he had never brought Rose up to the hut. The question seemed obvious to Harry, for if they had lived in the hut, he thought, then their lives would have perhaps been happier. ‘What would your mother be wanting to live here for?’ said Boy, perplexed by the question. Harry never raised the matter again.
    Of an evening Harry would make the roo patties and watch the red firelight flutter upon his father’s small compact body as he tacked the latest batch of skins around the inside of the fireplace to dry. Harry would watch the fireglow briefly illuminate in old-gold puddles the grey flannel his father wore upon his upper body, long and loose, flapping down to his worn brown breeches. The glow would sometimes throw his father’s face into total darkness, then highlight in turn a part of the wooden wall behind, so that Harry would imagine his father