Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan Read Free Book Online Page B

sea behind it disappeared as the man, the name of whom was Harry Lewis, continued to row. The Gordon ran deep and black beneath him. Deep and black and cold. Harry Lewis looked at the low hills, rainforest-rumped, humps like hunchbacks heading away from the river. The water was dead-flat calm. Not a breeze. The cold in the river was the last of the snow melt from the big freeze the week before. Though the cold rose up from the water through the Huon pine planks of the punt’s flooring, Harry wore only a blue singlet and his denim trousers, his body hot and sweating from the exertion of rowing his punt twenty miles already that day. He had started out early and the sun still lay on his back, as he headed further up the river, further away from civilisation, if that was the right name for Strahan. Harry’s eyes looked to the west, but his arms placed the oars at the beginning of the stroke east. East to west, east to west to east, that was the direction of the oars, as they pulled Harry and the punt further into that vast wild land known only by its geographical description: the South West. He was heading into the rainforested wilderness, up the mighty Gordon River, up its tributary the Franklin River, up the Franklin’s tributary the Jane River, following the paths these serpentine watercourses cut through the green carpeted temperate jungle into the land once called Transylvania, now shown on the government sketch map Harry carries in an oilskin satchel as an empty wilderness designated only as ‘Little Known About This Country’ but which was well enough known to Harry and his workmates.
    Some good pine to be had up there, thought Harry.
    In the ongoing pain of his body I feel Harry’s hurts and sadnesses dissolve into small concerns, dwarfed by the red-hot poker that burnt into the back of his neck, the ripple of soreness that ran across his breast each pull of the oars, the ache in his arse. The river was beginning to run faster. Harry took the punt to the edge of the river and rowed up the slower water at its edges, just far enough out from the banks to avoid the Huon pines and native laurels that blanketed the bank. He liked looking up close at the big trees, at the myrtles leaning at all angles, huge majestic trees with big iridescent fungi growing off them.
    Harry always hated the first hour of rowing, when his body rebelled against the demands being made of it. But after a while it warmed up and then there was something enjoyable about the journey. Imperceptibly the pain transformed into a rhythmic ache that demanded the steady caress of the action of rowing. Each pull of the oars hurt, but Harry’s body revelled in the strength that came with the ache. He could feel each muscle, every sinew in his arms and upper body when the pull began, and harnessing them all together, stretching and tightening them simultaneously, he was able to achieve power in his stroke and the smoothest and easiest of movements to accompany that strength. His mind emptied of thought and worry, and as his body took control of the punt, taking it this way and that to best and most easily get up the fast flowing river, his mind drifted into the hills far away, up the wild King River valley, past the ruins of Teepookana, past the ruins of Crotty, up into the town of Linda and beyond to the mining town of Queenstown with its strange, bald hills - a desert valley that had once been full of rainforest, now denuded of all vegetation by the dense plumes of sulphurous smoke which emanated from the copper mine’s smelters and which, rich in heavy metals, heavy in evil riches, caressed the downwind hills and mountains in an embrace of death. His mind watched the suppurating rivers that ran in garish pus-green and bloodied rills down those sad hills when the rains came (which was near enough to all the time) then wandered back into Queenstown itself and into the Empire Hotel and Gwennie’s eyes, those eyes that had led