Gulls woke her. She lay in the four-wheel drive, disoriented for a minute. Then she remembered: this was the day she was leaving.
It was barely light but somehow the light was different – softer, more diffuse. Had she dreamed the birds? The sound pulled her back to Valiant and the enormous blue of the Gulf and Frank in the container and the seabirds curling and crying way above it all.
But when she opened her eyes again, she could still hear them. What were they doing here?
Li cracked the door and the smell hit her. Fresh and salty, and wet like the beaches where she and Val had camped for a couple of summers, back when the west coast was still on the circuit and there was work on the kelp farms. She breathed it in and caught something rotten underneath. The air was thick with bird cries now. She didn’t understand until she limped out of the dunes and saw the water. It lapped twenty metres from where she stood, reaching back and out beyond the edges of her sight.
Through the night those northern rivers had kept running down, flooding the lakebed. And while she slept, life had come back, too. The water was livid with birds. Gulls, herons, ducks, black swans, birds she’d never seen and couldn’t name, all calling and landing and jostling and taking off in spurts across the water, reaching down and pulling up fish. The stink of dead fish along the shoreline rose to meet her, but the birds ignored them because the water was heaving with life. Reeds shivered and flowers bloomed pale and wide-cut on the surface. On the shore and even in the dunes, life showed green through the sand. What she thought of was Matti’s Best Place.
Li left her stick on the shore and walked into the water to convince herself that it was real. It was cold and shallow, deepening to a metre when she waded out. A pod of pelicans announced their descent with low honks – astonishing in their grace and power until they hit the water in a series of lumbering jolts.
She sank into the water up to her neck, shivering, feeling it touch her everywhere. The plenty of it. Scooped it up and let it run over her face, soothing the itch. She stripped, threw her clothes back on the shore, and rolled naked. Let the salt lift and hold her, taking the heaviness from her legs, her ankle. She scrubbed her skin with mud. Waded back to the edge and washed her filthy clothes and her stiff sour underwear. Stood up under the first thin heat of the sun and looked down at her cleaner self, muscle and sinew, the sharp angles of ribs and hips, her breasts gone slack, everything reduced.
It jolted her into a decision. She wouldn’t leave today, she would take this gift and carry it out with her tomorrow.
Naked, she dug out a large still at the water’s edge, deep enough to hold the thirty-litre jerry can. By the time she finished digging she wasn’t cold anymore. Then she made fish traps. On her hands and knees, scooping up the wet mud, it was a childhood feeling. She had always meant to take Matti to the beach in Valiant.
By the time she was done, her clothes were salt-stiff and dry enough to put back on, and the first trap was already full of yellow and silver fish. She worked in a steady frenzy, cleaning and filleting the fish, rubbing salt in and covering them in saltbush leaves. Skewered other fish whole and roasted them on the bonnet prop. She dug another, deeper fire pit, roped driftwood into a rough tripod and hung the salted fish in the smoke, hoping her wood supply would last long enough to do the job.
By midmorning the flies were coming, drawn to the rotting fish. There had hardly been any flies before now. She worked to keep them off the drying meat but gave up trying to keep them off her face. There were toads, too, a kind she’d never seen in West. Bloated and yellow, emitting a stop-start engine rumble under all the other noises. They were slow but she wasn’t tempted to catch them. Most of the birds ignored them too but the gulls dive-bombed them along the water’s edge, flipping them onto their backs and ripping their bellies open to feed.
All day the birds kept coming, preening, feeding, jostling on the water. The sky was solid with them, their shrieks and their shit and feathers falling. Where were they coming from? She hadn’t known there were this many birds anywhere. All day grasses and small plants grew up and covered the shore and the dunes, and smaller flowers emerged from them. It made her feel like a child.
When Li turned nine, Val bought her a magic garden. They set it up in the tent; the small tricky cardboard landscape on its plastic base, and poured the liquid into the channels that fed it, and then waited. She had fallen asleep waiting and missed the first bloom of colour on a fir tree, the first snow on the mountain. This was like that. She had fallen asleep with the outline of life and woken to life itself exploding around her, the chemical transformation so rapid it clambered over itself, multiplying at fantastic speed.
She tasted the flowers and they were sweet and nutty, so she picked armfuls, leaving some to dry on the roof of the four-wheel drive. Ate and ate, feeding herself up for the walk ahead. Her new still was working so fast that she could fill her waterbag and what extra bottles she could carry, and have plenty left to drink.
When feral pigs came in
