The campsite must feel vast, mysterious, and full of potential to her. Ronnie let herself imagine she didn’t know where the fences were. She had chosen a nice spot. They could spend years exploring nooks and crannies, mossy rocks and shaded glens along the serpentine creek. Universe in a nutshell.
She loved that the creek was hers now, as much as anyone’s, and that it would be Rainbow’s. It felt like a safe place here. Rainbow would grow up with roots to the land, not homeless and drifting from sheep station to sheep station.
This was only temporary, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t real. It was good enough until she built a house on higher ground.
Wet from a dip in the creek and half-dressed, hair down, she nursed a cup of tea. As she returned her toothbrush to the truck, she noticed the manilla envelope from her mum sticking out of a bag of important papers she had rescued from the flooded donga. Impulsively, she ripped it open.
It was empty.
When she shook the manilla envelope a business card fell out.
Matilda-Jane Peterson
Battlers’ Rattler etc.
Ronnie hesitated for a moment, then typed the number into her phone. Her finger hovered over the call icon.
Talking to her mother always made her feel like shit, but it had been a long time, and people changed.
She could press call. Try again. Maybe it wouldn’t be disappointing.
What was the worst that could happen? Homophobic slurs? Ableist and racist language? Her decision became easier.
Not yet. Maybe after she finished building the barn, when things were more solid. She slid the phone back into her pocket.
That door would be open when she was ready.
At the moment, Rainbow wanted to watch cranes.
First, there was something they needed to do. They took a can of white paint up to the top of their drive, where they wrote BRUM’S on the giant boulder.
In the horse barn at Upsend Downs, under the mops and brooms, they returned the half-empty can of white paint.
Rainbow perched on her shoulders, legs dangling. Both of them silently stared through binoculars out past land covered in sheep, at enormous grey Sarus cranes. The birds looked ancient and eternal—guardians of the lake—elephants of the avian family. When they talked to each other they made a strange warbling rubber sound.
“I liked what you said last time about it sounding like the lake was laughing,” Ronnie said.
Rainbow was tall for her age, but her feet still fit comfortably in Ronnie’s armpits. Human backpack. Full-grown, she would tap out at Ronnie’s chin.
Through the binos Ronnie spotted a mother crane with chicks weaving around her feet. “Look, chicks!”
A long silence, calibration, like a game of battleship. Ronnie held the cranes in her line of sight. “Underneath the willow tree that looks like a lima bean, just in front of the patch of sunlight, two thumbs left of the dead tree stump…”
“Got it. Aww… They’re so cute!” Rainbow said.
Two little grey fluffballs pecked at the grass, looking for seeds. Wrong time of year for seeds. Ronnie wondered if they ate grass. What did chicks eat? Surely they didn’t drink milk?
“What do chicks eat, Gumball?”
Rainbow hummed. “Bugs and grain.”
“Their parents don’t feed them?”
“Not once they’ve left the nest.”
“Where do they nest?”
“Marshes. Their nests can be two metres in diameter and a metre high.”
