‘Are we in danger?’ Ashley asked, taking the first spoonful of soup.
Micky shrugged. ‘Nothing much we can do about it, if we are. At least we’ve got shelter. It’s the koalas I’m worried about. This kind of storm can be devastating. We’ll have lots of rescues tomorrow, I reckon.’
Ashley was confused. ‘But they’re wild animals. Aren’t they used to storms?’
‘Yes, if they’re healthy,’ Micky said. ‘The problem is, many of the koalas around here aren’t. There are so few of them and they’re so cut off from other populations that we end up with small isolated groups. They’re at high risk of inbreeding and diseases like chlamydia.’
Ashley sighed. She’d forgotten, for a moment, how her aunt liked to lecture if she was asked a question.
‘Diseased koalas are highly vulnerable,’ Micky went on. ‘In a storm like this, they don’t have the strength to stay up in the trees. They can fall, and the young ones can get separated from their mothers. We’ll have to go out tomorrow and check what’s happening. There’s a colony down on the other side of the ridge and I know there are a few sick koalas there. They’re the ones I’m worried about. You and me, inside a house — we’ll be fine.’
Ashley took another spoonful of soup. Her aunt could barely walk, and they were stuck on the wrong side of a flooded river with an ex-tropical cyclone called Jasper heading their way. It didn’t sound fine. It sounded like they were already in trouble.
She felt a wave of homesickness. This holiday wasn’t turning out anything like she’d planned. She should have been at home, settling Puppy in for his first night with her. She would have thought up a name for him by now, and though her parents had told her she wasn’t allowed to have him on the bed, she reckoned she’d have been able to sneak him up there.
Emma would be doing all of that right now with Bella. It just wasn’t fair.
‘You’d better sleep down here tonight,’ Micky said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘There’s another swamp mahogany just outside your room, and if anything’s going to come down, that’ll be the one. Go and grab your things. It’s a foam mattress on the bed — you’ll be able to get it down the stairs. Then we’ll build up the fire and turn in.’
Ashley headed over to the stairs. As she climbed them, the roar of the rain suddenly increased in volume. It must be pouring out there, she thought.
‘Hey, kid, bring down some towels,’ Micky said. ‘If this rain keeps up, we’ll have to block the doors.’
The Bright has gone, but with the darkness has risen a shrieking wind that twists the branches around them and drives the rain into their coats. Youngster grips his mother with all his claws, pressing himself as close as he can to her back as the tree rides the wind.
Since the creature chased them up the tree, his mother has remained wedged in the fork, saying nothing. Her claws are dug hard into the bark and the stain on her arm has spread. The smell of her blood is metallic when he sniffs it.
Shall we go to The Safe?
She doesn’t answer him. The wind drags its claws through the leaves, and Youngster feels the tree sway more than it should. He knows, somehow, that they should be elsewhere on such a night.
We should go.
He squeezes her with his claws and she twitches, and he remembers the stain on her arm.
Mother?
A long silence. At last she responds: I can’t.
I’ll help. I’ll climb by myself.
The wind gusts and the tree sways again and Youngster hears the smaller branches crack and snap. He is filled with urgency. We’ve got to go!
She nuzzles him. You go. Find your way to The Safe.
Not without you. He can’t imagine leaving her. It’s unthinkable. He’s never been without her.
He waits for what she will say next, but she’s silent. Then he hears the noise in the distance, a scream of wind coming towards them, harder and faster than any before. The tree seems to shiver in terror.
Mother —
The gust hits them. The branches wrench and whip, the air is full of flying leaves, stripped from the stems. Youngster blinks, but all he can see are leaves and sticks. The wind is deafening, he cannot hear anything over it, and he cannot hear his mother at all.
Then another sound, louder than the wind. A deep splintering. He feels the shock of it run through the heart of the tree, and the trunk splinters.
Their world tilts. The Hidden has been split and now it is falling.
Youngster clings as long as he can, clings until it feels as though his claws will be torn out. He feels his mother’s fur slipping from under his grip. The tree falls and the wind snatches him and his claws close on empty air and all around him the torn-up leaves spin and the branches snap and she is gone and he is falling.
MOTHER!
Chapter 9
A huge crash jolted Ashley awake. At first she couldn’t remember where she was. She was nearly deafened by the roaring all around and it was too dark to see anything.
‘Kid?’
She heard Micky’s voice faintly and in a flash she remembered. She was at her aunt’s house, in the storm, and she was sleeping on the lounge-room floor.
‘What?’ she yelled back.
‘A tree’s come down outside. Might be on the roof. I can’t find the torch. Turn on the light, would you? The switch is near the door. Be careful in case there’s smashed glass around.’
Ashley struggled up and felt her way across the room in the dark. She banged her toes a couple of times before she found the wall and felt her way along it. She flicked the light switch, but nothing happened.
‘It’s not working!’
Over the roar of the rain it sounded like Micky said something very rude. ‘Must be a blackout. Help me find the torch. And walk carefully, OK?’
Ashley took a couple of steps, then yelped and jumped back. But it wasn’t glass under her foot. It was cold water.
‘It’s wet!’
Micky groaned. Suddenly a torch flicked on, blinding Ashley.
‘Sorry, kid,’ Micky said, lowering the beam. Ashley headed over to the sofa, took the torch and looked around. Water was pooling on the floor. She flicked the beam over towards the stairs. She could see leaves and branches where there should have been a window.
‘Get your boots on and help me up,’ Micky said, sounding businesslike.
Ashley went to the front door. Rain was still lashing down, the wind whistled past the house and water was running in under the door. She shoved her bare feet into the wet boots and headed back to the couch.
Micky took hold of her arm and hauled herself to her feet. She put her foot down on the ground and winced.
‘Does it hurt?’
She shrugged. ‘Hurts like hell. But I’d better have a look around. Stay here. This is getting beyond a joke and your mother’ll kill me if anything happens. Give me that stick again.’
Micky strapped on a headlamp, hobbled across the room and peered up the stairs into the tangle of branches. ‘I don’t think it’s too bad,’ she called. ‘A branch has come through the window, but I think the roof’s OK.’
Ashley flicked the big torch towards the front door, lighting up the water rushing in underneath.
Micky groaned at the sight. ‘Can you try blocking it with those towels?’
Ashley grabbed an armful of towels and headed to the door. The water was coming in fast — she could feel it washing over her boots. She crouched down and jammed the towels one at a time against the bottom of the door, blocking off the flow.
Micky had hobbled back to watch her and she gave her the thumbs up. ‘Well done.’
Ashley got to her feet. ‘What are we going to do now?’
‘Cup of tea, I reckon,’ Micky said. ‘Not much else we can do. SES can’t get here in this storm, and I don’t want to leave the koalas anyway. We’ll just have to stay put until the morning, and see how bad things are.’
She hobbled back to the couch and collapsed. ‘Phew. The fire’s stil
l going, kid. Reckon you can make a chai if I tell you how?’
Ashley followed her aunt’s instructions, and somewhat to her surprise, produced two cups of sweet, milky chai that were every bit as good as her aunt’s.
‘Oh yeah,’ Micky said as she took the first sip. ‘There’s chocolate in the bottom drawer. Better get it out — I’d hate it to get wet.’
Ashley opened the drawer. Fruit and nut. Her favourite. Micky smiled at her and for the first time since she’d left home, Ashley felt a bit better.
The rain was still falling when Ashley woke up. She was curled up on the lounge, a sleeping bag thrown over her, and she could see daylight had come. The wind didn’t sound quite as bad as it had during the night, and the rain was certainly lighter.
Micky was still fast asleep. Ashley slid the sleeping bag off and stood up quietly. She’d fallen asleep with her boots on. She tiptoed to the staircase and peered up. She could barely see anything except for leaves, but by moving them around she could see that a big branch had crashed through the window of her bedroom. Micky had been right — it didn’t look like the roof was crushed.
She crept to the front door. The towels had blocked more water from coming in, though the floor was still puddled.
Ashley opened the door. She half expected a rush of water, but the rain had eased to a shower and the floodwater from the middle of the night had run off.
She looked out and gasped. It seemed that nearly every leaf of every plant in the garden had been stripped away. The ground was a thick carpet of leaves and she could see bare branches everywhere. The branch that had broken the window wasn’t the only thing that had snapped — in every direction she could see fallen trees and branches.
Ashley remembered Jemima. She stepped outside the door, grabbed the oilskin and headed to the enclosure, skidding over the leaves.
To her relief, she saw that nothing had fallen on the cage. She went to the side and peered in. Many of the branches she’d collected the previous day were scattered on the floor, but otherwise everything looked all right. Jemima was curled up asleep as if nothing had happened.
She turned away and looked out towards the ocean. She could see it much more clearly today — lots of trees must have fallen and the rest had lost most of their leaves. In the distance she could see the lighthouse of Byron Bay, which had been under cloud the previous day. The wind was still strong, but she had the feeling that ex-tropical Cyclone Jasper had gone past them now.
‘Cooee!’
Ashley swung around. Micky was at the door, waving. Ashley headed back.
‘Jemima is fine,’ she said, before her aunt could ask. ‘Fast asleep.’
‘Good kid,’ Micky said with a smile. Then she looked around and her smile disappeared. ‘Hell. The garden is trashed.’
‘You can see all the way to Byron,’ Ashley said. ‘The trees have all lost their leaves.’
Micky shook her head. ‘As if the koalas here haven’t got enough problems. I wonder how they went in the storm.’
Ashley noticed that her aunt didn’t have the stick any more. ‘How’s your ankle?’
‘A bit better this morning,’ Micky said. ‘You hungry? How about some scrambled eggs? We’d better get our energy up before we go looking for drop bears.’
‘Micky? What exactly is a drop bear?’ Ashley asked.
Micky looked at her. ‘Haven’t you heard of Thylarctos plummetus? A carnivorous form of koala that kills its prey by dropping on it from a tree before biting it on the neck?’
Ashley wished she knew when Micky was joking. ‘Really?’
Micky poked her in the ribs and grinned. ‘I’m kidding, idiot. They’re a myth. No, round here we use it to mean the koalas that end up on the ground for one reason or another and need to be rescued. After last night, there’ll probably be drop bears all over the shire. The phone is going to start ringing as soon as I plug it back in. But I want to go and check the colony down the ridge and see if they’re OK. There are a few koalas in that group with conjunctivitis, and they’re likely to be in trouble. I’m going to need your help, kid.’
Ashley nodded. She wondered what it would take for Micky to stop calling her ‘kid’.
Chapter 10
It wasn’t as easy as just strolling down the hill to check on the koalas. Ex-tropical Cyclone Jasper hadn’t quite finished with them, so it was windy and still raining. The thick carpet of fallen leaves made every step slippery. Micky had to pick her way carefully along, using two walking sticks so she didn’t skid. Ashley trudged behind, carrying a big, heavy cage. Within minutes her arms were aching from the load.
‘Down here,’ Micky said, indicating where the path branched off from the road and went into the bush. ‘The colony lives on the side of this hill.’
They climbed slowly down the narrow path. Ashley emerged from the group of trees into open grassland. She heard Micky groan.
‘What’s wrong?’
Her aunt was shaking her head. ‘Look how many trees are down. It’s terrible.’
The hillside had taken the full force of the storm and Ashley could see trees of all sizes knocked askew. Some were snapped off, and a few of the larger ones lower down on the hillside had fallen over and were lying with their roots exposed.
‘How long will they take to grow back?’ she asked.
‘Too long for the koalas,’ Micky said. ‘They only live in such a small area anyway.’
Ashley was surprised to see that her aunt had tears in her eyes. Micky joked about everything, but the damage to the koalas’ home had really upset her.
‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.
Micky lowered herself to sit on a fallen trunk. ‘I need to rest for a bit, and then we’ll look for koalas. They’re not that easy to spot, especially up in the trees. You can walk right past them without knowing. Of course we’ll mainly be looking for any on the ground.’
Ashley felt sorry for her aunt. As well as being upset, Micky had gone very pale again, which probably meant her foot was hurting. ‘I’ll start, while you have a rest,’ she said.
Micky shrugged. ‘I doubt you’ll find anything if you don’t know what to look for, but give it a go. If you do find a koala, don’t touch it for heaven’s sake. Come back and get me.’
Ashley set off, trudging through the thick grass, weaving around the fallen trees and branches. The rain had settled to a drizzle and she could hear the roar of the ocean in the distance.
Looking for koalas was much harder than it sounded. The trees were tossing in the wind and it was nearly impossible to see if there were any grey furry creatures hiding in the forks. The rain got in her eyes and made her blink, and if she concentrated too hard on looking up, then she couldn’t watch where she was putting her feet. It would be hopeless if she twisted her ankle too.
The trees on the ground weren’t much easier. The two large ones that had fallen right over were enormous, and the jumble of leaves and branches were impenetrable. Ashley walked around the edges and tried clambering through the branches, but it was very hard to see anything. Micky was right, she thought. There could have been a hundred koalas hidden in there and she wouldn’t have seen any of them.
She heard a ‘Cooee!’ and backed out of the tree. Micky was standing at the foot of a tall, straight gum, pointing up into the branches. Ashley stumbled and slipped across the grass to join her.
‘There’s one,’ Micky said.
Ashley craned her neck and followed the line of Micky’s finger. Eventually she made out a speckled, furry bottom high up in a fork of the tree.
‘That’s one of the males, the boss of the colony,’ Micky said. ‘There’s a female over there in the tallowwood, and another female and a joey in the forest red gum. That’s good. I was worried the whole group might have been wiped out. But there should be a few more.’
Ashley was amazed. She hadn’t seen a single one of the koalas that Micky was pointing out to her. She looked at her aunt with renewed respect.
Mi
cky indicated another one of the fallen trees. ‘You take that one, kid. Just concentrate on one tree and look as hard as you can. I’ll do the other big one. It will be easier to see any that are on the ground. Don’t worry, it’s always hard to spot them in the trees.’
Ashley decided to be methodical in her search of the fallen tree, walking a few steps, peering into the mass of foliage, walking another few steps and doing the same. She worked her way around the whole tree, peering, lifting the smaller branches, trying to see right through the maze of green.
‘No luck?’ Micky walked up behind her. ‘I haven’t found anything either. Perhaps the storm has driven the rest of the group out of their range.’ She shrugged and blinked her eyes. ‘I hate not knowing, but I don’t think there’s much more we can do here. Can you cut some leaf from the top branches that haven’t touched the ground? We may as well take advantage of it, given it’s only fallen a few hours ago. I’ll just sit down for a few minutes while you’re busy, and then we’ll head home.’
Ashley took the secateurs and skirted around the branches to the very top of the tree, which was a mass of leaves. It only took a few moments to cut a bundle of leaf and she tied it together with rope.
‘Come on, kid!’ she heard her aunt call. ‘There’s more rain coming.’
Ashley hung the rope over her shoulder and turned away from the tree. Micky was at the foot of the track already, waiting.
Afterwards, she didn’t know what it was that made her turn around. She remembered a funny cold feeling between her shoulder blades, as if a raindrop had worked its way inside her collar and run down her back. She swivelled her head and looked back at the tree one last time.
Youngster hears the crunch of feet on the leaves and shivers. It’s not the same creature that attacked his mother, but it is huge and heavy, and its footsteps make the earth shake and the leaves rattle. He hunches lower, hoping that it won’t smell him.
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