the only sounds, then Pat stopped and doused his headlights, Beth pulling up behind him.
‘Now, remember we have to be very quiet or the animals will run away,’ Beth whispered to her charges as Pat turned on the big light and began to play it among the palms and ferns that crowded the side of the track.
‘There,’ he said quietly, and the children ‘oohed’ as the light picked up wide-open, yellow-green eyes. Beth shone her torch to the side of the eyes and nearly dropped the light. They were looking at a snake. A beautiful snake admittedly but still a snake.
Diamond patterns marked its skin, and though it was coiled around a tree branch, Beth guessed it had to be at least eight feet long.
She wasn’t very good with snakes, so the torch shook in her hands while her feet lifted involuntarily off the floor of the cart. Ally, perhaps feeling the same atavistic fear, slid onto her knee.
Fortunately Pat’s light moved on, finding now, fortunately on the other side of the track, a tiny sugar glider, its huge eyes wide in the light, its furry body still.
There followed a chorus of ‘Ahh!’ and ‘Look!’
How could children keep quiet at the wonder of it, especially when the little animal suddenly moved its legs so the wing-like membrane between them spread and it glided like a bird from one branch to another?
Next the light was low, catching an earthbound animal, sitting up on its haunches as it chewed a nut.
‘A white-tailed marsupial rat,’ Pat said quietly, while Beth’s torch picked out the animal’s body and then the white tail.
The children’s hushed voices startled the little animal, sending him scuttling into the undergrowth, so Pat changed lights, holding up another torch and shining ultraviolet light around until it picked up a huge, saucer-shaped fungus, the light making it glow with a ghostly phosphorescence so the children ‘oohed’ and ‘ahhed’ again in the wonder of it.
They moved on, Sam listing on his fingers how many animals he’d seen, soon needing Danny’s fingers as well.
‘You’ll be onto toes before long,’ Beth said to him, when Pat showed them the emerald-green eyes of a spider in his web.
‘This is so exciting,’ Sam whispered back. ‘Isn’t it, Danny?’
But Danny, Beth realised, was tiring quickly and, with a couple of children already in the hospital with some mystery illness, she decided she’d take him back to camp. Ally, too, had probably had enough.
‘What if you go into Pat’s cart and I take Ally and Danny back to camp?’ she suggested to Sam.
‘No, I’m Danny’s friend so I’ll stay with him.’
‘I’ll go with Pat,’ Ally said, surprising Beth, although she knew she shouldn’t be surprised by anything children did.
She shifted Ally into the bigger cart, found somewhere to turn her cart, then headed back, stopping when she heard any rustling in the bushes, letting Sam sit in the front so he could shine the torch around and spotlight the animal.
‘Over there! I can hear a noise over there. Shine the torch, Sam,’ Danny whispered, when they were close to the junction of the main track.
Beth eased her foot off the accelerator and Sam turned on the torch, finding not an animal or reptile but a human being.
A very tall human being.
A very familiar human being!
‘A-A-Angus?’
His name came out as a stuttered question, and she stared at where he’d been but the torchlight had gone. Sam had taken one look at the figure, given a loud scream, flung the torch down into the well of the cart and darted away, heading along the track as fast as his little legs would carry him.
Danny began to cry, Beth yelled at Sam to stop, to wait, but it was Angus who responded first, taking off after the startled child, calling to him that it was all right.
Beth took Danny on her knee, assuring him everything was okay, driving awkwardly with the child between her and the wheel, hoping Sam would stay on the path, not head into the bushes.
‘He got a fright,’ she said to Danny, ‘that’s all. We’ll find him soon.’
Fortunately, because Danny was becoming increasingly distressed, they did find him soon, sitting atop Angus’s shoulders, shining Angus’s torch.
‘He’s not a Yowie after all,’ Sam announced, as the little cart stopped in front of the pair. ‘I thought he was a Yowie for sure, didn’t you, Danny?’
Danny agreed that he, too, had thought Angus was the mythical Australian bush creature, although Beth was willing to bet this was the first time Danny had heard the word.
As far as Beth was concerned, she’d been more afraid Angus was a ghost—some figment of her imagination conjured up in the darkness of the rainforest.
Yowies, she was sure, were ugly creatures, not tall, strong and undeniably handsome…
A ghost for sure, except that ghosts didn’t chase and catch small boys.
Which reminded her…
‘You shouldn’t have run like that, Sam,’ she chided gently as Angus lifted the child from his shoulders and settled him in the cart where he snuggled up against Beth and Danny. ‘You could have been lost in the forest.’
‘Nuh-uh,’ Sam said, shaking his head vigorously. ‘I stayed on the path—I wasn’t going in the bushes. There are snakes in there.’
‘And Yowies,’ Danny offered, but he sounded so tired Beth knew she had to get him back to camp.
And she’d have to say something to Angus.
But what?
Not knowing—feeling jittery, her composure totally shaken—she let anger take control.
‘I’ve no idea what you were doing, looming up out of the bushes like that,’ she said crossly. ‘You scared us all half to death.’
‘Beth? Is that really you, Beth?’
He was bent over, peering past Sam towards her, and he sounded as flabbergasted as she felt.
‘Who is that man?’ Sam demanded, before she could assure Angus that it was her. ‘And what was he doing in the bushes?’
Exactly what I’d like to know myself, Beth thought, but her lips weren’t working too well, or she couldn’t get enough air through her larynx to speak, or something.
Fortunately Angus wasn’t having any problems forming his speech.
‘I’m Angus and I’m staying at the resort. Right now, I’m doing the same thing you’re doing, looking at the animals at night. That’s why I have my torch.’
He lifted it up, showing it again to Sam who took it and immediately
