The Hopeful Traveller by Fiona Farrell

Author:Fiona Farrell [Fiona Farrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781775531852
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Prologue

In which the island is described—Its history, geology, flora and fauna—The game begins.

SEE IT FROM above as the bold bird sees it, swooping to choppy waves, teasing and tickling. Inches from their fingertips she finds the updraught held like a surprise in the curve of water. It lifts her up, drawing her into a loop so that she might at first seem to be heading back in the direction she has come from, but that is an illusion: she is flying steadily forward, a hundred miles in a single day.

So she advances by a daring series of reverses.

See the island as she sees it with her black bottle-glass eyes. See the hump of it across the rolling stretch of water, its muscled shoulder rising on the out breath, sinking on the in breath, its highest point tipped with tumbled rock like the dorsal crest of some ancient beast. Once it oozed up molten to set as slab and bubble, a clot in the fiery crack, but over aeons the clot has been worn by water to its present form: an island separated from the mainland by a narrow channel, treacherous with reefs and a seething current. Its slopes have been carved to deep gullies, its cliffs are towering walls of crimson lava sculpted to arches and pinnacles and booming caverns lacy with birdshit. In only one place has the wall been broken. Between twin headlands set down like the paws of a sphinx on the sea is a bay. There the sea cuts into a beach of boulders and iron-grey sand bordering a grassy flat where an old house has been adapted as a lodge for visitors and work parties. To one side a creek, which has its source in a spring high on the hillside behind, makes a break for the sea through a tunnel of remnant bush and slick black rock.

Once the entire island was covered in bush: a densely woven cloak of kamahi, fuchsia, kowhai and totara and a million other plants bore fruit and flower, season after season, their skinny roots twisting and thrusting for a grip in shed leaf and fractured basalt. But fire has reduced the cover to a maze of twisted trunks that lie about like bleached bones after battle. Any regrowth has been defeated by marauding hordes of goats and cattle, pigs and rabbits until the bush hangs on only in the gullies, a skimpy cover like hair at the groin of a bare body. The slopes are occupied instead by the opportunists: mallow, elder, cocksfoot and boxthorn.

Smell the island as the bird smells it through nostrils weeping salt tears. The faint whiff of leaf mould from the gullies is an undertone she can detect still beneath the salty whiff of the sea and the pervasive odours of humanity wafting from the shore where people skitter about busy in their tracks and burrows, while beneath their careless feet wriggle the timid survivors of the siege: the worms in their guerilla tunnels of

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