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list of the many different creatures that are probably right now hanging on to my shoes, inching their way up toward the first sign of exposed flesh—ticks, leeches, snakes!
    Finally we get there, and I have to admit the serenity of the place is really breathtaking. There’s a shallow stream tumbling down a collection of haphazard boul-ders, the water so clear I can see every smoothly shaped pebble beneath the surface. On the other side of the stream stretches a field of deep green bracken ferns, thousands of them, about knee-high to thigh, dancing to the musical notes of a very light breeze.
    “Well, what do you think?” She’s standing beside me, gazing proudly across the crystalline stream as if this picturesque scene was all her own doing.
    I pick up a small pebble and attempt to skip it. It sinks on the first hit. “Nice.”
    She frowns, disappointed, but I’m fed up with being agreeable. She says, “Is that all you can say, just ‘nice’ ?”
    I sit on a spilled log, start checking my shoes for leeches. “Okay, very nice.”
    She sits beside me and groans, apparently conceding this is the most she’ll get. “Sorry about Jillian going off like that. You probably won’t believe this, but she’s known around here for her extreme tolerance and calm under duress. Sometimes she might appear a little abstracted, but that’s just her way. She’s intelligent, loves nature, is a wonderful magi—”
    Wisely, she doesn’t finish. “She raised me from a baby when my mother ran away.”
    She shrugs her shoulders as if her mother’s rejection doesn’t concern her anymore. I don’t need to be psychic to see that it does. Jillian’s hysteria gradually begins easing into a distant part of my memory. “Hey, look, forget it. It was no big deal.”
    We’re quiet for a minute, taking in the pleasant surroundings—water spilling over rocks, a gentle breeze playing tag with the ferns and vines and millions of eucalyptus leaves, an earthy smell of damp soil and moss. Kate is sitting beside me, her head angled, eyes gently closed, totally involved, relaxed with herself. Suddenly I envy her. This mountain is her home, has been probably all her life. This forest is her roots, and it’s obvious she loves it. It’s something I’ve never had the pleasure of enjoying—a place to call home, a group of friends. “Is it just you and your grandmother then?” I wonder fleetingly if she will think I’m intruding.
    She just shrugs. “Yeah, I don’t know who my father is. There was never a name.”
    “Hey, that’s rough. He could be anybody. Do you have anything to go on?”
    She gets defensive. “Who says I wanna know?”
    She glances away, but I can see her eyes are troubled. When she finally speaks again her voice is soft. “I know he was a camper, here in the forest. That’s how he met my mother. She used to come here, sit by the river and dream about living in a big city one day. She never liked the mountain.”
    “What happened?”
    “He had just finished his final exams and had come up the mountain for a bit of relaxation. He ran into trouble with some poisonous nettle and my mother looked after it. Apparently she looked after a lot more.”
    “D’you think they loved each other?”
    Her eyes change, like she’s slipped into the past, visualizing her parents as they would have been so long ago, young lovers, meeting in the forest. “How would I know? Can two people fall in love so quickly? They only had a couple of days.”
    Like an exploding bomb, it hits me. The reason Kate feels this place is special. “It was here, wasn’t it?”
    Her shoulders lift just a little.
    “This is where your father camped, where your parents . . .”
    She takes the defensive quickly again. “Yeah, so what?”
    “Nothing. Look, I didn’t mean . . .” She’s glaring at me with daggers for eyes. My words dry up.
    “So why did your family move up here?” she asks, switching subjects. “Even though I love it, it’s not