In the Land of the Long White Cloud

but deep in his heart he knew that David’s knots would hold.
    Shaking with fear and pain, he followed the boy’s descent on the rope. Despite his broken leg and his no doubt raw fingers, he shimmied adeptly down the rock surface, finally landing on the beach. He carefully shifted his weight to his good leg but then had to crawl to get to Lucas.
    “I need a crutch,” he said, feigning cheerfulness. “Then we can try to follow alongside the river to get back home…or ride down the river if we have to. How you doing, Luke? I’m so glad you’re alive! That arm’ll work again, and…”
    The boy crouched next to Lucas, examining his arm.
    “I…I’m dying, Davey,” Lucas whispered. “It’s not just my arm. But you…you make it back. Promise me you won’t give up.”
    “I’ll never give up!” David said, but he could not manage a laugh. “And you…”
    “I…listen, Dave, would you…could you…hold me?” The wish burst out of Lucas; he could not hold it back. “I…I’d like…”
    “You’d like to see the river?” David asked amiably. “It’s beautiful and gleaming like gold. But…maybe it’s better if you keep still.”
    “I’m dying, Dave,” Lucas repeated. “Any second now…please…”
    The pain was excruciating when David lifted him up, but then seemed suddenly to vanish. Lucas felt nothing except the boy’s arms around him, his breath, the shoulder he was leaning on. He smelled his sweat, which was sweeter to him than Kiward Station’s rose garden, and he listened to the sobbing that David could no longer suppress. Lucas let his head sink to the side and placed a surreptitious kiss on David’s chest. The boy did not feel it but pulled the dying man more tightly to him.
    “It will all be OK!” he whispered. “It will all be OK. You just sleep a little now, and then…”
    Steinbjörn Sigleifson rocked the dying man in his arms as his mother had done to him when he was little. He found consolation in this embrace; it kept at bay the fear that he would soon be left all alone, wounded and without blankets or provisions on this stretch of sand. He pressed his face into Lucas’s hair and drew him close, weeping inconsolably.
    Lucas closed his eyes and gave himself over entirely to an overwhelming feeling of joy. All was well. He had what he had wished for. He was where he belonged.

11
    G eorge Greenwood led his horse into the Westport rental stables and instructed the owner to feed it well. He seemed like a man who could be trusted; the facilities gave the impression of being well maintained. He liked this small town on the mouth of the Buller River. For a long time, it had been tiny, home to barely two hundred residents, but more gold panners were moving in these days—and coal would eventually start to be extracted. George was far more interested in that particular raw material than in gold. Though the person who had discovered the coal deposits was looking for investors who would provide for the eventual construction of a mine, his first priority was to line up financing for a railroad connection, for as long as there was no way of transporting the coal efficiently, a mine would be unprofitable. George planned to use his visit to the West Coast, among other things, to get a sense of the landscape and the possibility of rail or road connections. It was always a good idea for a merchant to look around—and his growing enterprise in Christchurch allowed him for the first time to travel from one sheep farm to another without pressing business concerns.
    Now, in January, after the sheep shearing and stressful period of lambing was over, he could even risk leaving Howard O’Keefe—an endless source of concern to him—on his own for a few weeks. George sighed at the thought of Helen’s hopeless husband. Thanks to George’s support, the valuable breeding animals, and intensive guidance, Howard O’Keefe’s farm was finally turning a profit, but Howard himself remained a shaky investment. The man tended to be touchy, liked to drink, and did not like taking advice—and, if he did, only from George himself, not from his subordinates, and least of allfrom Reti, Helen’s former student, who had slowly come to serve as George’s right-hand man. Thus every conversation, every exhortation, to drive the sheep into the lowlands in April in order not to lose any animals to a possible sudden onset of winter, for example, required a ride from Christchurch to Haldon.
    As much as