Into That Forest - By Louis Nowra Page 0,55
continued after the crying boy she suddenly seen Ernie coming towards her. He lunged at her but she easily jumped out of his way and then she was off. She ran through the screaming, burning mayhem and the squealing, panic-stricken rats and raced through the gardens out to the back of the school into the bushland, never looking back. She ran and ran and ran and vanished into the night.
We think we know where she’s gone and we think we know what she’s looking for, Hannah, said Ernie finishing his story and getting up from the bale of hay he had been sitting on. He motioned to his packhorse near the stable door. I recognised one of his phonographs with a huge speaking horn strapped to its side. Do you believe me now? he asked. I looked at his gentle face and then at Mr Carsons hitting his pipe against the wall. He looked tormented and I knew I had been told the truth and we were truly going to search for her.
Mr Carsons were in a hurry and we set off right away in a drizzling mist, through the streets of Hobart and out of the city. Mr Carsons didn’t give me a horse so I rode with Ernie. During the rough sections of the bush I’d try to wrap me arms round his stomach, which were so fat me fingers couldn’t meet, so I put me hands into his jacket pockets. That first night, after we had made camp and eaten, Mr Carsons tied me to Ernie’s leg so I wouldn’t run away, which were stupid cos I had no idea where Becky were and I needed the men to help me. Ernie had a flask of whiskey and as he sipped it he stared at the flames like someone looking at tea-leaves trying to see the future. I listened to the night birds and animals hunting for food, snuffling, grunting, snarling, crunching bones, crackling dead leaves. It were like I were coming home. I knew what the sounds meant. I could see in me mind what the devils, possums and owls were doing. I thought I heard the cough of a tiger and I spun round in the direction of the sound when Ernie leaned over and touched me hand, tapping it like he were doing Morse code of apology, saying to me how sorry he were to take me on this trip. I said I were fine with it cos we were going to find lost Becky. He asked me how might Becky survive. I said most likely she’d eat berries, catch creek crayfish and baby animals. It might take a long while, he said, glancing across at Mr Carsons sleeping in his bag. It took years to find you and Rebecca in the bush. Everyone else gave up, but not Mr Carsons.
Over the next few days and nights as we headed west into the highlands he told me the story of how Mr Carsons came to find us living with the tigers.
When the news came that me family and Becky were missing, searchers went looking for us. They found the smashed boat, me father’s body dumped on the river’s edge and me mother, still caught up in the branches of the tree that had carried her downstream. For weeks they searched for Becky and me. Eventually they gave up cos they thought we had drowned too. But Mr Carsons wouldn’t give up. He went out in all weather, whether it be snowing, raining or burning hot. He didn’t give up hope, because he weren’t a man of hope. He wouldn’t even think of the idea of hope cos that meant there were a chance we were dead and he could only keep on going, keep on driving himself on his quest if his only thought - his single thought - were that we were alive. He became a lonely, stick-thin figure forever seen on his forlorn horse riding through the main streets of small towns or across fields and paddocks. He were a man who didn’t talk much and he reeked of loneliness, as Ernie said, but he made himself start up a conversation with everyone he met, thinking they might have some clue or rumours about his daughter and me. Some people said he were so filled with dreams and thoughts of finding us that he became not so much a man as an idea of one dressed in human form.
It were in his