Free Past the Shallows by Favel Parrett Page A

too. And it would
     have been good like this was.
    Back at the house, George gutted and filleted the fish, set them to cook on a hot plate over the fire. With a bit of salt
     and a squeeze of lemon the fish smelled good as they sizzled. Harry watched in amazement as something that had been so ugly,
     the colour of mud, turned bright white as it cooked.
    The flesh was firm and sweet and Harry had never tasted anything so delicious.

D ad had left Miles to clean the boat and deal with the cannery again. Deal with the men in white plastic with blood and fish
     guts all over them. Men with sharp knives and no smiles, soaked in fluoro light. That’s what it was like in the cannery, fish
     guts and blood. It stunk of warm fish skin and bleach. And everyone who worked there smelled like that, too. It didn’t wash
     away. The fish oil soaked inside their skin and it stayed.
    Most kids ended up working there. Miles knew them; kids from school who left before the end of Year Nine. But they didn’t
     look like kids anymore. They were hard. Just big arm muscles and thick hands. Gutting and finning salmon from the salmon ponds,
     shucking the abalone and canning them. AndDad said Miles would end up there if he didn’t work hard. If they lost the boat.
    It was already dark when Dad picked him up and he didn’t say where he’d been. He just drove fast. Took corners fast and Miles
     had to hold onto the door to stay in his seat and not slide across and hit Dad.
    Now that Martin was out of the way, Jeff was in Dad’s ear all day telling him that they should start diving over at Acton
     Island or down the cape.
    ‘Why are we wasting time? We can’t compete with the big boats,’ he’d say.
    He talked about other places, too. All of them out of the fishing zone. And in the afternoons, Dad would go off in the ute
     with Jeff. Maybe somewhere down the coast where they could poach close to the shore without being seen. Under the high cliffs
     and rocks down where there were no roads. In the mornings there would be a few tubs of abalone already on the boat. Big fat
     abalone.
    When they got to the straight, hard bit of road, Dad pushed the ute even faster. Miles looked up ahead and in the blackness,
     maybe two hundred metres off, were the huge headlights of a truck coming. Coming down. And Dad wasn’t even on his side of
     the road. He was in the middle of the road like always. Driving right in the middle of the road.
    Miles kept his eyes on the truck, on the headlights, maybe only one hundred metres away now. Then the lights went out.
    The truck was gone. There was only the sound of the truck and the sound of the ute moving on the road in the dark.
    Dad’s face was blank. Miles went to say something, to yell out ‘Pull over’, but the truck was suddenly there, suddenly right
     on them. The full force of its horn filled the air and the night and the cabin. And Miles could feel how close the truck was.
     He could feel the centimetres between them.
    And in the headlights of the ute, Miles saw it. A bull on its side being pushed by the truck, its hulking body covering the
     space where the headlights should have been. A massive bull. Miles could even see one of his horns.
    The truck must have hit it on the road, must have hit it up where the lights had blacked out. And Miles didn’t know how the
     truck hadn’t hit them, too.
    He looked up at Dad, his eyes still fixed ahead. Then he turned and watched the red tail-lights of the truck fly away into
     the night.
    It hadn’t even tried to slow down.
    And neither had Dad.

J ake alternated between leading and following on the narrow track through the scrub and the ground was really wet here, wet
     from the river and wet from the rain. Harry had never been this way before. Not this far upstream. No one came up here really,
     but George seemed to know the way. And it looked like all this land had been cleared once. A long time ago. When the forest
     was cleared it never looked right when it