Arnott Limberlost

Main
ISBN: 978-1-83895-681-3
Verlag: Atlantic Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 234 Seiten

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2023 'Arnott has an eye and an ear for description that can elevate otherwise quiet moments to something genuinely transcendent... A luminously told, whole-life story of a young boy discovering how to be his own man.' Guardian Ned West dreams of sailing across the river on a boat of his very own. To Ned, a boat means freedom - the fresh open water, squid-rich reefs, fires on private beaches - a far cry from life on Limberlost, the family farm, where his father worries and grieves for Ned's older brothers. They're away fighting in a ruthless and distant war, becoming men on the battlefield, while Ned - too young to enlist - roams the land in search of rabbits to shoot, selling their pelts to fund his secret boat ambitions. But as the seasons pass and Ned grows up, real life gets in the way. Ned falls for Callie, the tough, capable sister of his best friend, and together they learn the lessons of love, loss, and hardship. When a storm decimates the Limberlost crop and shakes the orchard's future, Ned must decide what to protect: his childhood dreams, or the people and the land that surround him... At turns tender and vicious, Limberlost is a tale of the masculinities we inherit, the limits of ownership and understanding, and the teeming, vibrant wonders of growing up. Told in spellbinding, folkloric spirit, this is an unforgettable love letter to the richness of the natural world from a writer of rare talent.

Robbie Arnott is the author of the novel Flames, which won the Margaret Scott Prize, was short-listed for the Victorian Premier's Literary Prize for Fiction and was long-listed for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and The Rain Heron, which won the Age Book of the Year 2021 and was shortlisted for Miles Franklin Literary Award. He has been named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. He lives in Tasmania.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Arnott, Robbie

Leseproben

4

IN THE WEEK that followed his fruitless fishing trip with Jackbird, Ned killed fourteen rabbits—by far his biggest haul of the season. He hadn’t done anything all that different, although he’d started getting up earlier, often before sunrise, waiting in the darkness until the world warmed and the rabbits twitched out into the open. He learned to let his pulse settle before squeezing the trigger, instead of rushing to fire as soon as they revealed themselves. As his accuracy improved he began to know the shape each rabbit would make in death, just from how they sat on the grass. In the moment before he fired, he saw a premonition of the form the rabbit would fling into when its flesh caught his bullet—snapping and collapsing into stillness.

His traps were more successful too. He’d learned to distinguish between earth that was bare due to a lack of moisture and soil that had been scraped by a rabbit squirming under a fence. He began targeting these under-fence trails, setting traps in the centre of the dirt and concealing them with scatterings of dry grass. Only a few yielded rabbits, but the ones that didn’t were usually triggered. Ned scored these near-catches as ties, and reset each trap with minor variations.

He enjoyed the game of trapping, of finding the runs and outsmarting the animals. But he did not like treading through purple dawns to find rabbits still living in his traps, their legs rent, blood matting their fur, primitive terror vibrating off their whiskers. Usually they were dead, even if the jaws hadn’t closed around their necks or heads; usually the trauma of the trapping would halt the thump of their hearts. But on those mornings where he found them alive, Ned felt a yellow-green surge in his stomach, and couldn’t rush to kill them quickly enough. They were feral, he reminded himself, as he held their ruined bodies firm and placed a boot over their necks. They were pests. The only true use they had was to serve in death as slouch hats. And yet he felt a huge relief when they ceased shivering under his foot. In these moments he would look away from the rabbit to the sky, the glowing trees, the wakening river, as if the tranquillity of the orchard could remove him from what he’d done.

Each morning after breakfast he’d skin the rabbits on an old grey stump. With practice he’d reduced the mistakes he made with each pelt, as well as the time it took to remove them. First he’d take his knife to the hock joints, cutting through the tendons, before twisting off the paws. Then he’d make a small slice into the belly fur, making sure his blade did not slip into the flesh. From here he wriggled his fingers into the aperture and began working the skin from the muscle, freeing the stomach, sliding off the back, reversing both sets of legs through the holes where he’d removed the feet.

He did this carefully, meticulously, at all times remaining conscious of the shape and quality of the pelt. The only roughness came at the end of the process, when the final connection left between the fur and the flesh was at the neck. With a sharp yank he’d pull the pelt over the head, ripping it free. The carcass was left port-ruby and naked. The only hair remaining on the body was around its hacked hocks and on its now huge-seeming head.

Ned had learned skinning from Toby, who had learned it from Bill, who never revealed where he learned anything. While he was showing Ned where to make the incision in the belly, Toby had claimed that Bill could skin a rabbit without a knife.

‘No idea how he does it,’ Toby had said, a confused smile on his face. ‘I tried figuring it out, but it happens so fast. Little twists, a pop, a rip, and the pelt’s off. No blade in his hand.’

~

Towards the end of that bountiful week Ned removed a skin with such precision and artfulness that he felt the need to show his father, and to ask him something. It was mid-morning. He found his father in the orchard, standing before a juvenile apple tree. As Ned approached he stretched the pelt over his palms, showing his father the untorn skin, the bloodless fur. The neatness of the thing. But his father didn’t appear to notice him. He gazed at the tree, eyes unfocused, until something caught his attention in the sky and he snapped his head up to stare at a cloud, his mouth moving, emitting no sounds.

Ned waited for a minute. When nothing changed he wandered back to his stump and knife.

Later in the day his father came to find him. He praised the skin he’d found hanging in the apple shed, along with the others Ned had harvested that week, and said that it would be a shame to let them spoil in the heat. He told Ned that he’d take him into town so he could sell them.

‘I have some things to take care of as well. We’ll go Tuesday.’

Ned nodded. He tried to remember the weather forecast for the days before Tuesday, tried to calculate how many skins he might add to his collection by then. His father turned to leave. As he began walking away Ned remembered what he’d wanted to ask the old man that morning.

‘Toby said Bill could take a skin off without a knife.’

His father stopped. ‘You don’t want to do that. Not if you want to sell the fur. Looks flash, but it leaves the pelt raggedy, all torn up. Only good if you’re in a hurry. If you need to feed the dogs before they rip into a lamb. You stick to the way you’re doing it. You’re doing it right.’

‘But—’

‘But what? What’s all this butting—you meet a goat?’

‘Sorry. But could he do it?’

His father turned to the orchard. Breathed at the trees. ‘Who do you think taught him?’

~

The day before the trip to town, Ned’s sister Maggie returned to Limberlost. She had been staying with a distant aunt in Hobart, training to be a teacher. The plan had been for her to spend the whole summer down south, taking extra courses, shortening the time it would take to gain her certificate. But circumstances had changed. Ned didn’t know what circumstances, or how; he only learned from his father that Maggie was coming home the day before she arrived. And then there she was, marching down the gravel driveway, untroubled by the weight of her case.

By the time she’d eaten and washed, it was late. Ned was going to talk to her, but she seemed tired, and although she appeared pleased to see him, he read into her weariness that a conversation would only tire her further. After taking her case to her room he said goodnight.

As he lay in his bed he could hear her talking with his father, but he did not strain to make out the exchange. She was the eldest of the four siblings, the only one with a clear memory of their mother. It made sense for the two of them to talk, as they’d always done.

~

The next morning Ned found Maggie crouching by the chicken coop. He tried to figure out what she was doing, tried to think of something to say. He saw her fingers dip beneath the wire mesh, her face shifting with discovery.

Her hand stopped on a bare scratch of earth. Furrows were traced into the dirt, and the wire above was frayed and loose. She wedged her hand into the gap and, as she grimaced at the metal raking her skin, Ned must have moved or made an involuntary sound. Maggie glanced up. An expression passed over her face—a look somewhere between annoyance and humour. Ned raised a palm, words evading him.

Sometimes the love he felt for his sister flared so bright within him that he became uncommonly emotional—he’d feel an urge to show her his favourite knife, or to gabble at her without having anything to say. It had always been like this, even before she’d left for the capital, although he’d been too young to know her properly, and Maggie had been focused on school.

Now he felt it again. He also felt powerfully aware that he was the only brother she had left on the orchard. He had to make her laugh like Toby had, had to give her the quiet companionship Bill had somehow provided. He had to distract her from how far away they were. These swells of duty rose within him alongside his unpredictable pulses of love, and yet it was all he could do to stand before her, his palm raised, his mouth and mind a mess.

She withdrew her hand from the coop and stood up, brushing the dirt from her knees. ‘Something’s been at this,’ she said.

‘What was it?’

Maggie toed the scrape of dirt. ‘I don’t know. Cat, maybe. A devil.’

‘Did it get in?’

‘Not yet.’

She began walking around the rest of the enclosure. The chickens clucked at her from within the wire, venturing to peck at the gap she’d been investigating. Ned remembered what Jackbird had said about his sister and her shotgun.

‘Could’ve been a hawk.’

Maggie looked up. ‘A hawk.’

Ned avoided her eyes. ‘A hawk’s been after the chickens next door. Could be the same one.’

Maggie pointed at the scratched earth. ‘You think a hawk landed here, grew paws and tried to dig its way in?’

‘Well. No.’

‘Hawks don’t dig, oh great hunter. They swoop.’

She smiled, not cruelly, but still it twisted Ned’s airways. He felt stupid and ashamed. He was going to argue, or he wasn’t. He was going to push past her and see if he could demonstrate that the lines in the dirt could have just as...