Read Dream Time (historical): Book I for Free Online

attention, so I walked a little farther. Saw a large stand of sandalwood near an inky dark billabong.”
    Jimmy’s light blue eyes glittered, and she realized he felt about woodcarving as she did about writing.
    “Sandalwood is marvelous for carving jewelry boxes and canes, and I couldn’t help meself. I crept closer to take me a look. Just then, whomp! Jaws missed me by the span of me finger!”
    Jimmy’s big ears twitched with just the thought. ‘You don’t want to be food for a croc. They’ll poke you beneath a log and let you rot, ’cause they can’t chew too well. When you’ve ripened enough, they’ll tear a chunk off. Crocs are the bloody nightmares of this Dream Time land.”
    Dream Time land. A name Nan was to hear often, especially from Pulykara. Something about the aborigine’s explanation for the beginning of life and its continuation into the future.
    “There is places called Dreaming sites, baby. Them places still have power and energy of the Dream Time.”
    Pulykara, Nan discovered, limped due to mistreatment by, not an overseer, but her husband. Because of her limp, she was spared work in the fields with the rest of the women convicts.
    “For what were you found guilty?” Nan asked.
    Pulykara gazed at her steadily. “For killing my husband. He was the master’s dog man. While my husband slept, I drove a bamboo shoot through his ugly heart.”
    Nan’s scalp tingled. The ferocity that glinted momentarily behind Pulykara’s dark eyes reminded Nan how close the woman was to savagery.
    Three times a week, an officer came to the government farm. His was a cursory duty: to inspect the supply room, the storage barns, and the prisoners and their living quarters.
    In regard to Nan, h is interest was more than cursory. That first time she sensed his stare, she had been washing convicts’ clothing in a large kettle. Bending over it, she had felt a hitch in her back, prompted by her mounded stomach and her bulky body’s uncomfortable position. She had paused to stretch—and caught him looking before he quickly turned away. She had thought nothing of it.
    The next time, when she had fetched water pails, she had noticed him watching her from the veranda of the main building. The officer had stayed in the veranda’s shadows, but she had felt him watching her, nonetheless.
    He was there again today, observing her as she made her way to the kitchen larder. The clerk on duty, a beefy man, marked in a ledger supplies issued to each hut. So bedraggled was she, so unkempt and homely and large with child, that he never once looked at her. Not really looked at her.
    The officer did. As he approached her on the veranda steps, she noted first his stripes. A captain, he was. She shifted the heavy burlap bag of potatoes to her other hip. Why would he be interested in her? Then she saw his eyes. Clearly saw the pity there.
    “Can I help you?” His hand was on the railing, his arm blocking her descent.
    Although he was a step below her, they were of the same height. She stared directly into his eyes. “Now why would you be wanting to help me, Captain?”
    He blushed. She was surprised by this reaction, and her writer’s curiosity got the better of her antipathy toward males. She studied him and realized he wasn’t unattractive: tall, lanky, with ruddy cheeks and wayward brown hair. Hazel eyes fringed by stubby, curling lashes peered back at her.
    “You don’t seem like the others.” Shyness made his voice rusty.
    “Oh? Do I seem to possess more than the dumb intelligence of animals? That’s how we’re treated by the likes of you, you know. Like dumb animals. Beasts of burden.”
    His fingers rubbed the wooden railing. “You’re felons. You committed crimes, and so you have to pay for—”
    “Are you so sure each and every one of us really committed a crime?” With a boldness imprisonment had made her forget, she pushed past him and continued to her hut.
    That night, lying on the floor with the men