Trading Rosemary Read Online Free PDF Page A

next day to get to a hospital, the hand beneath her broken arm swollen twice the size of normal and cold to the touch. But the cast that was applied was a pretty green, like sunshine on five-fingered
Pseudopanax
leaves, and whenever Rosemary looked at it she felt a slight and curious smugness.
    “I like it,” said the youngest brother, simply. “What do the two of you think?”
    “Rather you than me, mate,” said the middle brother, as the coin was passed between the three of them.
    “I think I’ll imprint it permanently,” said the youngest brother. “Give myself delusions of competence, it will.”
    “We could always haul your arse up there in a helicopter, tip your chair over an edge somewhere.”
    “So thoughtful.” He turned to Rosemary. “See how generous my brothers are? Always willing to lend a hand, or a foot. I’m sure they’d offer a brain, if they had one between ’em.”
    “He’s got a penchant for the outdoorsy stuff,” his brother said. “I like it too—without too much of the inconvenience, understand. I’m more a marshmallows and ghost stories about the campfire type. Something exciting, but not too much of a strain. That’s what I want.”
    “I might have something suitable,” said Rosemary, “from when I was in the Hunua Ranges.”
    Nausea and cramping and vomiting, her mouth filled with stringy saliva and her legs unable to carry her more than a few meters without spasms gripping her from knee to hip. Rosemary had had to drop to all fours more than once. Her knees were filthy, and there was leaf litter under her fingernails—strong black crescents that stood out even in the half-light.
    Rosemary knew it would be impossible for her to reach the campsite before night fell. The track was too treacherous to navigate in darkness, but she found a relatively flat patch just off the path and erected her tent, head spinning. She lay on her stomach, sweat coating her face, and stared out of the tent, up at the green faces of the trees. They’d grown arms and heads and the two in front pointed down at her, waving for other trees to come look. It seemed they were talking to each other, wondering about the small pink unshelled thing that lay at their feet.
What is it?
said the branch arms to one another.
What is it?
    It occurred to Rosemary, briefly and from a distance, that she might have been sicker than she thought. It was a feeling that skipped across the surface of her fevered brain, for how could she feel anything but small when the trees were walking around her?
    Sleep came in short bursts, and she woke screaming every time. There was an animal in the tent with her that perched behind her left ear and growled—Rosemary screeched and thrashed and threatened, waiting in creeping horror for the weight of padded feet between her shoulder blades, pinning her to the ground.
    (She tried to convince herself that it was a possum in the forest outside, but could not make herself believe it. Sound might carry between the trees, but the feel of breath on her ear and the echoes in the tent were not those of a possum.)
    As soon as it was light Rosemary crawled from the tent, from the hard rooted slope beneath her, from nightmares and retching and hallucination. Lucidity had returned, but her throat was dry with thirst and screaming and the path she staggered along wove before her endlessly, the few short kilometers stretching into the future, hours for each one. She was hot, and then too cold to move, and her bright orange thermal blanket covered her like eggshell as she huddled beneath, in fetal position, and waited for rescue to come.
    She had never been more grateful than she was to hear the sound of whistles echoing through the Hunuas, see the reassuring tramp of help come towards her.
    “It’s a good thing you stayed on the path,” they said. “Someone got lost here last year, and we looked for a week but never found him.”
    The trees have covered him up,
thought Rosemary, tired, and