Free Storm Boy by Colin Thiele Page A

wiry, wizened man with a flash of white teeth and a jolly black face as screwed-up and wrinkled as an old boot. He had a humpy by the shore of the Coorong about a mile away.
    Fingerbone knew more about things than anyone Storm Boy had ever known. He could point out fish in the water and birds in the sky when even Hide-Away couldn’t see a thing. He knew all the signs of wind and weather in the clouds and the sea. And he could read all the strange writing on the sandhills and beaches—the scribbly stories made by beetles and mice and bandicoots and anteaters and crabs and birds’ toes and mysterious sliding bellies in the night. Before long Storm Boy had learnt enough to fill a hundred books.
    In his humpy Fingerbone kept a disorganised collection of iron hooks, wire netting, driftwood, leather, bits of brass, boat oars, tins, rope, torn shirts, and an old blunderbuss. He was very proud of the blunderbuss because it still worked. It was a muzzle-loader. Fingerbone would put a charge of gunpowder into it; then he’d ram anything at all down the barrel and fix it there with a wad. Once he found a big glass marble and blew it clean through a wooden box just to prove that the blunderbuss worked. But the only time Storm Boy ever saw Fingerbone kill anything with it was when a tiger snake came sliding through the grass to the shore like a thin stream of black glass barred with red hot coals. As it slid over the water towards his boat Fingerbone grabbed his blunderbuss and blew the snake to pieces.
    ‘Number One bad fellow, tiger snake,’ he said. ‘Kill him dead!’ Storm Boy never forgot. For days afterwards every stick he saw melted slowly into black glass and slid away.
     
    At first, Hide-Away was afraid that Storm Boy would get lost. The shore stretched on and on for ninety miles, with every sandhill and bush and tussock like the last one, so that a boy who hadn’t learnt to read the beach carefully might wander up and down for hours without finding the spot that led back home. And so Hide-Away looked for a landmark.
    One day he found a big piece of timber lying with the driftwood on the beach. It had been swept from the deck of a passing ship, and it was nearly as thick and strong as the pile of a jetty. Hide-Away and Fingerbone dragged it slowly to the top of the sandhill near the humpy. There Hide-Away cut some notches in the wood for steps, and fixed a small crosspiece to it. Then they dug a deep hole, stood the pole upright in it, and stamped it down firmly.
    ‘There,’ said Hide-Away. ‘Now you’ll always have a Lookout Post. You’ll be able to see it far up the beach, and you won’t get lost.’
     
    As the years went by, Storm Boy learnt many things. All living creatures were his friends—all, that is, except the long, narrow fellows who poured themselves through the sand and sedge like glass.
    In a hole at the end of a burrow under a grassy tussock he found the Fairy Penguin looking shyly at two white eggs. And when the two chicks hatched out they were little bundles of dark down as soft as dusk.
    ‘Hullo, Mrs Penguin,’ said Storm Boy each day. ‘How are your bits of thistledown today?’
    Fairy Penguin didn’t mind Storm Boy. Instead of pecking and hissing at him she sat back sedately on her tail and looked at him gently with mild eyes.
     
    Sometimes, in the hollows behind the sandhills where the wind had been scooping and sifting, Storm Boy found long, white heaps of seashell and bits of stone, ancient mussels and cockles with curves and whorls and sharp broken edges.
    ‘An old midden,’ said Hide-Away, ‘left by the Aborigines.’
    ‘What’s a midden?’
    ‘A camping place where they used to crack their shellfish.’ Fingerbone stood for a long time gazing at the great heaps of shells, as if far off in thought.
    ‘Dark people eat, make camp, long time ago,’ he said a little sadly. ‘No whitefellow here den. For hundreds and hundreds of years, only blackfellows.’
    Storm Boy looked at