The Secret River and Searching for the Secret River by Kate Grenville

Author:Kate Grenville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2010-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

PART SIX

The Secret River

One blue and silver morning a week after the attack on Webb, the Hope glided past Darkey Creek. It was an absence that Thornhill noticed. For once there was no smoke rising out of the gully where Captain McCallum’s men had been routed. Only birds, rising, circling, dropping down below the trees.

He might have sailed by, but an impulse made him push the tiller over. The tide was rising and floated the boat up the creek easily. The wind died to nothing as the mangroves closed around him, brushing the gunwales on either side. The boat slipped along the water to where the bank opened out on to level ground.

As he stepped out to wade ashore, Thornhill felt the silence deepen. He wanted to get back into the boat and push it down the creek, away from this dense silence. He called out Oy! to hear a human sound, and the silence flowed back over the noise. Even the mosquitoes seemed to have abandoned the place. It was a relief to step onto the land. The quicker he could see what there was to see, the quicker he could be gone again. The blacks had a few humpies around the coals of a dead campfire. They had burned around them, the way they did, so the ground was clear. A couple of empty flour bags lay about, bright against the dirt, and a bark dish where a damper had been mixed, the scraps dry and yellow.

He waited, but nothing moved. Above him the birds flapped and shifted in the branches. He stooped to look into the nearest humpy. He saw nothing at first, just shadows. Then he saw that the shadows were a man and a woman, and they were dead. A mass of shiny flies crawled and buzzed around them. The man lay on his back, arched even in death, his mouth ajar, his chin crusted where he had vomited. His eyes were open but dull with death. The woman had one hand flung out grasping at the air. He could see the lines on her yellow palm. The smell of shit was overpowering.

He backed away into the light. Beyond the humpy were more bodies: another man, and a woman with a dead child still in the crook of her dead arm. Even the child had the pale stickiness around the mouth where the flies seethed.

There was an unnatural clarity to everything, each twig on the ground more real than itself, the way the sunlight made a sharp copy of it out of shadow.

When he heard a sound he thought it was himself, groaning. When it came again he told himself it was a bird, or a branch rubbing on another. But when it came a third time it was unmistakable: another human, alive, here with him in the clearing. His feet took him towards the sound against his will, feet in a nightmare.

It was a boy, still spindly in the arms and thin in the chest, a lad no more than Dick’s age, on the ground, his knees drawn up to his belly.

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