Filed to story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“Move what?”
“The freezer? To higher ground.”
Dom scratches his chin, looking skeptical. “Dunno how we’d manage that. It’s a room, not a box.”
“What about the freezer back up in the lighthouse?”
“It’s too small,” Orly points out. “We’d only fit a fraction of what’s here.”
There is silence.
I look the kid in the face. “We might need to make some tough choices.”
“No,” he says. “Hank already halved them. It can’t be less.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. This place is going under fast.”
“Then fix it!” he demands.
“Hey,” Dom says softly, and Orly bites off whatever he was about to yell at me. He turns on his heel and disappears into an aisle of seeds. The rest of us look at each other helplessly.
We keep going, keep patching, keep pumping. It is, as Dom put it, pushing shit up a hill. And as we work we are all probably thinking the same thing: Orly is the only one who knows enough about the seeds to know which to save, and this is a terrible thing to have to ask him.
I tell myself he’ll be alright. That he has to be. Because he’s a kid, and kids are resilient.
But as night falls and we all slide wearily into bed, I hear the patter of small feet and there is a boy climbing in with me, and he tells me the story of the dinosaur trees. And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.
Orly
There is a tree that once grew, long ago in the time of dinosaurs. Everyone thought this tree had gone extinct two million years ago. Which means that in all human history, not a soul had ever seen this tree. It was gone like the dinosaurs.
And then one spring afternoon in 1994, a park ranger was exploring the rough terrain of a national park in Australia’s New South Wales. This stretch of rugged forest was mostly unexplored, and on this day he saw something no human had seen: the bright-green fernlike foliage and bubbly black bark of the long-extinct dinosaur trees, the Wollemi pines. It was the greatest botanical discovery of the twentieth century. They had been here, secretly, for two million years.
How had they survived so long? Surely only by staying hidden from us, everyone agreed on that. The scientists who were taken to confirm their identity were blindfolded so they’d never know the exact location of the trees and the information couldn’t spread.
Only 10 percent of the Wollemi’s seeds have a viable embryo, and most of these are eaten by cockatoos, so the researchers needed to act quickly, harvesting the seeds they could salvage, studying, preserving, and keeping them safe. The seeds can be found only at the very top of its branches, hidden within cones, and accessed by descending, harnessed, from a helicopter. A kind of extreme sport, a spy mission. Extract the seeds. Save a species.
Fast-forward a few decades. There’s a much bigger danger approaching. A fire, an inferno, destroying everything in its path, plants and animals alike. They’re calling it a “megafire,” they’re saying no fire has ever been as bad. It’s burned twenty-four million hectares and
three billion animals, and it’s headed straight for the last remnants of the dinosaur trees.
Firefighters pull on their helmets and protective gear and they descend from their choppers into the dense burning forest. They make a barrier, they take up positions, and they fight this fire with everything they have. They save one of the world’s oldest and rarest plants.
The Wollemi’s location is never revealed to the public, even throughout this incredible mission and the worldwide joy of the rescue.
Now the seeds we have of the
Wollemia nobilis sit in aisle G, row 12, and they are not on Hank’s list.
Rowan
The ship may not arrive on the exact day it is due, but apparently it’s usually only a day or so off on either side. Which means we have about a fortnight remaining on this island, and though we should all be joyful at the thought of escape, at the thought of this exhausting, stressful work coming to an end, we trudge through our days and hours like we are marching to our funerals. Dom and Fen
still haven’t spoken, and I don’t know what will become of this family once we leave the island. Nor if I will ever see them again.
Which is exactly why I’m throwing a dinner party.
I send them all upstairs to their rooms while I do the cooking; they will hopefully take the opportunity for a nap. It takes me a few hours to get the last items in the oven and then I duck into the bathroom with the clippers. I haven’t touched my hair since coming to Shearwater; this is well overdue. I set the blades and start shaving, working from front to back.
Fen appears in the open doorway, watching silently.
“Dinner won’t be long,” I tell her.
She doesn’t speak until I’ve finished and am cleaning up the fallen hair. “I want to feel lighter,” she says softly.
I straighten, meeting her eyes in the mirror. I smile.
The thick, salty hair falls to the ground in heavy chunks. It is much more satisfying than shaving my own short hair. Fen’s perched on a stool before me, studiously not looking at her reflection, but down at her hands.
“I think it’s time for you to move back to the lighthouse,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “He doesn’t want me here.”
“He’s grieving, but he’ll get over it.”
“We were broken even before the bonfire.”
“No you weren’t,” I say. “There’s shit to grapple with, I’m sure.”
“You don’t understand,” she says. “He won’t talk to me. When he looks at me he sees something damaged.”
I don’t ask what happened. If either of them wanted me to know they would have told me. Instead I find her eyes in the mirror. “No, kid. That’s what you’re frightened he’ll see.”
When all her long hair lies in tendrils on the floor, I use the clippers to tidy the edges, but I don’t linger too long. I can touch anything up tomorrow; it’s getting late, and we need to eat.
“Okay,” I say.
Fen takes a breath, and looks at herself. She gasps. Hands fly to cover her mouth. She looks every bit as wild as she used to, only now she looks fierce, too, and sleek. I wait, unsure if this reaction is good or bad. But she turns and hugs me tightly.