Penny brushed her long copper-coloured hair, and tugged it back into a practical ponytail. She buttoned her shirt, squeezed into jeans, frowning as she struggled to zip them.
‘I’m starting a diet today,’ she said, as usual.
‘Don’t,’ said Matt, as always. ‘You’re perfect the way you are.’
Penny made a face and left the room. He found everything about her irresistible. Her ripe figure, her serious smile, her freckled dimples and clear blue eyes. But Penny couldn’t take a compliment. She never believed him and he didn’t know why. After all, he was no oil painting – tall and fit, for sure, but with an ugly hawkish nose like his father. It made him look arrogant.
Matt showered, thinking a little about the day ahead and a lot about the night before. He arched his neck and turned up the heat, let the water pummel his shoulders, knock some sense into him. Matt hated secrets, but he couldn’t tell Penny what had happened. It was beyond him.
He found Penny in the kitchen.
‘You’d better boil the kettle again,’ she said, before disappearing into the lounge room with a brush-tailed possum curled around her neck like a stole. ‘Can you muster the pademelons for me?’ Penny asked when she came back in. ‘We’re weighing their joeys this afternoon.’
‘Sorry,’ said Matt. ‘I promised Bernie to fly the falcons.’ He combed his dark hair with his fingers. The purple bottlebrush outside the window quivered with honeyeaters. The sun shone. A spider wove its web across the sill. How could everything look so normal when nothing was?
‘Dr Deville’s coming this morning,’ said Penny. ‘Don’t you want to meet her?’
Matt put the kettle back on the gas. ‘It can wait.’
Penny nursed her mug and watched him. ‘You didn’t sleep much last night.’
That was an understatement. He’d lain restless in the dark, reliving each detail of his heartbreaking accident in the park. Reliving the shock, the amazement – the dreadful guilt and grief. Willing himself to wake from this living nightmare. As head ranger at Binburra National Park he’d pledged to protect it from harm. Instead he’d caused the greatest harm possible. He’d killed a Tasmanian tiger – an animal believed extinct for almost a hundred years.
The kettle screamed. Matt caught the edge of his hand on the scalding jet of steam and barely felt it. Penny’s questioning eyes bored into him and he tried changing the subject. ‘You’re running an information session this morning, right? What’s this one about?’
Penny didn’t answer. Then Matt remembered and wished he’d never asked. The Devil Roadkill Count was Penny’s pet project. Binburra was at the forefront of conserving Tasmanian devils. As scavengers, they were particularly vulnerable to being killed by cars. Matt had hit one himself last year – one of Penny’s painstakingly hand-reared orphans. Released with radio collars and a great deal of hope, many perished on the roads within months. ‘How could you be so careless?’ she’d asked him. How indeed.
Matt kissed his wife and escaped to the verandah.
Their modest house was perched halfway up the hill above Binburra Wildlife Park’s home compound. Covering several hectares, it stretched out before him under a sky of brilliant blue. The buildings and enclosures were designed to blend seamlessly with the native trees and gardens, providing as natural an environment as possible for their residents. The main focus of the park was the breeding and conservation of Tasmanian devils, but Binburra also housed a wide variety of rescued birds and animals. Some would be rehabilitated and returned to the wild. For those too badly injured to fend for themselves, Binburra provided a permanent home.
Matt hurried down to the historic shearing shed that he’d converted into a mews. It housed Aquila and the peregrine falcons that he’d be flying today. First he checked on the other raptors: the masked owl with the wire-fence injury; the snow-white goshawk, his leg in a cast; and an old peregrine, blind in one eye, his retina detached by the force of a three-hundred-kilometre-an-hour dive. Last in line was a slim nankeen kestrel, victim of an inebriated and out-of-season duck hunter. Matt frowned as he fed the kestrel a mouse. Her hovering days were over, but at least she could fly from floor to perch now. It was time to move her to the flight aviary. But not today. Today was Hills End Cup Day.
Matt drew on a leather gauntlet and fetched the falcons. They hopped onto his arm in return for pieces of rabbit. First Sooty, the tiercel, and then Sweep, the larger female. The blue-black plumage of their heads and upper body gleamed with good health. Their breasts were the colour of rich King Island cream, and delicate buff bands extended with exquisite symmetry to the tips of their short tails. Their gaze, once wan and pale, now flashed clear and bright; eye rings vibrant yellow, golden beaks tipped glossy black. Matt encouraged the birds onto his homemade cadge, a portable frame fitted with perches, and whistled low while hooding them.
Jake, Binburra’s only full-time keeper, came in with a trolley of road kill to restock the freezer. He was a gentle young man of twenty-five with sandy-blond hair, kind eyes and an impressive work ethic. Matt liked Jake a lot. Usually the two of them would stop for a chat, but today Matt merely grunted at Jake’s cheerful, ‘Good morning,’ and busied himself with the falcons.
Jake finished packing the freezer. ‘You off to the races? It’s a nice sunny day to fly those birds.’
Matt ignored him, couldn’t even look at him – caught up in an irrational fear that Jake would know what had happened last night if he made eye contact. When it became clear that Matt wasn’t going to respond, Jake shrugged and left with the empty trolley. Matt let out his breath. More than anything, he wanted to be alone with his thoughts. His throat went dry. If he couldn’t even face Jake, how on earth would he face crowds of strangers at the race track?
Once the peregrines were in the jeep, Matt fetched Aquila. She flew to a low branch at his approach. Matt braced against her weight as she stepped onto his arm, broad wings unfurled. The eagle bent her head, with its striking blonde nape, against his cheek. Matt laughed and rubbed her neck. ‘All right, you floozy, that’s enough. Save some love for Woorawa.’
With just eighty breeding pairs of giant wedgetails left in the wild, the sub-species was in serious trouble. Fingers crossed, Aquila would bond with Woorawa, a young male arriving next month, and the pair could be released along with the peregrines. But the birds required more free flight sessions before then to regain strength and stamina. Matt rewarded Aquila with a strip of rabbit, she consented to the hood, and they set off in the jeep for a day at the races.