Finding Kerra by Rosanne Hawke

Author:Rosanne Hawke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: story;belonging;love;teen
Publisher: Rhiza Press
Published: 2017-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

11

In the morning, Blake and I saddled the horses for our picnic.

‘Today I’ll take you to my favourite spot,’ he said as he tightened Cador’s girth strap. ‘I reckon you can ride that far now.’

We rode off laughing, past the dam Kerra nearly drowned in and across country in a race. We rode up a rise and I scanned the landscape sloping away behind us. We had been climbing so gradually I hadn’t noticed. We reined in at the top. I gasped at the picture before me: a gorge set between two small hills.

Blake smiled and touched my hand on the reins. ‘The land is so flat, so a place like this is special. It would have been a meaningful place for the Nungas too.’

I didn’t let on that my legs and back still ached from my spill off Rainmaker, but this gorge was worth it. The touch of his hand too.

A tree-lined creek ran through it—no water, but I was getting used to not expecting water in creeks and rivers.

‘There’s a spring here but it doesn’t run in the dry. And the creek fills up with a good rain,’ Blake said as we walked the horses down the rise. ‘It happens every now and then.’ I guessed 150 millilitres of rain each year wouldn’t offer many opportunities for creeks to run. A few rusty sails of a windmill rose above the bushes and as I moved Rainmaker to have a better look, a crowd of corellas soared squawking into the air.

‘Since the spring was unreliable, they dug a well here ages ago. The windmill pumped the water up for the horses. It used to be a changeover station for Cobb and Co.’ We looped the horses’ reins over the branch of a tree that had three different trunks growing from the main butt. The mulga trees were everywhere. ‘We also have a lot of desert oaks and those are river red gums by the creek.’ I looked around me. A place like that, with a sense of history, always got to me: what would the people who’d lived here say if they could see us now?

Blake led me to the ruins of a single-roomed house. The heart of it still stood: a single fireplace, bare against the spindly grass, and a solitary trough—they bore witness to a land Europeans didn’t understand. We sat under a silver eucalyptus tree, its bark velvety, and looking as though it’d been there since the creek first carved itself into the land.

Blake made himself busy pulling a small frypan and billy from his saddle bag. He had a faint smile on his face as if he was counting his blessings and was pleased with how many he had. Then, after he got the fire going and the damper cooked to his liking, he held out his hands to the food and nodded at me to tuck in. He was so happy. I was just thinking how Kerra would enjoy a picnic when Blake floored me.

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