The Memory Tree

by Jennifer Scoullar

  Sarah reached behind her back and extracted a spanner.

  ‘Thanks.’ Matt pitched it over the back seat. ‘I was looking for that.’

  Taking Sarah on a tour of Binburra’s trapping sites had been Penny’s idea. ‘She’s doing so much for us. Genetically mapping our devils. Revolutionising our entire breeding program. The least we can do is show her around.’ Matt hadn’t argued. He’d been avoiding people lately, keeping to himself, but in Sarah’s case he’d make an exception. They owed her big time. Her work could save the entire species.

  He switched on the radio for some music, drove through a small strip of shops, the main street of Hills End, and turned up Binburra Road. Farms slipped by. Sheep dotted the grassy slopes below looming forest ridges. They passed a pair of wrought iron gates with the name Canterbury Downs inset in ornate lettering. Bronze eagles crouched atop the gateposts, which were flanked by massive bluestone walls.

  ‘What an impressive property,’ said Sarah, stretching her long, tanned legs. ‘Do you know who lives there?’

  Matt didn’t answer, but it seemed Sarah was not the type to be easily ignored.

  She turned down the radio. ‘I said, do you know—’

  ‘It’s Fraser Abbott’s place.’

  ‘Fraser Abbott … he’s your father, right? Is that where you grew up?’

  ‘We spent a lot of time there when I was a kid. Dad’s way of mixing business with pleasure. He owned the Hills End mine and timber operations. Still does.’

  ‘And what about your mother?’

  Did he really want to get into this with her? Matt glanced across at Sarah. Something in her open, expectant expression loosened his tongue. ‘Mum loved that place, but after she died we stopped coming.’ Sarah fell silent. It always happened when people found out. They were curious, but thought they shouldn’t ask. Usually that suited him just fine, but Matt suddenly felt like talking. He’d been cooped up inside his own head for way too long. ‘Mum died in a car accident when I was twelve, along with my twin sisters. Fraser was driving.’

  ‘How awful,’ said Sarah. ‘What’s your mum’s name?’

  Her question took Matt by surprise. Nobody ever asked him that. ‘Charlotte. My mother’s name is Charlotte.’ It felt good to say it out loud after all this time. ‘And my sisters? Christy and Cathy.’ He gave Sarah a grateful sideways smile. She was easy to talk to, this Yank.

  Matt took a left turn past the main entrance to Binburra Park. Penny was in there. He stopped the jeep, gripped by a sudden desire to see her, talk to her – confide in her. The urge was never very far away. It had come upon him that morning at dawn as he’d risen and dressed. He’d stood statute-still for minutes in their bedroom, wrestling with his conscience, caught between wanting to share his secret, and wanting to let Penny sleep. Watching the soft rise and fall of her breath, the curve of her throat, the curl of her lashes. How very beautiful she was – beautiful inside and out. How little he deserved her. He’d kissed her softly on her freckled cheek and escaped into the bright morning.

  ‘Matt, what’s wrong?’

  As Sarah touched his arm, the urge to see Penny subsided. Now wasn’t the time. She’d be taking school groups through the hospital ward to show them devils injured by cars. He was well out of it.

  * * *

  An hour passed. The road ran between blue gum canopies under a narrow ribbon of sky. It grew rougher and rougher as they climbed, causing the truck to pitch and slide. An iron rim of distant cliffs rose up ahead. Sarah seemed content to stare out the window, but she’d see no panorama. Trees hugged them too close, obscuring the view.

  They were getting close now, close to where it had happened. Matt’s knuckles showed white on the wheel and he swallowed hard, bracing himself for that sick, swooping feeling in his stomach. He tried to concentrate on driving, working hard to coax the vehicle up the steep, rutted track.

  ‘Not much wildlife,’ said Sarah.

  Matt barely heard her. He was reliving that fateful night a month ago. Going over and over what he was doing, what he was thinking, in the seconds before the young thylacine died. He’d been listening to music. Cold Play. Viva La Vida. A song about a fall from grace. He liked to sing along to the song, but he didn’t know all the words and was focused on the lyrics instead of the road. Is that what happened? Theo – the name he’d given the thylacine – died because he couldn’t remember the words of a damned song? Matt thumped the steering wheel, alarming Sarah. She looked at him for an explanation, but he said nothing so she went back to staring out the window.

  ‘Stop,’ said Sarah. ‘Is that a devil?’

  Matt slammed on the brakes. He ran to a dark shape lying beside the road. Flies buzzed about. Congealed blood caked the animal’s coat and ran in a line from its mouth. He examined the ear-tagged devil more closely – an all-black male, dead less than twenty-four hours by the look of him. Matt felt sick. Was this Lazarus?

  He fetched his scanner with a sinking heart, hoping he was wrong, but the animal’s microchip told the tale. Matt swore, feeling the prick of tears and a stomach-churning sense of déjà vu. This part of the park was closed to the public. Nobody else had access. He must have hit Lazarus last night on his way home from setting the camera traps. Matt examined his muzzle – healthy, with no deformity. If he was going to kill devils, couldn’t he at least pick on diseased ones? Thank goodness it was a male. He didn’t know how he or Penny would cope if he’d killed a female with pouch young.

  ‘So sad.’ Sarah squatted down for a closer look.

  Matt gazed at the dead devil. In flashback he saw a bleeding Theo instead. The sense of loss was overwhelming.

  ‘Who could have done this?’ asked Sarah. ‘Don’t only park staff came up here?’

  ‘It was me.’ Matt could hear the pain, the tremor in his own voice. He fetched a specimen bag from the jeep and placed the stiff corpse inside. Then he bent over the bonnet, closed his eyes and clasped his hands behind his neck.

  Sarah touched his shoulder, her fingers softly stroking. ‘This wasn’t your fault. It was an accident.’

  Was it an accident though? Or was it criminal carelessness? He hadn’t even noticed hitting the poor little devil. With first aid and a trip to Binburra’s hospital, Lazarus might have been saved. Instead he’d bled to death on a lonely roadside, while Matt kept driving down the mountain.

  How would he tell Penny? How could she forgive him? Lazarus carried precious genes from a rare, almost extinct west coast population. They’d hoped he might inject some desperately needed hybrid vigour into Binburra’s devil colony. Penny’s Uncle Ray had delivered Lazarus to their door last summer. He’d hit the wild devil with his log truck in the Tarkine and driven all day to bring it to Binburra. Matt hadn’t realised Ray could be so sentimental. That bristly old bastard had taken a real shine to his rescued devil, bringing him marrow bones for treats while he recovered from his injuries and naming him Lazarus. Ray had never taken a shine to Matt, though, even at the best of times. Matt could only imagine what he’d say now.

  ‘Matt?’ asked Sarah. ‘Are you okay?’

  Her soothing fingers rubbed his shoulders. Unexpectedly, she ran her hand down his back. Matt let it linger for a second before standing upright. He was supposed to take Sarah to the main research sites. He was supposed to spend the day explaining how they monitored traps and recorded data, but he was too upset – too heavy with guilt and grief. He’d been living in a pressure cooker of his own making for weeks now, and Lazarus’s death was the final straw. What he needed was time out, a chance to think things through, gain some perspective. What he needed was some peace, and he knew just where to find it. ‘Do you mind a change of plans?’

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Sarah simply.

  ‘Loongana Warrawong,’ said Matt. ‘Tiger Pass.’

  The road narrowed and narrowed again. Bracken and saplings punched through the track. Flattened by the jeep, they sprang back up behind, resilient, reclaiming the road. The countr
y grew wilder, more rugged. Tall eucalypt forests gave way to sassafras, beech and leatherwood. The morning was cold and unnaturally calm. No wind tossed the trees or crumpled the light coverlet of cloud. They saw no bird or animal. The stiff plastic bag holding Lazarus crackled in the back, a constant reminder of his folly.

  They rounded increasingly precarious hairpin bends, as the jeep climbed and climbed. An hour passed without a word. Somehow it wasn’t awkward, being silent with Sarah. Now she’d get her view. Each twist of the road revealed spectacular scenes of the range, in turn blanketed by forest or scarred by jagged bluffs. The once-distant granite cliffs loomed in the windscreen.

  Matt parked the jeep when the road ran out and they walked between high stone walls into a rocky gorge. Fat little wallabies bounced across their path. The air here was thick with a chorus of birdsong – magpie, butcherbird and currawong. Bright parrots foraged in treetops, and butterflies swarmed on swathes of wildflowers. The bush pulsed with life.

  Sarah gazed around, her expression one of pure delight. ‘Now this is more like it.’

  Matt smiled. ‘It helps to get out of the car.’ Sarah made a face. Abruptly, he grabbed her arm. ‘Don’t move.’

  Sarah froze mid-step. ‘What is it? A snake?’

  Matt pointed to the path ahead. ‘See there?’

  Sarah peered at the ground. ‘There’s nothing,’ she said at last.

  ‘It’s not what you look at,’ said Matt. ‘It’s what you see.’ He crouched down, indicating that she should do the same.

  ‘Caladenia anthracina. The black-tipped spider orchid.’ He pointed out a fragile finger-high purple and white flower. It poked bravely through the leaf litter, with petals like tiny striped tuxedo tails. Matt lay prone on the ground for a closer look and beckoned for Sarah to join him. She hesitated, then lay down flat beside him.

  ‘There aren’t leeches, are there?’ she asked, uncertainly. ‘I heard there were leeches.’ Her body, from hip to shoulder, pressed lightly against him.

  ‘Shh.’ A tiny wasp zigzagged its way to the delicate bloom, grasped it with its legs, and thrust its abdomen in and out of the flower’s heart. ‘Darwin’s beautiful contrivance,’ Matt whispered. ‘The orchid mimics one specific species of female thynnine wasp. Frustrated males pollinate the flowers, whose seeds then germinate in symbiosis with one specific local soil fungus. These plants have evolved together with this particular place.’ He breathed a long sigh. ‘Perfect, isn’t it?’

  The unsuspecting wasp flew away and Matt helped Sarah to her feet.

  ‘Is that orchid endangered?’ she asked.

  ‘Critically.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you make some sort of official report?’

  ‘And tell the world? No chance. These spider orchids have lived here quite happily since dinosaurs roamed the earth. They don’t need our interference. They need to to be left alone.’

  Sarah frowned and began to argue the point. He put a forefinger to his lips. ‘Now, there’s something you don’t see every day.’ He pointed into the bushes. A line of spiny little echidnas trundled along, nose to tail. There must have been ten of them.

  ‘What on earth?’

  ‘That,’ said Matt, ‘is an echidna love train. A female leads the way. The rest are poor lovelorn males, hoping she’ll take pity on them. It might take six weeks before she agrees to group sex. Only the strongest, most persistent males get lucky.’

  They watched the strange procession waddle off into the scrub. Matt brushed a beetle from Sarah’s hair as a long-legged bird with red eyes and slate grey wings stalked across their path.

  ‘It looks like an overgrown chicken,’ laughed Sarah.

  Half a dozen more of the birds scooted past, one followed by fluffy black chicks. ‘Tasmanian native hens,’ said Matt. ‘Known locally as turbo-chooks. That bird with the chicks? She’s the single female in the group. Native hens are polyandrous.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘You know your Latin. Poly – many. Andro – men. The girls have harems of husbands.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Sarah. A laggard sprinted past, uttering a high, see-sawing alarm call. ‘Tasmanian females seem very well provided for.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Matt, feeling lighter than he had in weeks. ‘I have something to show you.’

  ‘The mind boggles.’

  * * *

  He led Sarah down an overgrown path. They followed a fast-flowing stream punctuated by pools and fringed with ferns. The cliffs of Tiger Pass rose on either side, dark and forbidding, into a sky of broken blue. Small caves peppered the weathered parallel walls of stone. Ancient rainforest trees reached for the sun. Walking into the pass was like walking back in time.

  After half an hour they came to the head of the gorge. The stream flowed even faster here, rushing through the rocks in a mini-maelstrom. Matt took Sarah’s hand as they scrambled onto a rocky ledge above the water. Tiger Pass was really a little hanging valley, carved out by long-vanished glaciers and suspended high above a vast forest basin. The creek spilled over in an unbroken crystal band, shattering into rainbow shards of spray when it broke on boulders hundreds of metres below.

  Matt gazed skywards, imagining a pair of peregrines soaring in the empty blue sky. This was the place where he’d planned to release Sooty and Sweep. They should be here. He ached with missing them.

  ‘Ever been to the Grand Canyon?’ Sarah’s voice was a whisper. ‘It’s the same feeling – kind of holy.’ She moved closer to the brink.

  Matt took her arm, edged her back. ‘Gaze not too long into the abyss …’

  ‘Lest the abyss gaze into thee,’ she answered.

  Matt inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘Not many people know that quote.’

  She stared at the view a while longer. ‘How do you get down to the valley?’

  ‘You don’t,’ said Matt. ‘Not without a helicopter. Five years ago we scraped together funding for one and set traps. Hoped to find some disease-free devils.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We didn’t catch a single devil and the state withdrew our grant. Either there are none down there, or they’re unusually suspicious of carcass baits.’

  ‘And you’ve never been back?’

  Matt gazed longingly after the cascading water. ‘Legend says there’s a way down, but if there is, Penny and I have never found it. Lord knows we’ve tried.’ Matt winced at the we. He and Penny didn’t feel like a we at the moment.

  ‘Working out here, being part of all this … you must really love your job.’

  ‘I don’t have to wear a tie,’ said Matt. ‘And it’s a living.’ He indicated the magnificent scene before them with a wide-armed flourish. ‘A living in the true sense of the word. The job doesn’t pay much and the park gets next to no funding, but that suits me. It means they won’t fix the roads.’

  ‘But you’re so far away from everything.’

  ‘The way I see it, everything’s right here.’

  ‘What exactly do you do?’ she asked.

  ‘Take my time. Watch the clouds.’

  ‘When you’re not watching clouds.’

  ‘Watch for idiots with trail bikes and four-wheel-drives tearing up the place. Watch for weeds, poachers, lost tourists.’

  ‘I bet you don’t like tourists.’

  ‘They’re all right, some of them, the ones who remember that their legs work. You’d need a crowbar to get others out of their cars.’ He tossed a pebble into space. ‘Last week I lost it with this couple taking photos through their windscreen. “Get out,” I said. “Get those kids out of the car. Let them run around for Christ’s sake. Let them loose.”

  ‘“Aren’t there snakes?” That’s what the woman said to me. “Of course there are snakes,” I said. “And bull ants, and leeches. But there’s also a creek and a mountain and a ten thousand-year-old-forest. There are sassafras leaves to chew and leatherwood flowers to smell and stones to skip on the river. There’s mud to squelch between your toes and rocks t
o climb and birds to spot. There’s the cleanest air in the world to breath, a whole frigging wilderness to explore – and you won’t even wind down your window.”’

  ‘You said that?’ Sarah’s eyes were wide.

  ‘Something like it.’

  They looked at each other and burst out laughing.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘They took off. I’ll probably get a complaint.’

  ‘I asked you if there were leeches,’ said Sarah, with mock indignation. Matt grinned and helped her down from the ledge.

  As they walked back along the track, Sarah stopped to peer into several small caves.

  Matt pointed up ahead to a big rocky opening at the foot of a massive Huon pine. ‘We can go into that one.’ He ducked his head, flicked on his torch and followed Sarah into the gloom. After a few metres she screamed and lashed out, as if fighting an invisible foe.

  ‘Stay still. You’ll hurt her.’ Matt gently pinned Sarah’s arms to her sides, then carefully unwrapped the transparent sheet of web, more than a metre in diameter, from her upper body. He accidentally brushed her breasts, which were small and firm beneath his fingers. ‘There she is,’ he murmured, coaxing an enormous spindly spider onto his hand. It was as big as his palm. ‘Hickmania troglodytes, the Tasmanian cave spider.’ Sarah shrank back. ‘A relict species dating all the way back to Gondwanaland. Her closest relatives are in South America. They can live for decades.’ He brought the spider close to his face. ‘You could be as old as we are, darling.’

  ‘How can you tell it’s a female?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Her size, for one thing, and the fact that she’s guarding this.’ He pointed out a snow-white pear-shaped egg sac, suspended in a stony crevice by a silken thread.

  ‘I suppose she has some strange sexual predilection as well?’ said Sarah.

  ‘Good guess. Her mating is highly ritualised. The smaller, weaker male courts her for hours, rhythmically plucking her web and stroking her into a kind of trance. The aim is to grip her head in a special kink on his legs and jam her jaws apart so he can safely have sex. Venom drips from her fangs the whole time they’re doing it.’