Free The White Earth by Andrew McGahan

we dug, we couldn’t find anything. The black soil had swallowed it up. It’s deep, the soil out there. Forty feet, sixty feet, eighty. No one knows for sure. There’s bedrock underneath it somewhere, but in my time I’ve seen whole houses sink down into the earth and vanish without a trace. They might still be there even now, resting on the bottom, if you knew where to look.’
    It was a rich, dry voice, rolling in the darkness. William waited, disturbed and uncertain. The old man sniffed at the air.
    ‘There are strange things in the world. Another day, we were camped out there during a storm, and in all the rain and wind something huge passed by. The horses went mad and the tents were blown away. Afterwards we followed a track through the grass, where the earth had been scoured bare a hundred yards wide. We followed it for miles, this way and that, and then suddenly there was nothing — it had lifted itself back into the clouds. The soil had been gouged away a foot deep, and polished so that it almost shone. That storm had signed its name in the ground.’
    There was another streak overhead, and for an instant William glimpsed his uncle’s face, tinged with luminous green, narrow and severe, with dark holes for eyes.
    ‘You live long enough in one place, there’s nothing you won’t have seen.’ The old man tilted his head southwards, a shadow against the stars. ‘I even saw the smoke, the day your father died.’
    William swallowed, his mouth dry.
    ‘What about you, Will? What have you seen?’
    William didn’t know what to say. What had he seen? He thought back to his life on his parents’ farm … but there had only been small things. Little dust devils, dancing across paddocks. Icicles hanging from gutters on the roof, on deep winter mornings. Flights of crows, trailing after the tractor to pick at the freshly turned earth. But he divined that his uncle wanted something more. Something to match a night of shooting stars, or a tornado.
    ‘No wonders?’ the old man inquired, looking down William now, his voice alert and testing. ‘No floods or droughts? No swarms of locusts or plagues of mice in the wheat?’
    William shook his head, and in the sky a meteor flared and sputtered out.
    His uncle nodded towards the eastern horizon, where shadows humped, a wall against the plains.‘Have you been to the mountains?’
    ‘Yes,’ William whispered.
    ‘I was told a story once, by an old man. He said he was one of the first to climb those hills. It was all forest then, thick and dark, and he hunted an animal up there that he had never seen before. He didn’t give it a name, but he said that when it bellowed in the night, the other creatures, the birds and the insects, would all go quiet. It left footprints by the creeks, and slept in caves under the cliffs. One night he cornered it in a gully, and it almost crushed him as it fought its way out. Huge and shaggy and wet, he said it was, with a stink like old mud. And a great head with wild, white eyes. He never saw it again. He thought maybe it died, when the loggers came and cut down most of the forest. I was one of those loggers, as it happens. And once I saw some enormous prints, by a creek, like an elephant had stomped past. And I saw marks in the sand of a cave, like something big had rolled there. And I heard something one night, crashing through the undergrowth, and I could smell mud even though there was no mud anywhere near.’
    The shadowed face studied William once more.
    ‘Did you ever wander off into forest? Did you ever see the terrible bunyip?’
    Again, William could only shake his head. And even though he knew there were no such things as bunyips, he heard no humour in his uncle’s question, only that hard edge, examining. William felt cold. The old man turned towards the brow of the hill upon which the House rode. A tangle of trees waited at the top amidst the silvery grass, tall gums with white skin and pleading arms.
    ‘You won’t find