Into That Forest - By Louis Nowra Page 0,58

snowy hill to the lake. Mr Carsons and Ernie decided to cut us off as we headed to the south of them.

The two men reckoned we must have seen them cos by the time they came out into the clearing we were gone. It were Mr Carsons who spotted our foot- and hand-prints in the snow and he realised we were racing back to the other side of the ridge. Those aren’t ghosts, he said pointing to our footprints in the snow. It weren’t long after that they catched us. The next morning they tied us to the horses and we began our journey back to Mr Carsons’s farm and civilisation.

That were what happened way back then, and now I were returning to the country where we had been found years before.

As we followed the river Mr Carsons asked me if I recognised the place where Becky and me had nearly drowned. I shook me head cos it were all vague to me til one day, just before we stopped for lunch, I felt the slam of memory hit me. There it were - the bend in the river, the bank where we were saved by the tiger and, lo and behold, in a tree were the remains of me father’s boat. Is this your father’s boat? Mr Carsons asked me and at that moment I seen in me mind me father struggling under water and me mother gone. The sight of the boat told me like no words could that me mother and me father were now ghosts. I began to weep. Ernie hugged me til I was cried out but I noticed that Mr Carsons looked at me without a skerrick of pity or grief. He had the dead eyes of a harpooner aiming for the heart of a whale.

After we had eaten, Mr Carsons asked me which way Becky and I had gone with the tiger. I pointed the way into that forest and its trees so high that you’d strain your neck to see their tops which were a tangled darkness blotting out the sun, cloaked in moss and vines and giant tree ferns - it were a land for giants. It were obvious that Mr Carsons thought Becky in running away from the school had taken the path along the river and were following the trail we had taken those years before. Ernie suggested we take a short cut and make for the lair, which meant continuing straight upstream til we got to the clear country, but Mr Carsons were of the mind that his daughter might be starving and ill and unable to make her way to the lair and he didn’t want to go the easy way just in case we accidentally bypassed her.

But we found no sign of her by the time we rode onto the tablelands. As he had done the previous three days, Mr Carsons woke up early and spent the hours before breakfast calling out Becky’s name. He never got an answer except when it were an echo that seemed more desperate than the actual cry of her name. I knew he were hoping that his daughter were making for the lair, but had she made it that far? In the late afternoons when the air were still and crisp Ernie would unpack his phonograph and set it up in a clear space and he’d play the cylinder with me singing the sea shanty. He did not play it too often cos he said my voice and her voice would wear away til the songs were lost forever.

But something were happening to me that I only gradually noticed - I stayed awake most of the night, me hearing becoming real keen, me eyes sharper too. I heard the slightest rustle of animals looking for prey. I heard the squeal of animals being killed. The sounds of their struggle for life made me tingle with fear and excitement. I felt meself one with the night. I were reliving the thrill of setting out with Becky and the tigers on a hunt, the sense of the four of us being at one with our purpose and the sheer, juicy thrill of the chase, our thumping hearts, the way we each knew without words what to do, the tigers running ahead in a circle to turn back as Becky and I run after the quarry yelling and shouting and scaring the bejesus out of the prey who did not see the tigers