Life is a circle.

Bones to dust, dust to earth,

earth to the promise of birth.

—Galen’s Anatomy

Chapter 1

On the banks of the Arrow, where the gold poplar grew, lived the daughter of Hapless Burns. Her name was Jenny. And if the tale I’m about to relate seems a little far-fetched, then you’ll just have to take it on trust. For Jenny had a hand in crafting it.

Course, New Zealand has changed a great deal since the 1870s. These days it’s all fat beef farming and “wipe your feet.” But back when Jenny was a girl, growing was hard. The Rush for gold had come and gone, the miners had slogged off to the coast, and drought had hit Otago. It got so hot that sheep took to shearing each other to stay cool.

Not that it mattered to Jenny. To this wild, red-blooded girl of twelve, the schist and the gorse and the hills raw as bone were as pleasing to the eye as the fantails chasing flies through the Gorge. The mountains might have taken her mother and befuddled her father, but Jenny was willing to give ’em her body and soul.

“You can’t know what it is to breathe free,” she once told me, “till you have danced with the sky.”

And what a sky it was. To picture the world where our heroine roamed, you’ll have to imagine a snug little valley, with pastures like hides and rivers like arteries. This was a living, lively place, where every peak held a secret.

To the north was the Sleeping Girl—a mountain ridge that flanked the edge of the town of Eden. Seen from the side, she had a big, rounded forehead, a pert, pointy nose, and a row of rock buttons down her pinafore. Her dreams, some said, were shooting stars.

To the south were the Wise Women. There’s been considerable debate about the origin of that one, for the raggedy furrows look nothing like ladies. But they were said to be the oldest mountains in the territory, and I suppose someone made the mistake of equating age with brains.

To the east was the Crooked Man—Jenny’s favorite piece of geology. Romantics claimed the label for this range was inspired by the twists and turns of the Arrow River, where the water swerved sharp through the Gorge before it widened and straightened beside the town.

And to the west were Lake Snow and the frosted Alps. Lake Snow was the site of a famous rescue, where a bloke named Still Hope had died while saving the station owner from drowning. A spiritual man, some said, who spoke of singing trees and sacred spaces. Jenny admired his nerve.

Apart from the Alps, most of these christenings came courtesy of the Rush. No sooner had the gold miners stumbled into an empty space than they filled it with memories from home. The rocks became their family, and the mountains their mates. Though it didn’t do much to combat the heat and the heartache, it had the benefit of making the country feel familiar.

They came, they fossicked, and, before you could blink, they were gone, leaving their monikers behind. By the time Jenny was grown, only a few like Hapless and me could recall the characters who had laid claim to Eden. But their ghosts still lingered in the memory.

There was Soapy Jones, who bragged he could smell gold through the ground. Gamblers would often observe him snuffling along Main Street with his nose in a newspaper cone. “The better to focus the scent,” he’d say.

There was Kip Two-Fister, who laced his beer with flakes from the Arrow. Drinking your fortune may be a good spectacle sport, but it didn’t do much for Kip’s constitution. It’s no wonder his friends took an interest in his long drop.

There was Lucky Cork and Roaring Sue and Pistol Harry. There was Lazy Bill and Swifty Dan and Tiny Samson.

But I’m sure the character you’ll be most curious about was Doc Magee. Having saddled him with the title of this tale, I really can’t blame you.

I’d like to satisfy your longings here—to tell you of a man so eccentric he used to stand on his head for breakfast. Of a doctor so crafty he could trick a drunk into using his own bottles for target practice. Of a dreamer who believed in harebrained schemes.

And, of course, of a nugget of gold so bright and gleaming that men compared it to the eye of God.

Only I run the risk of ruining Jenny’s story.

What I can relate is that Magee caught the same greedy fever that swept through the territory. Some it killed and some it scarred and some it left lonely and broken. For the sake of a shiny thing, folks were willing to torture the ground and ruin their souls.

And maybe, just maybe, murder.

This, at any rate, was the land that Jenny found herself in one scorcher of a Thursday at the beginning of autumn as she scaled the gate toward home. She had been out exploring a goat track and lobbing potshots at the pine trees in the valley below. Her mouth was as dry as a stick and her feet were as sore as cuts, but she was looking forward to an evening on the roof of the shed.

“Help!”

You might think a cry like that would set a kid running, but it was not an unusual sound for Jenny to hear. Hapless Burns was known throughout the territory for being the most ham-fisted, long-winded, foggy-minded bloke you could ever hope to hire. His heart was in the right place, sure. But his work on a sheep station left a lot to be desired.

“Got myself stuck!”

When you’re weary from a day in the sun, the last thing you want to see is your father’s rump poking out at you from a window two stories up. With his red feet dangling high in midair, and his front half embedded somewhere in the dark of the woolshed, Hapless Burns looked precisely like the tail end of a horse headed north.

“Dad! Why are you in your drawers?”

“Jenny? Is that you? I was trying to climb in the window. Jenny, are you there?”

Jenny stepped back and contemplated the situation. The window was a sticky one—that she knew from personal experience—and lethal when it dropped. If she pushed Hapless out from the inside, she ran the risk of chopping off his neck or breaking his legs. If she pushed him in, he might somersault over the platform and impale himself on a broom handle—she’d seen him pull similar stunts before.

All in all, she reckoned, her father was better in than out. So taking up the ladder that lay by her feet, she scaled the side of the corrugated iron wall. It wasn’t exactly cool to the touch.

“Stop kicking, Dad! You’ll take my eye out!”

“Oh, lordy, lordy, my calves are burning!” moaned Hapless.

“Then keep your trousers on next time!”

It took a good ten minutes for Jenny to loosen the window, and another ten to shove the remains of her father through the opening. By the time he had gotten around to righting his body and blundering his way back outside, she was practically spitting. Only she had no spit left.

“This has got to be the dumbest trick you’ve ever pulled,” said Jenny.

Hapless sat down on the ground and sighed.

“Guess so.”

“Why didn’t you go through the door?” asked Jenny.

“I lost the key.”

“But Dad, there are two doors!”

It was a mark of his character that Hapless had to take a moment to think about this. “Suppose there are.”

When you can’t say anything nice, the trick is to kick something, hard. Jenny took a swing at the side of the shed and immediately felt much better.

“I spilled paint on my legs,” Hapless continued, smiling foolishly. “Took off my trousers because I didn’t want to get any on the sill.”

Whether you will or no, it can be hard to stay angry at a twig of a man with nought but a wisp of hair on his crown. And if Jenny was good at getting mad at her dad, she was even better at forgiving him. It was one of her finer qualities. So she did the honorable thing and fetched him a drink from the pump.

“I don’t know why you’re worried about messing up this place,” said Jenny, handing him a tin cup. “It’s not like it’s marble and teak.”

“That’s as may be,” said her father, taking a swig, “but we got our reputations to be thinking about.”

A cold rush of worry, like the first surge of a spring thaw, ran through Jenny’s veins. “What do you mean, ‘our reputations’?”

“Farmer Wilcock has given us a month’s notice. Says we have to be up and out of this house before the first frost.”

Now, you can infuriate a kid like Jenny in many ways. You can push her over a cliff, or tie her to a rail, or remind her that her mother died of a fever, but the quickest and surest method is to try to wrench her from the mountains of home.

“Why?” cried Jenny.

“Guess I’m no good at my job,” said Hapless.

“So get a new one!”

“I’ve asked. Nobody round here wants me.”

For Jenny, this was the end of any forgiving. Her father might have been a hopeless gold miner and a useless stockman, but to give up on being a hand to the slackest farmer in the valley was downright embarrassing.

“Then go right ahead and quit,” she shouted, blasting the last wisp of hair off his head, “but I’m STAYING!”

It’s a shame no one had a thermometer on Jenny that afternoon, ’cause I bet she came as near to busting the mercury as a girl could get. Whenever Jenny hit boiling point—and she hit it fairly often—the first person she ran to was her best friend, Pandora. With the news she’d received, it was a miracle she didn’t burst into flames. As it was, she left a fine pair of scorch marks in Farmer Wilcock’s paddock.

From the gate of the sheep station, it was three miles north to Eden—an easy enough distance for any country girl to travel, but plenty of time for Jenny to seethe.

What in heaven was she going to do? From the day she first drew breath, she had been as rooted to Eden as the tree of knowledge. The Arrow wasn’t in her blood; it was her blood. The concept of living on some windswept prairie, or a tropical island, was as foreign to her as geometry.

So what would happen if she left the valley? Would she no longer be Jenny Burns?

There was still silver on the ridge of the Sleeping Girl as Jenny came flying through Main Street, but Eden was winding down for the day. Doors were banging, brooms were whisking, and flies were settling down to feast on the blood of the butcher’s knife. A lone ray of light was grazing the hills above the Arrow, making the first three letters of the HOTEL sign glow a fine ruby red.

“Jenny Girl!”

In any other circumstances, Jenny would have been pleased to pause at the vegetable stall and talk to the Lum brothers. They were, after all, her next-to-best friends. But in times of crisis, Pandora took precedence.

“Sorry, can’t stop. I’m in a rush.”

“Looking for gold?” asked Lok, with his crinkled smile. Jenny knew he was teasing. A prankster to his roots, Lok was fond of pretending to know only a few words of English. It made for a biting reply when passersby took to ragging him.

“Not today,” said Jenny, ignoring the laughter lurking in Lok’s question.

“What’s the hurry?” asked Kam. Around town, Kam was known as the boy with the long, braided queue and a scar through his eyebrow. He was a serious fellow, too serious for a lad of fourteen. But he liked Jenny and her sudden fits of temper.

“It’s nothing,” said Jenny, reluctant to break the news before Pandora had heard it. “I just have to go.”

“You mean pee?” asked Lok, innocent as snow.

“Yeah, pee!”

“I’m afraid we’re all out of peas,” said Lok with a roguish grin.

He wasn’t joking this time. Like everyone who relied on the land for their living, the Lums were struggling with the drought. Market gardens need a lot of water to thrive, and the clouds were drying up. “Those Chinese boys,” as the folks of Eden called them, might have earned a certain respect for the heft of their onions and the sweetness of their carrots, but they were only a few weeks away from losing their dreams.

“I’ll be back, I promise! See you soon.”

“Counting on it!” called Lok.

Chatting to the Lum brothers had brought Jenny’s anger into check, but it wasn’t destined to stay there long. Within a minute of resuming her run down the boardwalk, eyes down and heart pumping, she was thrown catawampus by a couple holding hands. In less than a trice, she found herself flat on the ground chewing patent leather boot.

“Why, Jenny Burns,” cried a coppery soprano from above where she lay, “you haven’t been to see me in an age!”

Wherever you roam in this world, I doubt you’ll find a woman to compare with Gentle Annie. Rich by the Rush and retired by choice, she was the ugliest, largest, and most bewitching piece of feminine in the territory. Rumor had it she could charm the eggs from a crocodile.

“Evening, Miss Jenny,” boomed a baritone. “Enjoying the air?”

Jenny raised her head to glance at the second speaker. There was no denying King Louis was a rake and a ruffian. But it sure takes guts to stick it out in a town that doesn’t want you around. When the rest of his mining cronies had upped stakes and scarpered, King Louis had decided to dig in his spurs. According to Louis, panning for gold was the profession of youngsters and fools. A man of fifty owed it to himself to adopt a nobler occupation. Like poker.

“Help her up, Louis.”

Up Jenny came, covered in grime.

“But take care with the new dress!” cautioned Annie.

Jenny stepped back. Even she might have guessed that a puffed orange jacket and a tricornered hat weren’t the first items a woman would normally choose to wear. Especially if you happened to be square as a chimney, short as a tree stump, and blind in one eye.

“What’s the hurry?” asked King Louis.

“I’m going to see Pandora.”

Gentle Annie bobbed her wig. That day it was platinum blond, but she tended to switch colors every third or fourth morning.

“A good friend is worth a thunderstorm these days. If she’s willing to listen, please give her mother my regards.”

“Something troubling you?” asked King Louis.

“None of your business,” Jenny shot back.

King Louis grinned. “Careful with that tongue, Miss Jenny. Someone might cut it off.”

“Now then, Louis.” Gentle Annie tweaked the lobe of his ear. “Girls aren’t obliged to be civil any more than boys are obliged to be clean. Just stand aside and give her the chance to go where she’s trying to get.”

Jenny smiled gratefully. Women who paid attention to motherless children were apt to fuss and smother, but Annie was different. She gave kids the credit of being rational beings with personal privacies. If she figured Jenny was fretting on something, she let her be until Jenny was good and ready to talk. Picking at a scab will only make it worse.

“Whatever you say, Miss Annie,” said Louis.

“You come and see me soon, Jenny Burns. After four, of course.”

Grasping King Louis firmly by the arm, Gentle Annie pulled her companion away from Jenny’s path.

From there, it was only a few doors down and a full flight of steps up to the rooms at the back of Quinn’s Sweet Shop. Course, by now the sun had dropped completely behind the hills. The storefronts had turned from a golden yellow to a bluish gray, and the whole town had a look of peeling paper. Jenny paid it no heed.

“Pandora?”

Three solid bashes on wood were greeted with silence.

“Pandora, it’s me!” Jenny knew the time had come to employ the code that only her friend could fathom. “Volcano!”

An odor of sour milk and disappointment came pouring through the crack in the door.

“Want an apple? I ate half.” Pandora stuck out a hand. “Oh, and I’m pretty sure Mum’s dead.”