The Untold by Courtney Collins Page A

creatures—rock wallaby, quoll. Here, they did not flee. They were as still as rocks as they watched her.
    She and Houdini wound farther up the mountain, crossing granite bands, observing that their ledges curved like cupping hands and contained clear pools of water from which she and Houdini drank. When she reached a large saddle of the range she dismounted and led him through. Sweeping over them was an arch of granite boulders and walking through she felt a reverence such as she had never felt.
    She navigated her way by the sun, and where the forest grew so dense that it would not let the light in, there were plants on the ground that turned their heads to face the sun’s direction.
    At night, she took her cue from those same plants and her limbs relaxed and her head turned down against her own chest and sheslept an exhausted sleep, and when the sun rose again she traveled with the compass of the shadow of the mountain.
    Her peace did not last.
    She was leading Houdini over a high ridgeline when her remorse caught up with her suddenly. In front of her, a spectacular basalt scarp revealed the stretched necks and seismic heads of mother, father and child, the same faces Jack Brown had first pointed out to her from a far, far distance. It pained her to see them and feel that he should be beside her and between them there could have been a child, his or even Fitz’s. And there was no escaping it, not the longing nor its looming and ancient reminder, its head lifted up against the sky.
    She missed that longed-for life as if it had actually happened—as if she and Jack Brown had won their freedom, as if I were born in perfect time and strong. Days and nights she had allowed herself to imagine the simple, gentle happiness of our life together. But it did not happen. Now it shadowed her like any other myth.
    She rode or walked or scraped along, leading Houdini, sometimes Houdini leading her. It was as if her eyes turned in, seeking some clue, something that in the spit and struggle of living she had missed as to how things could have been different.
    Her sleep was taken up with nightmares of Fitz, so day and night she was all but ricocheting off the walls of her past and the feeling was like prison but now the prison was herself. She pushed herself and Houdini up more treacherous slopes. Houdini stepped dutifully behind her, though he was slipping more and more. She had no appetite but was reminded to graze when he did, feedingon fern fronds that grew between the exposed roots of trees. Still, she was growing ragged.
    When she found herself kneeling against a slope and surrounded by sharp-edged rocks, it seemed to her that if she had spewed out her insides that is how they would look.

T he first time Jack Brown rode into Fitz’s forest was the first time he saw my mother.
    Jack Brown had ridden his horse along the southbound track as the letter from Fitz instructed. The track had wound him through an open paddock and then into the forest, alongside the river. He moved through the forest till he heard the reverberating sound of kangaroos, their bounding noise traveling from every direction. Jack Brown pulled up his horse and halted on the track. He had heard stories of mobs attacking lone riders, although he had never seen it himself.
    He lay down along the neck of his horse and a huge gray buck appeared on the track, then a dozen or so smaller roos bounded past. They traveled in single file, following the gray buck down to the river, clearing the fence line one at a time. Jack Brown had seen them traveling in mobs before, mainly across open fields, but there was something impressive about the agile way they negotiated the thick bushland without losing their order. He watched them until they reached the river and it was then that Jack Brown saw my mother, sitting on a rock ledge. She was so still he might not have seen her camouflaged against the rock if she had not sensed him near and turned around.
    Who’s