There was enough timber to build a house for ourselves, another for Hector Gallagher and his son, and buildings for the animals. Ian Matlock and his wife and daughter took a property adjoining our southern boundary. Technically the flocks belonged half to Ian and half to ourselves but it was understood that they would graze in common over all the land. There were no neighbours, no fences, no lawyers to tell us where we might and might not go. Everything we saw was ours: by the power of our guns and of our will.

From the house the land falls away eastwards until it ends at the line of cliffs, a hundred feet in height, which border the gulf. The cliffs are sheer, affording no access to the water that creams rumbling at their feet. In the air beyond the cliff edge seabirds wheel and call, white plumage bright against the blue sea. The edge of the cliff might have been cut by a knife: a line dividing what is from what cannot be.

One day shortly after we arrived I took Edward for a walk towards the sea. I say I took Edward; in truth he took me. He had been there already, drawn by the sea, the cliffs, above all by the sense of danger that had attracted him since he first walked. I cautioned him: of course. He heard my warnings and ignored them: of course. He was not a boy to be held in a noose of words.

He pointed. ‘There is a way down. See?’

I looked, my toes jutting over the edge. Growing up where I had, I had no fear of cliffs, of the unprotected and beckoning air. Sure enough, there was a cleft, steep—in places almost vertical and glassy with polished rock—and marked with a thin silt of dust and loose earth. It was a trail used by animals, I thought. It ran from the cliff top twenty yards to our left to—I had to crane my neck to see—a level patch of grass, ten yards or so wide, above a final section of cliff that plunged vertically into a small inlet a few yards across that I thought might be exposed at low tide. From here it was hard to tell how high the final step was, perhaps not more than five or six feet. Not that it mattered; neither Edward nor I was going down there to find out.

‘Please,’ Edward pleaded, reading my thoughts.

‘It is too steep.’

At home I had clambered down steeper paths than that before I was his age.

‘I can manage it.’

‘No.’

The distant swathe of grass was cool and enticing but I would not allow myself to look at it. I turned my back, Edward following reluctantly at my heels, and walked slowly away along the edge of the cliffs, enjoying the salt breeze that cooled my face and moved the heavy weight of hair on my neck.

‘I could manage it easily,’ Edward complained.

I know now that I should have permitted him to use the path but I did not. We walked on until I wished to go no further then circled back inland until we reached the house: as though by avoiding further sight of the path I would somehow put it out of his mind.

When we reached home I put my hands on his shoulders and looked down at him. ‘I want you to promise not to climb down there.’ I shook him slightly to show how serious I was. ‘It is too dangerous. Do you understand?’

He tried to avoid answering but I insisted. I should not have asked it; even as I spoke I knew that, given his nature, it was a promise it would be impossible for him to keep. Above all I should never have mentioned the word danger but I had done so and it was too late.

 

III

The walk through the tall grass has heated me. I wipe the sweat from my face. I can feel it running over my body beneath my clothes.