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giving enough space for another item of furniture—a spinning wheel. When Luke arrived after school, she was seated at the wheel feeding wool into the machine.
    ‘Hi, Luke,’ she said without stopping. ‘Help yourself to a drink and some biscuits. I’ll be finished here shortly.’
    He did so, taking them to the computer which hadn’t yet been turned on for the day. While he waited for it to boot, he wondered if Beth was losing her enthusiasm for the digital revolution.
    It seemed not, for she was soon seated beside him expecting a lesson. ‘Right!’ she said. ‘Show me how to use TradeMe.’
    He looked at her. ‘Do you want to buy something?’
    ‘Nope! I want to sell things. Jerseys, cardigans, ponchos, beanies, scarves, homespun wool…I’m going into business.’ A pause. ‘I have to—if I don’t do something soon, I’ll go mad.’
    ‘Have you done anything like this before?’
    ‘Oh, I’ve spun and knitted for years, but mostly for friends and family. Now I want to see if anybody would buy the sort of stuff I make.’
    Two minutes later, they had the answer. Yes, people did buy stuff like that on TradeMe, but there were also a lot of people selling it. Even so, Beth was not put off. She reckoned her’s were better than what was listed, and anyway she wouldn’t know whether she could do it unless she tried.
    As Luke helped her create an account, he learnt that Kevin Thomas had been the one who’d suggested using TradeMe. Apparently, Beth had visited him with some of the brawn she’d made out of the pigs’ heads. In return, he’d given her some wool from one of the several black ewes he had in his flock. Since then he’d been to Beth’s house to mount the TV on the wall, spotted the computer and started talking about TradeMe.
    From all of this, Luke guessed that Beth and Kev were starting to hit it off. He found it hard to imagine the down-to-earth farmer making friends with the sophisticated city woman, but that’s what seemed to be happening.
    This was confirmed when Kev arrived during Luke’s Thursday session after school. The stated reason for the visit was to give Beth some bacon that he’d smoked, but it took the man twohours to hand it over. Meanwhile Luke had the computer to himself, which was just what he wanted, for he’d had some more thoughts on how he might find his father.
    The idea was to visit some Australian pig-hunting forum sites. Luke soon found that there were plenty to choose from—pig hunting seemed to be a major activity in Australia. Unfortunately, they all required membership before you could do any searches or communicate with the members. Luke joined up to three of them with the user name of Little Ham. Then he had to wait for an email from each to authenticate his address. One came through fairly quickly, allowing him to log on and look through the list of members. He figured that Hamish would probably use something like Ham as his user name. There were Hams and Hambonez and Hamhooks, but no Ham. While Luke was disappointed, he was also not surprised. This was real needle-in-the-haystack stuff. For all he knew, his father might not have access to a computer; he might not even know how to use one!
    Over the next hour, Luke browsed through the forum to get a sense of what Aussie pig hunting was like. Exciting, was the answer. The many photos showed big, mean pigs surrounded by hunters and their dogs. Luke felt the adrenaline rising just looking at them. Most hunters used dogs and knives to kill the vicious beasts. He would do anything to go on a pig hunt like that.
    On Friday afternoon, Luke finally received email confirmation from the other two forums. He would have liked to have gone straight to them to look for Ham, but Beth wanted to sell acardigan she’d knitted, and asked that he check that she was listing it properly.
    After that, she wanted to find out how to spin possum fur in with wool. ‘Kev reckons he can get me heaps of possum fur if I want. Garments