Free Storm Boy by Colin Thiele Page B

the big heaps of shell and wondered how long ago it must have been. He could paint it in his mind…the red campfires by the Coorong, the piccaninnies, the songs, the clicking of empty shells falling on the piles as they were thrown away. And he thought to himself, ‘If that time were now, I’d be a little black boy.’
    But his father’s voice roused him and he ran down to the beach to help dig up a bagful of big cockles for their own tea. And when they had enough for themselves they filled more bags to take up to Goolwa, because there the fishermen and the tourists were eager to pay Hide-Away money for fresh bait.
    Storm Boy stood bent over like a horseshoe, as if he were playing leapfrog; his fingers scooped and scraped in the sand, and the salt sea slid forwards and backwards under his nose. He liked the smell and the long, smooth swish of it. He was very happy.
    Storm Boy liked best of all to wander along the beach after what Hide-Away called a Big Blow. For then all kinds of treasure had been thrown up by the wind and the wild waves. There, where the wide stretch of beach was shining and swishing with the backward wash, he would see the sea things lying as if they’d been dropped on a sheet of glass—all kinds of weed and coloured kelp, frosty white cuttlefish, sea urchins and starfish, little dead seahorses as stiff as starch, and dozens of different shells—helmets, mitres, spindles and dove shells, whelks with purple edges, ribbed and spiral clusterwinks, murex bristling out their frills of blunt spines, nautilus as frail as frozen foam, and sometimes even a new cowry, gleaming and polished, with its underside as smooth and pink as tinted porcelain.
    In places the sand would be rucked and puckered into hard smooth ripples like scales. Storm Boy liked to scuff them with his bare soles as he walked, or balance on their cool curves with the balls of his feet.
    He grew up to be supple and hardy. Most of the year he wore nothing but shorts, a shirt, and a battered old Tom Sawyer hat. But when the winter wind came sweeping up from Antarctica with ice on its tongue, licking and smoothing his cheeks into cold flat pebbles, he put on one of his father’s thick coats that came down to his ankles. Then he would turn up the collar, let his hands dangle down to get lost in the huge pockets, and go outside again as snug as a penguin in a burrow. For he couldn’t bear to be inside. He loved the whip of the wind too much, and the salty sting of the spray on his cheek like a slap across the face, and the endless hiss of the dying ripples at his feet.
    For Storm Boy was a storm boy.
     
    Some distance from the place where Hide-Away and Fingerbone had built their humpies, the whole stretch of the Coorong and the land around it had been turned into a sanctuary. No-one was allowed to hurt the birds there. No shooters were allowed, no hunters with decoys or nets or wire traps, not even a dog.
    And so the water and the shores rippled and flapped with wings. In the early morning the tall birds stood up and clapped and cheered the rising sun. Everywhere there was the sound of bathing—a happy splashing and sousing and swishing. It sounded as if the water had been turned into a bathroom five miles long, with thousands of busy fellows gargling and gurgling and blowing bubbles together. Some were above the water, some were on it, and some were under it; a few were half on it and half under. Some were just diving into it and some just climbing out of it. Some who wanted to fly were starting to take off, running across the water with big flat feet, flapping their wings furiously, and pedalling with all their might. Some were coming in to land, with their wings braking hard and their big webbed feet splayed out ready to ski over the water as soon as they landed.
    Everywhere there were crisscrossing wakes of ripples and waves and splashes. Storm Boy felt the excitement and wonder of it; he often sat on the shore all day with his knees up