Three Letters on a Sign

Three letters on a roadside sign, and Anth saw them as we came round the corner: CRB. It was the camp we had been aiming for the night before, the one the light had refused us. We had already settled on driving straight on to Raspberry Hill, our next planned stop, but there was no question of not looking. We turned down the narrow dirt road in.

Not a single soul was camped anywhere, and the whole place lay along the bank of the Cobungra River. Raspberry Hill was only forty-five minutes further on. We stood there and tried to think of a reason to keep going, and couldn’t find one. Nothing was waiting for us. With Torrin’s weeks with us already numbered, an unhurried stop felt less like a delay and more like something worth keeping.

With the place to ourselves we took the best spot, right beside the water, and Torrin pitched our Hilleberg a short way off. The portable panels went out, and with sun to spare Anth set the 3D printer going. For a while now he had been slowly filling the cutlery drawer with Gridfinity, a modular grid of small printed trays, each one sized to hold its piece; the knives and forks from IKEA had been bought to fit them exactly. Every so often the printer finished another piece, he clicked it into place, and the drawer came a little closer to done. On the Wednesday Sal ran her SMART Recovery calls from the camp, the bus going nowhere, as it never does on her group days.

OOur training carried on, now with three. Torrin joined us on the rings, then pistol squats and whatever bodyweight work we could think of, the river running beside us. When we gathered wood for the Pomoly he took the axe to it and counted that as training too, which nobody argued with. We recorded another video for Both Sides of the Couch, and came up with a plan for it: at every place we camped from here on, we would film an episode.

Then, one afternoon, the camp showed us its other side. We were out under the awning on our chairs, on the mat, both bent over our laptops, Torrin inside the bus. Sal said “Anthony!” in a voice that left no room for anything else, and her legs came up onto the chair in one movement.

A copperhead was at Anth’s bare feet. Not curled and still like the one at Goongerah, but moving, busy, hunting for food. When Sal moved, it flared its head and held there, ready. Anth didn’t move at all. His phone was right there by his feet, and he would have liked a photograph, but there was no reaching down for anything with a snake in that mood at his toes. So he sat, and it watched him, and for a few long seconds nothing happened. Then the snake seemed to decide that this was not how its afternoon should go. It turned and was gone into the bush.

Sal’s heart took a long time to come down. For the rest of that day and all of the next she checked the ground before she put a foot on it, drew her legs up whenever she sat, and every stick at the edge of the mat looked, for half a second, like something else.

That same afternoon the sky closed in. The rain came hard and all at once, drumming on the awning and the roof, sheeting off the edges, pocking the river until the bright camp we had stopped at for no reason but its beauty went grey and loud and strange. We sat inside with the smell of wet earth coming through the door and listened to it pour down, the three of us, and nobody needed to say that whatever lived in that bush would be keeping its head down too.

On the third morning we packed up. Raspberry Hill was where Justin had rung us from more than a year before, his Starlink newly set up, to tell us it was a great spot. We drove the forty-five minutes to see for ourselves.Read more