When Robert was younger he lived somewhere else. When asked, he could never say exactly where, for the simple but painful reason that the nature of his removal from his home had been so sudden and rough and frightening, and had taken such a long time to end, that by the time he found himself in his new home and dared to open his eyes, he had not the slightest idea where he was or where he had come from.
In fact, the only details of his old home that he could remember with any confidence, were the last few minutes of his time there. Those minutes he remembered with a horrible clarity. Especially the voices of his mum and dad calling out to him and his siblings, who were playing on a group of rocks in the middle of their large pond, “There’s a big storm on its way! Get out of the pond now!”
Thinking back, Robert could not say if he had just been too slow to heed his parents’ warning. It was entirely possible, for he was a boy easily captivated by the world. So it was likely he had lingered too long in the middle of the pond, looking at the black clouds which were, as his parents had urgently called out to him, “very, very dangerous, Robert!” But he could also remember why he had lingered: the clouds had a shape and colour that he found both beautiful and bewitching.
And it was not only how they looked that had held him there. It was also their sound – the most incredible, deep thunder claps, as if the sky itself was talking, wanting to tell him something extraordinary. So it was indeed very possible that he had stayed one or two moments too long on the rocks. But they were misjudged moments, that was all, not belligerent ones. Moments that were ruled by his heart.
However, the price paid for this delay, Robert now knew, was a truly terrible one. Even though it was only a handful of seconds, it was long enough that when he did finally dive from the rocks and swim as hard as he could to the bank where he could see his brothers and sisters clambering out, and his mother and father frantically urging him to hurry up, instead of a fresh surge of the storm’s water missing him, it caught him up in its powerful grip, whipping him away at a speed he barely thought possible.
In the blink of an eye, he was swept to the far end of the pond, a place he and his brothers and sisters had never dared swim to before. Then, moments later, he crashed over the pond’s embankment into the swollen river, which was flowing faster and higher than any living animal had ever seen.
Of the hours that followed this frightening separation from his home, Robert could not remember any great detail. It was as though all the rushing, falling moments had an endless, horrible sameness about them, like a gigantic jigsaw made up of only black pieces. The only thing he could say with any certainty was that he’d been lucky to survive.
For there were hundreds of dangerous items flowing alongside him in the river, any one of them capable of crushing, entangling or dragging him under at any moment. In the end, however, it was one such item – an old tree – which saved his life. When Robert speared into it, he was able to hang on to it, then crawl into an old hollow in one of its branches.
From that moment on, even though Robert still had to deal with the feeling that he was being swept further and further away from home, at least he had a sense that he could survive. So he said to himself over and over during that horrible night, “I am going to find my way back home. I am going to find my way back home.”
There passed an unknown amount of time, during which Robert would not have been able to tell you if he had slept or remained awake, for his eyes had stayed tightly closed. Then finally, he felt the tree slow down, then come to a standstill. “Where am I? Where on earth am I?” he thought to himself, alongside all manner of other frightening thoughts as to what might be waiting for him outside the old tree’s hollow.
In the end, he knew the only way to find out was to have the courage to look. So after wriggling to the hollow’s opening, then carefully poking his head out the top of it and looking around, the first thing he learned was that he couldn’t hear any animals nearby. The second was that it was night-time. He knew this because the storm clouds had passed and the stars and moon were out.
The storm’s end was a comfort. It was only a small comfort, but it was enough to give Robert the boost of confidence he needed to hop out of the hollow and onto the top of the branch. From here he was able to see in the moonlight that his life raft had become lodged in a clump of thick, tall reeds. When he looked around, he learned the reeds were a small distance from the edge of what seemed to be a large tree-lined pond that, in this light at least, did not look too different from his home.
This unexpected sameness finally caused Robert’s most painful feelings – which he had been trying to keep away the entire journey down the river – to push to the surface and burst out. As his whole body began to shake, and he tried to hold back his tears, he said quietly to himself, “Please, just be a bad dream. Please, just let me be home with Mum and Dad.”
But of course, this was not a dream, nor could he just magically go home. And it was only after accepting these two horrible facts that he sighed the deepest of sighs, one that might have come directly from his heart, and hopped back down into the tree’s hollow to wait until morning.
The Far Mountains 