Forest Secrets. David Laing

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       I sense the spirits

       when they walk the land;

       the keepers

       watching, waiting to return;

       a flame that burns

       deep in my heart,

       never extinguished

       mine to pass on.

       For the love of this country,

       the land of my birth.

      A verse from the poem, ‘My Country, My Land,’ by Margaret Cowen, Word Weavers An Anthology of Poetry, S.W.W.T., Foot and Playsted, Tasmania, 2010, p27.

      Prologue

       The rhotosaurus tore some leaves from the high branches of the conifer tree and chewed. Always cautious, he turned his head from side to side, watching and listening. All he could hear were the usual sounds of the forest – the rustling leaves and bushes, the scurrying ground dwellers, the distant roar of another dinosaur. Then suddenly he stopped chewing. There was something else, a smell, one that he’d never come across before that was somehow threatening. He didn’t know why or how but he could feel it, sense its menace.

       There was a noise, too. But that was a familiar sound. It was a snuffling coming from nearby – from the trees at the edge of the small clearing where he stood. Swivelling his long neck, he saw that it was the two muttaburrasauruses that he often saw prowl-ing around in the forest, feeding from the low-hanging branches of the trees. They were the bird-hipped dinosaurs that walked on two legs. And although plant eaters, they were considered by all the other dinosaurs, big and small, to be dangerous. They were fearless and always up for a fight. The rhotosaurus liked to keep his distance from them whenever he could. Although they were nowhere near his size, he knew he was no match for their deadly leg spikes that could rip his hide to shreds in seconds.

       Standing perfectly still, he waited, hoping they’d go away.

       But there was something else. Something he had felt a few moments earlier … that was far more dangerous than the muttaburrasauruses. Thousands of times more. And it was coming towards him.

       It was an object as big as a small city and it was travelling at twenty times the speed of a bullet. It was an asteroid, due to blast through the earth’s hemisphere in seconds and which was destined to crash into the sea to create a wave, a monster wall of water 100 metres high.

       Oblivious to the coming danger, and from habit more than anything else and hoping that the two dinosaurs below would leave him alone, he pushed his small head through the branches of the conifer for more leaves. But the strange feeling that something was wrong came over him again. He didn’t know what it was. He simply felt it, sensed it like before. It was something … different. With all thoughts of food gone from his mind, he swivelled СКАЧАТЬ