Zac, young, smart and adventurous, roams the eucalypt bush and pine forest around his house to his heart’s content. But not over the old train tracks. Never that far.
Until one day, he feels something magical calling…
He knows he should ignore it. But even he can’t imagine the consequences for listening this time.
A tragic story about the mistakes we can make while grieving, and how clinging to our grief can cheat us of everything we ever loved, or hoped or dreamed for.
At The Home of the Winter King
Imagine, if you will, a young boy—about seven, say—who thinks he’s the cleverest thing in the whole damn world. Sadly for him, he’s not far wrong—but clever doesn’t also mean wise.
This kid, this boy—this genius—has played in the bush behind the house forever, and he knows every gum tree, knows the curve of white eucalypt limbs, the smell of leaves baking in the sun, the feel of a sneeze coming when the wattle-puff pollen dances in the aid. He knows the needle-sharp sedge grass and the tiny, smiling faces of the billy buttons, miniature suns waving in the breeze; he knows the smell of the snow wind as it rushes off the mountains in the winter, and the taste of the crystal-bright water from the stream, all iced mineral and sweetness.
He wanders through the bush at his leisure, sometimes wandering all the way down to the edges of the pine plantation lining the highway that’s the artery of this little two-bit town called Jilamatang. Regional Victoria, back of the Snowy Mountains, over an hour to the nearest thing they’ve got to a city: he’s outgrown the place and he isn’t even in double digits. Good thing they have the internet, even though the connection’s slower than the post from Melbourne.
He scouts far and wide, spends the whole day exploring while his parents think he’s a good lad in school—an easy ruse because school’s also easy—and one day, he discovers something worthwhile. Not far from town, a couple of kilometres or so, there’s an old train line, rusted iron, smells almost like blood. Barely anyone remembers it, and even the real old timers hardly know it’s there.
But he knows.
It’s always been a demarkation, the eastern border of his domain, and he’s had in mind that he probably oughtn’t cross it. Crossing it, he feels, is maybe a step too far from his parents’ world.
But of course, one day, his curiosity gets the better of him and, breath held by tightly pressed lips that quiver with anticipation, he skips across old rails rusted to the colour of fox’s fur.
At first, nothing seems to have changed. The air tastes the same, of warm eucalyptus and baking bark, the same wind blows against his skin with the smell of pine needles, and the same sun beats down upon his shoulders like comfort, like healing, like love.
Then the trees grow denser, gnarled eucalypts and tufty wattles giving way to lofty, straight-trunked pines, needles flared against the bright sun and crisp air of early autumn. Their leaves will not succumb to the on-coming cold.
Never mind that neither will the eucalypts’; the pines would have everyone know that needles, at this altitude, this close to the highest mountain in the whole damn country, are superior—which is why their trunks are so tall and straight, while the poor little natives twist and bend, backs crooked in submission to the wind.
The thick mat of rust-coloured needles devours the boy’s footsteps more effectively than any carpet, and for a while it’s eerily quiet, only the slightly sweet, musty smell of decay for company. It grows colder, too, and the boy shivers, even though summer still lingers in the air in long, hot afternoons, and the true bite of winter is still months away.
Through the dense boughs of the pines, something shifts, and he catches glimpse of something moving, something big—something alive. And although his heart pounds like it wants to escape his chest and run right back home to the safety of his kitchen, although the taste in the back of his throat is dust and anxiety, the boy continues.
This, he knows, will be a sight worth seeing.