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me.’
    ‘Scared of you.’
    ‘Bullshit.’
    Bob said nothing, took his plate to the sink.
    ‘Anyway he’s a boofhead,’ said Villani. ‘Always been one. Like his mother. Why you limping?’
    ‘Fell.’
    ‘How?’
    ‘No particular way.’
    ‘What, your hip?’
    Bob turned. ‘You’re not the doctor, boy,’ he said, ‘you’re the fucking copper.’
    Bob wasn’t going to look away. Villani put up his hands, they went outside.
    ‘Ibises,’ said Bob. ‘Never seen so many ibises. That’s a very bad sign.’
    ‘What happens when the fire gets here?’
    Bob turned his head, the long, appraising, pitying look. ‘Fire’s not coming,’ he said. ‘Fire’s going where the wind says.’
    ‘Just got lucky the last time.’
    ‘That’s what I am. Mr Lucky.’
    ‘I hope so,’ Villani said. ‘I very much hope so. Let’s have a look at the trees.’
    ‘You go,’ said Bob. ‘I’ll wait for Lukie. Take the dog.’
    Villani looked at the dog. It was studying the ground like an anteater waiting for food to appear.
    ‘Walk?’ he said.
    The dog looked at him, alert, cheered, a sentry relieved at last. They walked across the bottom paddock, it had provided no horse feed this season, went through the gate to the big crescent of dam, stood on the edge. The dog wandered down the dry fissured side to an unhealthy yellow-green puddle, stepped in and lapped. The hole was carved before they began planting, a man came with a bulldozer on a truck, shifted tonnes of earth, rerouted a winter creek. For years, it was never empty, often it overflowed, its lip had to be raised.
    Below them a forest, wide and deep and dark, big trees, morethan thirty years old. Planted by hand, every last one, thousands of trees—alpine ash, mountain swamp gum, red stringybark, peppermints, mountain gum, spotted gum, snow gum, southern mahogany, sugar gum, silvertop ash. And the oaks, about four thousand, grown from acorns collected in two autumns from every russet Avenue of Honour Bob Villani drove down, from every botanical garden he passed. He stored the shiny amber capsules in brown-paper bags in their own fridge, place of origin and date, sometimes a species, written in pencil in his squat soldier’s report-writing hand.
    In the spring, Villani helped him fence off a big rectangle behind the stables, rabbit-proof fence. They put the acorns in plastic pots, in a mixture of river sand and soil, a weekend just to do that. Villani was thirteen that year, already alone all week with Mark, making their breakfast and tea, sandwiches for school, washing clothes, ironing. He remembered the delight of the morning he saw tiny green oak tips had broken the soil, dozens and dozens, as if they had received some signal. He couldn’t wait for Bob to get home to show him.
    ‘What’s wrong with the others?’ said Bob. ‘Water them?’
    The others emerged in the next weeks. All that summer, he watered the seedlings by hand, half a mug each from a bucket filled from the tanks.
    On a Saturday morning in late summer they walked down to the bottom gate and across the road that went nowhere, stood at the gate opposite. Bob waved a hand. ‘Bought it,’ he said. ‘Hundred and ten acres.’
    Villani looked at the overgrazed, barren, pitted sheep paddocks. ‘Why?’ he said.
    ‘A forest,’ Bob said. ‘Going to have our own forest.’
    ‘Right,’ said Villani. ‘A forest.’
    That winter they dug the first holes, at least a thousand, left paths, clearings, Bob appeared to have a master plan in his head, never disclosed. They dug in icy winds and freezing rain, numb black hands, your cold skin tore, you only found out you had bledwhen you washed off the dirt. Towards spring that year and the next two, Saturdays and Sundays, eight hours a day, they created the forest. They planted the oak seedlings and the bought eucalypt seedlings through squares of old carpet underfelt, protected them with house-wrap cut from fifty-metre rolls, Bob got these things