The Third Day, The Frost Read Free

most of the work. The chooks certainly seemed to like
it. They clucked around happily, murmuring to each other as they
explored their new territory.
    It was ten in the morning when we left. The
last thing I’d done, just after breakfast, was to make a little
bouquet out of leaves and grasses – it was the wrong season for
flowers – and take it to Chris’ grave. I wasn’t surprised to find
someone had been there before me, and left a wooden flower, a
flower clumsily carved out of wood. It could have been anyone:
Homer, Fi, Lee, Robyn, any one of them could have done it.
    The weeks of hiding, and the depressions that
we’d been through, had taken the edge off our fitness. The heavy
packs seemed to have doubled their weight before we reached the
first of the giant rock steps that the path threaded around on its
way out of Hell. At least the weather was on our side. It was cold
but not raining; a moist winter day, when our breaths made us look
like chainsmokers. I never tired of blowing the little white clouds
and watching them evaporate. Above us was nothing but cloud, the
whole sky grey and flat. You knew, just looking at it, that it
would be cold all day and there would be no sign of the sun. But it
was OK for what we wanted; I had no complaints.
    At the top we rested for a while, annoyed and
disappointed at how hard we’d found the climb.
    ‘It’s the packs,’ Fi said. ‘They’re the
biggest loads we’ve ever carried out of Hell.’
    ‘It’s the lives we’ve been living,’ Homer
said. ‘Just lounging around watching TV all day. I knew it’d catch
up with us.’
    We walked along Tailor’s Stitch. A lot of the
features around the Wirrawee district were named after old trades:
Cobbler’s Bay, Tailor’s Stitch, a hill named Brewer’s Mark, and a
rock formation called the Old Blacksmith. We kept our eyes and ears
open for aircraft, but there were none. About halfway to Mt Martin
we turned left down the rough old four-wheel drive track that would
take us into the valley. We went right by the Land Rover, hidden in
thick bush near the top of the ridge. We’d agreed that it’d be too
dangerous to use it until we knew more about what we’d find around
Wirrawee. But at least the walking was now downhill.
    My place was the first one we came to.
Approaching it from the Tailor’s road we were in good cover until
about a k from the house. By then it was midafternoon. As we
reached the edge of the line of trees I signalled to the others to
stop while I sneaked forward, searching for a good lookout. I found
a huge old river gum and installed myself in it. It was perfect,
except for the stream of bees pouring in and out of a large hole in
the trunk, about thirty centimetres above my head. I hadn’t seen
them when I chose the tree. But at the same moment that I noticed
them I also noticed a movement out in the paddock we call Bailey’s,
and I instantly forgot about the bees.
    For the first time since the invasion I saw
strangers in our paddocks. There was a ute over by the western
fenceline and I could see two men working on the fence itself. One
of the old pine trees that Grandma had planted must have come down
in a storm, and fallen across the fence. One man was holding a
chainsaw and the other was dragging away some of the lighter
branches. As I watched, the bloke with the chainsaw gave the cord a
pull and started it up, then moved in to continue cutting.
    It would have been a normal bush scene except
for one thing: the soldier with the rifle across his back who was
watching from fifty metres away. He was sitting astride a
motorbike, a cigarette in his mouth. He looked about fourteen years
old.
    I studied them for a few minutes. At least the
man with the chainsaw seemed to know how to use it; lucky, as it
was a big one. We’d all been raised on horrific stories of people
slicing arms or legs off with chainsaws. In our district they cause
more accidents than tractors and firearms combined.
    I went back to the