him. Flynn reached out for it and began sobbing.
‘Give it!’
‘No, you’ll have to catch me first.’
Tom walked off, holding the harmonica out behind him. Flynn stood slowly and came after him. Tom kept him going for most of the day with the same trick. They passed through another deep valley filled with tall columns of flooded gum and turpentine, quiet as a cathedral. Then the deep valley was gone and they were in open woodland once more, the creek little more than a trickle beside them. The day was even hotter than the one previous and there was an overhum of worker bees in the trees around like the sound of heat itself. Every now and then black bird-like shapes fluttered in front of Tom’s eyes and he would have to sit, pull up his legs and put his head down until the shapes went away. He had no experience of death and associated it with sudden impacts and rending of flesh, not this gradual fading, ebbing feeling.
Mid-afternoon they stopped to rest again and as Tom lay in the shade he began to think he could smell wood smoke. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. Wood smoke. He propped himself up on one elbow and looked over at the timbered country on the far side of the creek. He convinced himself, slowly and surely, that he could see the smoke, lit up by broken sunlight, under some trees just downstream. Flynn was quiet beside him. He was falling behind more often now, wanting to sleep, and Tom was having to almost carry him to keep him going. He was starting to have fits of deep, phlegmy coughing as well.
Tom left him to sleep and started off towards the smoke. He stumbled down until the land levelled out and the trees changed again. The creek they had been following disappeared into a swampy complex of tussocky grass and sedges and deep, narrow sluices of water the colour of strong tea. The swamp now lay between Tom and the smoke, which he could easily see now, rising almost vertically into the sky, a small incline just obscuring its source. He set out across the narrowest part of the swamp towards a stretch of higher ground studded with paperbarks. He slipped and fell more than once when the solid footing afforded by the grass failed him and spun him off into muddy depressions laced with stagnant, silvery water. The mud sucked at his feet and as he struggled to free himself one more time his vision suddenly blurred and starred and he fainted.
When his eyes opened a little later the smell of the swamp was strong in his nostrils and he could hear Flynn wailing. He was near-hysterical by the time Tom managed to return to where he had left him. He took him by the shoulders and told him that he’d gone to look for the smoke and had fainted, that he hadn’t abandoned him at all, that he would never do that, but it was a good half-hour before Flynn had calmed down enough for them to continue.
They went down to the swamp with Flynn holding tightly onto Tom’s hand and then they skirted the mud and found that the creek continued its course on the swamp’s far side. The creek was running in the direction Tom had seen the smoke so they followed it down and down until it entered a steep-sided valley crammed with palms and ferns. The creek formed pools they had to climb round and both were soon scratched and faint from the exertion. They stopped and rested by a pool on grey rocks that jutted out of the earth like the half-buried skulls of giants. Across the water, on the far bank, water dragons warmed themselves in the sun. They sat and watched them and the water and Tom saw tiny flowers float past in the current. Somewhere a tree or bush must have been dropping flowers onto the surface. Some looked like drops of blood under the water as if a murder had taken place in a shady upstream bend. A certain peacefulness stole into Tom’s thinking as he sat there, watching the lizards, watching the flowers. It began to replace the gnawing fear and panic which had been close to overwhelming him all day. Although he was very tired and very hungry he welcomed this feeling and its enticement not to worry.
They walked no more that day and as the sun sank behind a saddle in the hills before them – the glow rising up as though a wondrous, golden city existed just beyond the next valley – pale yellow butterflies came and floated all around them, some dying in the water and floating away downstream, and then something – maybe a platypus – splashed and slipped under the surface of the pool, leaving nothing but long, gentle ripples to kiss each bank. It took a few minutes for the fact to dawn on Tom that the sun was setting in the west and they’d been walking all that day almost directly towards it – in the opposite direction to the one he’d intended. He was about to burst into tears when Flynn began to speak, very softly, beside him.
‘I’m hungry, Tom. I want to go home,’ he said. ‘I want to see Mum.’
‘You’ll see her.’
‘You promise?’
‘Already have.’
‘Swear?
‘Yeah.’
Tom licked his thumb, straightened Flynn’s fringe, then brushed dust off his cheeks.
‘You want to look good for Mum, don’t you?’
Flynn nodded.
‘We must be close to a house or something. A road. Tomorrow we’ll find it. Tomorrow we’ll get home. I swear we will.’
The sun lowered quickly then, and even though it was hard to see, Tom rubbed cool creek water onto the scratches on Flynn’s arms and legs and picked specks of dirt and gravel from a deep graze on his own knee. He found a fern and stripped it of its fronds and laid them on the rock and laid Flynn down on them and then curled up round him. He watched him fall asleep, watched his thumb go into his mouth, and then he too closed his eyes. Finches chattered in the bushes and from somewhere up in the hills came the soft, clear tolling of bellbirds.
Grace leant her head back against the seat and began to see the tricks the light was playing on her. She swung the door to and fro and small horses of reflected light galloped backwards and forwards across the road. It was nearly midday and the heat radiated down through the metal of the car like lightning down a rod but found nowhere to go. The sun burrowed into the car’s paint and cracked the colour apart, found a rainbow where you wouldn’t expect one, lifted it out for the boiling air to cushion, display like a dusty nugget, spin back out into the day. Everything on either side of the road seemed to be wilting. The road was empty, chalky. The rails running parallel to the road, behind the barbed wire, gleamed like chrome and appeared and disappeared in the heat haze. She looked over at the edge of the trees, where the timber started, where the shadows began, where it might have been just a little cooler. It almost seemed up to the country now, and the sun, to conjure up the boys, to have them step out from the shade and walk directly over to where she sat. They would be dusty, very hungry, and thin. They would probably have cuts on their legs and arms and torn clothes and she would bandage them up and then she and her father would drive them into town and they would sit quite still between them while Pop cracked jokes and she would put her arm across Tom’s shoulders and when they arrived in town everyone would come out and crowd around and chatter with excitement and amazement.
They’d been missing for more than a week now. Nearly two hundred men, including blacktrackers and men with dogs, had been brought in to search. It was in all the newspapers – even in Sydney – and on the television and radio stations. She hadn’t gone out with Pop again but she had sat by the two-way radio in the station listening to the talk and following the searchers’ progress on the big map pinned to the wall. She hadn’t even thought about Darcy until she hadn’t turned up to have her dress altered, and then she wondered whether her father was being even more strict with her than usual.
She squinted over at the trees again, then turned and perched on her knees to look out the back window, but there was nothing there either, just a red-sided steer plugging slowly across
