Gord woke. The dream was of rotted flesh and the wheelbarrows of decayed bodies and shovels that scraped up the flesh and the bodies. The dream was of the fire that hissed, sparkled, as the flesh and bodies of the salmon were swung by the shovels onto the pyre. The flesh and bodies of the salmon fish hit the petrol-driven fire and he saw the carcasses of children. The fish were dead children. The dead children were butterflies. The butterflies tried to rise from the climb of the flames and were caught, and their wings were withered. The bright colours of butterflies’ wings crumpling in the fire heat, and there was the shriek of children and the spit of the fish flesh. The bodies of butterflies fell back into the fire heat . . . He woke. He started up. The light of the day, grey-white under the cloud, pricked at his eyes. Should have been dark, should have been night. Should have been the blackness around him, and the phlegm cough of men roused from sleep. He lay beside the track and there was a lip of rock a yard high into which he was huddled, and which took the weight of the falling rain.
