Fade out to the mist and that whispering that seems part solace, part injunction. He hears bellbirds calling and ducks splashing on a lake somewhere. Sees himself standing next to his father, who is carrying a shotgun. Remembers that day, their only time together that didn’t involve chores or disappointment when he couldn’t use a hammer like his father could, when he showed no interest in car engines or gardening.
They are visiting his father’s sister and family, who live on a farm near where his father lived as a boy. He enjoys riding the tractor to the potato fields and helping his barefoot cousins, soles covered in thick calluses, free sheep from barbed-wire fences, though the smell of their dung-covered rear legs repulses him. A bout of German measles puts him in bed for three days. When he is not fuzzy with the thickness of fever, he reads war books belonging to his uncle and tries to write letters to friends back home. When he can walk, he wanders around the farmhouse and notices the photo of his father taken when he joined the air force. Notices how much he looks like him. Wonders how he would look in a uniform. When he is fully recovered, his father promises to take him hunting the next day, but they have to be up by six. With no alarm clock, he goes to bed saying, six o’clock, six o’clock, six o’clock. His father finds him dressed and ready at six.
As they walk along the river, they listen to the birds and watch for the telltale flicker of a rabbit sprinting home. The drizzle is a film of damp on their faces and hair, but they are dressed in heavy boots, jeans, woollen jumpers and overcoats, and only interested in the flashes of bright colour highlighting distant leaves. His father leads the way.
They come across a farmhouse teetering among gums and stringybark. His father tells him to fire a round into a broken door. The recoil pushes him into his father, who was waiting behind him, though he remembers he fell back onto wet ground. They discuss shot patterns—the choke and bore of a barrel, the shot load—and the parameters of certain pain. They move on.
