slipping through the gaps between the trees.

At first it was because I was angry. It might have looked like I was running away but I wasn’t. I was punching the earth with my feet. The faster I went — the harder my soles hit the ground — the better it felt. Because punching people is, you know, illegal. And wrong. But mostly illegal.

Even then, I might have at least slapped a few of them, only I’m a coward and I’m smart and I’m pretty sure jail sucks.

So. Running. Not even in proper running shoes at first, just whatever I had on, then for a while in a pair of sneakers, almost not too big, I found at the op shop. But the land around my place is stony. Ridges of quartz stick up out of the ground all blocky and angled, ready and more than willing to stub your toes. The land is also: muddy, dusty, covered with thistles and blackberry runners, and littered with bits of broken glass and barbed wire offcuts. That is to say: the earth punched back. It didn’t take kindly to my unwarranted attacks. I slowed down a bit, started to look where I was going.

I had plenty of time, after all. No job, no truck, no prospect of getting either back. And a debt of $250,000, plus the lawyer’s fees, so until the sheriff or cops came for me, I didn’t have much to do but run or walk or whatever.

All the time I was wanting to get online and complain about it, but no: that was over for me. I’d told the truth, I’d got sued, never mind if I was right, and if the mine will poison the creek and if that cow who wrote the environmental effects statement did take money from Ballantyne West Inc — never mind that, what mattered was what the court said. And I didn’t have $250,000, and the neighbours scattered like chickens when things got serious and left me standing there.

All I have is this house and it’s worth hardly that much, so good luck to them. I’ll be long gone before the bulldozers move in.

I fired the lawyer — only racking up more fees — and I stopped opening the notices, so I really don’t know how long I’ve got. Until then I’m just walking around this scrappy bit of land where the trees

trees

grow up out of their own stumps like afterthoughts.

It’s like anything. First, you get to know your way around, then you start to get familiar. From my place going north is a good walk

trees trees

up a gravel road, paddock one side, wooded slope the other. At the top, where the road kicks right is this one tree — some sort of eucalypt, I don’t know the Latin names — placed just right to catch the setting sun. And because it’s so tall, I don’t really look at the leaves, the branches, the crown, just that big wide straight-up, blotchy trunk

trunk trees bark

bark all patterned with green and cream like army camouflage.

Sunset’s the best time up there: streaky-bacon western sky, orange light on the trees, evening star suddenly there in the pale sky. This one night I took some photos, then when I was putting my phone away, I realised: it had gold in it. The phone, I mean. Not much, according to the internet, just a scrap, but how many mobiles are there in the world, all taking photos of sunsets and trees and rivers?

The mine will leach cyanide into the river. They say it won’t but it will. They always say it won’t, whatever it is, right before it does. Or it will, but not much. Or it will, but it won’t make any difference. Or it will make a difference but it won’t damage anything important. And the creek isn’t important. Damaged already, they said, “degraded” was the word.

They got to say what was important. I even hunted for an Indigenous connection but the local Corporation said nope, sorry, maybe once there was, but there’s no stories left for that one and we have enough battles already. So my degraded creek and me, we’re going down. Down like that fake tourist mine when I was a kid: down pointlessly. Down into the dark. Down with someone else in charge.

So I looked at the phone and I thought: it’s the gold. It’s always been the gold. First for jewellery and gold cloth for the churchmen, for big houses back in London, for grog and a stake to buy some sheep. Now for the phones, the circuit boards. And if it’s not the gold, it’s the rare earths (whatever they are) for the batteries for the electric cars that are supposed to save the planet from what we’ve done to it with all the other cars.

I walked home in the partial dark, half-lit from one side by the last glow in the sky, half-lit on the other by the rising moon. I stayed off the road, walked slow between the trees, like they were a maze made out of massive upright trunks. And when I got home, I put the phone in the drawer. I’ve got a landline anyway, a backup for the shitty mobile service. No lawyers have that number.

I sat outside and watched the stars flicker through the ragged gumleaf curtain between the verandah and horizon — on, off, dark, light, winking like a signal — and when I got cold, I said aloud “okay,” and went inside.

Which is why, when I first saw, it, I didn’t have a camera.

the trees are multiple and all the same

their patchwork bark is a show and a disguise

they change from day to day, from week to week, like clouds

I was walking east up the track that’s half flood-gully, half dirt-bike circuit, trying to pick out irregularities in the path, to tell them from mere shadows. And then a movement in the corner of my eye.

When I got home, there was a letter from the lawyers shoved under the car’s wipers. The getting-rid-of-the-letterbox trick turned out to be a dud. I left it there, went out again. The rain was coming. I grabbed my jacket, shoved three logs in the fire, and set my feet in motion on the road.

The second time, it was more than a movement. It was a flash, a set of stripes resolving against a mossy bank, then disappearing. When I got home, the letter was papier mâché. Water one, lawyers zero.

So I stood on the back porch and turned on my phone. The local Facebook group is usually just lost dogs, free quinces, and tradie recommendation requests. I put up a post: anyone lost a Tasmanian tiger? and added a smiley face.

Then I remembered the lawyers, and that I was supposed to be hiding out, and deleted it. I scrolled: no lost chickens, complaints about foxes, sightings. I was stressed. This was the mainland FFS. There never were tigers here.

Still, the next day, I took my phone. I photographed: a tiny starburst native flower, mauve; a puffball flower with a stick for a stem, yellow; a cushion of moss on a chunk of granite, green; half a dozen shards of very old beer bottles, amber; and a few high-vis orange survey tags, new, which I pulled up and dumped in someone else’s recycling bin at the junction.

Day after that, God help me, there was a chase. I was coming back to the house from the hill over the back — not my hill, but unfenced and thistle-and-blackberry-infested, so no harm done — and didn’t see the strange car out the front.

The fucker was knocking on the back door — they’d come around the side, through a gate with a No Entry sign — and just as I was backing off, they saw me. I turned, and then I ran, actually ran. Not dignified or brave but not stupid either. Once I touch those papers, I’m stuffed.

the moss cushion was soft, springy, structured like a sponge

So I ran up and over the hill the way I’d come, circling the crown of it behind the blackberries — yeah yeah a crown of thorns — they were behind me, shouting, but not for long — and walked forty minutes to town and the pub. I’m off the grid, not a complete hermit.

Four hours later, at 9.15 — pub shuts at nine — the headlights of my neighbour’s ute (she doesn’t like me much but she’s good for a lift home) showed the strange car still there — a small black city car with tiny wheels, clean, cold, empty.

I called the cops myself, because not to call them would just look suss. It took a week before they towed the car away. The search turned up two trail bikes, three lost dogs (dead of course) and an illegal mining rig, all down the shafts, but they didn’t find the lawyer. And no, I didn’t do it.

Something happened to my knee in that chase — turned sideways on the embankment coming into town, I think — and I spent the week on the couch with a hotpack, when I wasn’t talking to the police. The sheriff’s letter came again. A cop helpfully brought my mail down from the corner, where it was piling up on the ground where my letter box used to be. She handed it to me, but there was no way for her to know what was in it, and property disputes were below her paygrade anyway, so I chucked it in the fire.

the trees around here wear charcoal skirts, reaching to the ground from five feet up, from the fire five years ago

The cops took my phone: they said they’d bring it back. As if I cared. Once I could walk again attention moved on, to Mr Lawyer’s private life — interesting to say the least — and I hobbled out, not so far this time, just up the hill and into the bush a bit. There’s a big silver log lying at ninety degrees to the slope, a proper bench. It gives a view down the hillside, across the paddock, past the house, the road, the bush on the other side of the valley, the paddocks on the plateau, the sky, the clouds. I lay on it and looked up through the canopy at the rows of cloud, the grey ridges like furrows ploughed.

Then a smell, or a sound, or a prickling on the back of my neck, and I slowly turned my head north, uphill and saw it clear.

It ran, of course. Loped. Sprang. Became a rustle in the dry bark, a sense of movement in the still air.

I lay there some more and thought. No one would believe me. Me, the crazy greenie who was about to lose their house over a degraded creek. Oh, a thylacine? How convenient. How handy, that an extinct beast should pop up just there.

Yeah, right. Yeah, nah.

the bark on the forest floor builds up, in layers with the leaves and twigs, held down by falling limbs, until it burns or the forest floor has risen

The missing lawyer achieved one thing: the others backed right off. I guess I should have been offended, but I could understand it. The survey pegs kept appearing, but there were no more letters, and for a minute there, I thought I’d win, and lose: keep the house and get to watch the mine get dug. Yeah, nah. Not happening.

Because I was going crazy. The tigers weren’t hiding any more.

moss green eyes bruised violet maw whipped cream yellow coat dry stick brown lines after-the-storm grey pads

I sat round at night composing posts for Facebook: “Anyone seen a Thylacine?”

Then I’d realise that rhymed, and backspace, and write: “Anyone spotted a Thylacine?”

Then I’d think: spotted?

I tried: “Anyone striped a Thylacine?” but that was just stupid.

“Anyone striped a stringybark?”

Yeah, that was about right.

Luckily the internet was down and I couldn’t post until morning, when I deleted the whole thing.

blurred streaks of rain down my window

The bush can swallow a person up. That’s what all the old anxieties and settler stories are about. It’s so big and we’re so small. It’s so — piecemeal. Entire logs falling off trees onto your head. Dry gullies becoming drowning rivers. The land itself rising up in clouds of dust, leaping down your throat and choking you: the invader invaded. And all the mineshafts — I. Did. Not. Kill. That. Lawyer. — the wounds we gouged, taking us down and closing over with loose scabs of forest litter arranged to look like solid earth.

What’s solid earth anyway? It’s gold; quartz reef; thin layers of soil deposited through millennia’s hard yakka by the trees.

In the mornings here, the first sun shows on mountains of pink, grey and white cloud over to the south. They look to me like abstracted galahs. The sun touches them, then the scarlet liquidambars, the wet gravel road, the tin roofs. All that, and the fallen-down stone walls, hover for a moment above the real country.

Then the sun rises above the clouds and it all goes grey again, or the rain sets in. We don’t deserve this country (“we” — me, my lot and the lawyers and the miners, who I must admit are also of my type).

We deserve it, what we get.

One day I’ll walk outside and the thylacines will get me. They’ll swarm me, biting off neat pieces with their strange hinged jaws. Or a tree will fall on me, or I’ll step on a snake, or a magpie will pierce my skull in spring, or maybe just an ordinary mineshaft will eat me up.

Does it matter? Perhaps the thylacines will keep coming then, overrun the mine like mice in the old rodent plagues; cleanse the land like microbes and then, when it’s quiet at last, recede into the forest, their stripes merging with the trees, with the strips of bark vertical and multicoloured, with the lines of granite reef poking from the soil, with the rays of the setting sun.