Hope's Road by Margareta Osborn Read Free Book Online Page A

bark into the old copper. The water was just starting to boil nicely and turning an inky black. Perfect. He threw in the new Lanes dog-traps the Departmental blokes had dropped in the other day. The Conservation mob constantly kept changing the design of the traps he was to use, so it was an ongoing thing, making the traps smell as much a part of the environment as he could. A dog’s sense of smell was one hundred times that of a human and they were damn smart. Some of the old blokes smoked their traps; others made a fire with gumtree leaves and dumped the traps in it. Some just rubbed the metal in dirt and found that worked. He preferred to use a mixture of methods. The wattle bark for some traps and just plain old soil for others.
    It was a perfect day up here on his hill, in the bush. He didn’t have anyone to annoy him and he liked it like that. He wasn’t certain where Billy was but suspected he was floating around spying on someone. Old Joe or the McCauley girl down the bottom of the hill. Or maybe even watching him? Travis let out a sigh. His son, with his big eyes so like Katrina’s. He was finding himself getting more and more annoyed with the kid when he wouldn’t shut up. Sometimes it’d just become easier to ignore him. Trav liked his peace. Liked to be in his own head.
    But now he was paying the price: an ten-year-old who sometimes glanced at him like a scared dog about to dodge a kick. The look in Billy’s eyes this morning . . . Trav winced, remembering. It reminded him of how he used to look at his own father. It was obviously one thing to have a son, but another entirely to be a dad.
    It was all still so new, this living with Billy again. Maybe he shouldn’t have shipped the kid off to his grandmother so young? Trav threw another log onto the fire as he ruminated. But there really wasn’t much else he could’ve done, was there? Well, except leave his job on the dog fence, and he hadn’t wanted to do that. Surely it had been better for the kid to be brought up in Burra, go to school with other kids, rather than being out in the scrub? Billy had seemed happy enough with Diane Hunter and Trav had tried to visit when he could. It had all been working out fine until his mother had had her stroke. Life’s a bastard, thought Trav, as he pictured his once active but now incapacitated mother.
    Diane had done a good job with his son. He owed her a lot and that’s why he’d brought her back to Lake Grace and why they were here at Belaren, although he had to admit the boy seemed to relish it too. The kid’s bush skills were second to none and that had really surprised him. Like now, even he wouldn’t know if Billy was watching him. He didn’t know where it’d come from, this desire to be at one with the bush, especially since the boy had been living in town for the last few years. He wondered if it was a quirk of genetics, something inherently born to the males in their family? He couldn’t see his own father consciously imparting such knowledge even though he’d been a dog trapper too.
    His father was more likely to pit himself against the elements and see who could win. Take a swig on a bottle whenever he damned well pleased and pretend he didn’t have a family to go home to. He’d been an old bastard, Jack Hunter. Trav hadn’t realised how different his childhood had been until he’d met Katrina and her ‘normal’ parents. He winced again. Even after eight years it hurt to think of what could have been. He’d lost touch with Kat’s extended family years ago. Her parents had been in their mid-forties when they’d had their daughter. They’d moved on into a nursing home not long after Kat had left and then they’d passed away within weeks of each other. Together, always together. Shame they hadn’t instilled that ethos into their daughter.
    The sound of a car labouring up a hill caught