Word Hunters

by Nick Earls

  While stories build from words, it’s true,

  The words themselves have stories too.

  Who dares to read? Who dares to look?

  Who dares to hunt within this book?

  The last photo of Alan Hunter was taken on the day he went missing. He taught Year 5 at Cubberla Creek State School, and it was sports day. In the photo he wore an orange towelling hat, shorts that were pulled up way too high and socks that went to just below his knees. He had a megaphone in his hand and a vinyl bag over one shoulder with ‘TAA’ and a picture of a plane on it. In other words, according to Lexi and Al’s father close to 30 years later, he looked like a classic daggy teacher from 1983.

  Even in that photo, Lexi now thought she could see a key pinned to her grandfather’s shirt – a key exactly like the ones she and Al had used to lock their word hunters’ pegs in place.

  It was Lexi’s turn to dust the lounge room, a job that always took ages because of the number of framed photos on the bookshelves. Al was on the back deck cleaning the barbecue. He complained every time that it was the worse job of the two, but he never wanted to swap.

  Lexi took the photo into the kitchen, where their father was tying a bin bag.

  ‘Do you know what that is?’ She pointed to the key in the photo. ‘I’ve always wondered.’

  Al’s face appeared at the window, glaring at her. He couldn’t believe she’d brought it up and drawn attention to it.

  Their father took the photo, then stretched his arm out and squinted at it. ‘No. I’ll need some help.’ His reading glasses were at the end of the bench, and he put them on. ‘Oh, that. It’s a badge Grandad Al wore. He had it for a couple of years. He wore it a lot. I always assumed it was a Lions Club badge, or Rotary, or something.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was in any of those,’ Al said through the screen. He had his hands next to his face to shield himself from the glare outside.

  ‘Well, I don’t know that he was.’ Their father took another look at the photo. ‘I don’t remember him going to any meetings. I just think that’s what it was. I never asked him about it.’ He handed the photo back to Lexi. ‘I was 15. If it had been Rotary and I’d sounded interested, he would have had me on the school Interact club executive the next day. That’s like junior Rotary. Or it was, back then.’ He waved his hand in front of his face at the smell of the rubbish in the bin bag. ‘I’ve got to get this out of the house.’

  He finished tying it and picked up the plastic recycling bin, which was full of bottles and crushed cereal boxes.

  Al stayed at the window. As soon as their father was gone he said, ‘What were you thinking? You could blow the whole thing.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t. And I wouldn’t. Not with that.’ Lexi put the photo down on the bench. ‘We’ve got to find out what we can. Grandad Al is lost somewhere in the – I don’t know – last few thousand years? Thirty years ago he chased a word into the past and it went wrong. The only people who know that, and the only people who have any chance of finding him, are you and me. And if I can find one clue in the present that’ll get us to him sooner and save me from having to fight the Battle of Hastings again – or any other stupid war – I’ll take it.’

  The front screen door squeaked and slapped shut. Their father was back from the bins.

  ‘Okay,’ Al said before he came in. ‘But there’s got to be a better way.’

  ‘A family history project.’ Mursili was pacing up and down in his office in the school library when the idea came to him. ‘I’ll find some way of making it official. Or making it look official.’ He picked up a sheet of school letterhead and fed it into his printer. ‘I know – something about confidentiality. About how family details won’t be disclosed, et cetera, et cetera. Get your parents to sign it, saying they understand the terms. That’s very 21st century.’ He smiled and nodded. ‘Imagine if I’d suggested that to King Suppi back in Hattusa. Getting peasants to sign something, as if they had some say. Hah. Far too dangerous. Where would it end?’

  Al swivelled around in one of the chairs next to Mursili’s desk. ‘Dad’s an architect and Mum’s an accountant.’

  Mursili wasn’t listening. He was pushing buttons on the printer. Al was sure they’d had architects and accountants in Hattusa, even if it had been more than three thousand years ago. The palace hadn’t built itself, and part of Mursili’s job had been looking after the financial records. Al still wasn’t clear on everything Mursili had done, but he’d been left in no doubt about how important it was.

  ‘You have King Suppi,’ Mursili had told him one day, marking the air with his hand, head high. ‘Then you have the generals and the ministers and the high priests of the temples. And of course the court librarian.’ Neck high. ‘Below that, everyone is just following orders, making baskets, threshing grain, standing watch in the towers.’ Both his hands had then waved around imprecisely somewhere lower down, as if those people hadn’t mattered much.

  ‘But what if someone worked out the letter was a fake?’ Lexi said as Al did another couple of spins in his chair and Mursili sat down at his desk. ‘Couldn’t you get in trouble? Couldn’t we all get in trouble?’

  Mursili shrugged. ‘What can they do? Transfer me back to my old job? I don’t think so. Take my liver to the mountain and feed it to gryphons? You don’t do that here.’ He started typing. ‘Anyway, we get your parents to sign things all the time. Working bee? Sign here. Understand the new contagious diseases policy? Sign here.’ He was concentrating hard, typing with two fingers, but trying to make himself use at least four. ‘Sacrifice a few goats to appease the rain gods? Sign here.’

  Lexi cleared her throat. ‘I think that one’s from the old days.’

  Mursili wasn’t listening. ‘Home keys, home keys,’ he reminded himself. He had a touch-typing manual open on his desk. He hit ‘print’ and pushed his chair back from the keyboard. ‘I hope you find him soon. Your grandfather. I hope the family history project gives you something that helps, or at least confirms what you’re thinking. The dictionary hasn’t—’ He tried to think of the right way to put it. ‘Signalled you? Sent you anywhere?’

  ‘Not for two weeks,’ Al said. ‘Nearly two weeks. We’ll call you as soon as it does anything.’

  ‘Good.’ Mursili picked the letter up from the printer, checked it and folded it. ‘We need to get you as ready as we can. Information’s the key, I think. Forewarned is forearmed, as they say.’ He reached for an envelope. ‘Though much use it was when the Kaskians burnt our fields on the way to Hattusa.’

  The silver recorder sat on the coffee table with its red light on as Grandma Noela confirmed that Grandad Al hadn’t been a member of a Lions or Rotary club.

  ‘I thought the badge was something to do with school,’ she said. She had her own set of photos, far more of them than their father. ‘I thought it was a craft club. I might have even asked him once, and I think he told me that. Or debating. Yes, something to do with words.’ She looked again at the photo in her hand. Grandad Al was on a jetty, holding up a fish he had caught. He was wearing the orange towelling hat again. He had a peg key pinned to his collar. ‘He did lots of things for the kids, lots of extra things. They loved him, you know.’

  Grandma Noela had made fruitcake, and she cut Al a third piece without even thinking. She had photo albums full of family pictures, but Grandad Al had taken most of them and only appeared here and there. He was the same height as Lexi and Al’s father, and had similar hair. Their father’s hair was starting to recede. He was two years older than Grandad Al had been when he disappeared.

  In the last two years of photos, though, Grandad Al had changed – not a lot, but it was
there if you looked for it. On his wedding day he had been a thin man with slick black hair and a dark suit, and over the years he had put on weight. Over the last two years, though, he had lost it. He looked stronger. The muscles in his arms were more defined.

  ‘He looks very healthy,’ Al said, to see how Grandma Noela might react.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ She put the fishing photo down next to one from a few years before. It only made the contrast clearer. ‘He decided to look after himself. He was pretty determined about it too. His father had had heart trouble. I think that’s what did it. He and your dad started doing a lot of bushwalking. Sometimes they’d go out for days with practically nothing – just some food and a compass. Sometimes your grandfather would go by himself. Survival training, he called it. And he learnt to ride a horse. He said he’d wanted to since he was very young, but his family could never afford it. And he went to fencing classes – you know, fighting with swords. He said it was good for balance and coordination.’

  Al stopped chewing in the middle of a mouthful. He knew what it meant. He could tell Lexi did too. In the early 1980s Grandad Al, without telling anyone, had turned himself into a medieval warrior.

  ‘I have something more,’ Grandma Noela said. ‘It’s probably the time for you to see it, if you’re working on a family history project.’

  She stood up and went down the hall to her bedroom. They could hear her opening a cupboard.

  ‘Do you think that’s what we’ve got to do?’ Lexi turned the two photos on the table around to get a better look at them. ‘Learn how to ride horses and fight with swords?’

  ‘We want to find him,’ Al said. ‘So, yeah. Maybe it is what we have to do.’

  Lexi had wanted the answer to be no. She had wanted Al to have another way. The wounds on her arm from the Battle of Hastings had only just healed, but the scars were still pink.

  ‘You should probably cut down on the cake then,’ she told him. ‘People don’t get themselves ready for battle by hoovering up cake.’

  ‘Because you’d know.’ He shoved another piece in his mouth.

  ‘Hey, I already fought two battles and the food was terrible both times. No cake.’

  Grandma Noela came out of her room with a box in her hands. She sat down between them again, put her glasses on and opened it. She lifted out a folder of yellowing newspaper clippings.

  ‘One of my friends cut these out,’ she said. ‘She gave them to me later, in case I ever wanted to have them. The other things in there are from your grandad’s desk at school. The police kept them for a while.’

  She took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes. The clippings were all about Grandad Al’s disappearance.

  ‘If you’re writing family histories at Cubberla Creek, this is a story you can’t avoid.’ She sat back in her seat. She didn’t want to look. ‘I’m going to make myself another cup of tea, I think. You can ask me any questions you need to, though.’

  She stood up again, and Al moved his knees so that she could walk past.

  ‘I want to help her,’ Lexi said once Grandma was in the kitchen. ‘I’ve never seen her feeling this bad.’

  ‘We can help her. And no one else can.’ Al leant forward and picked up an article. ‘There’s one way.’ They had to go back into the past, as many times as it took to find Grandad Al. ‘I hope he’s okay. I hope he’s just stuck.’

  The newspapers had started out with big stories about his disappearance. It made several front pages. They ran the sports day photo and talked about what a popular teacher he was and how out of character it was for him to disappear. They mentioned his bushwalking, but also said that his habit was to plan each walk well in advance and to make sure Grandma Noela knew exactly where he was going and when he’d be back. There was no plan this time: it was the middle of a school day and all his bushwalking gear was where it usually was, under the house.

  When he stayed missing the papers wrote about him having no known enemies and about there being no leads among his past students. His bank accounts weren’t touched. He contacted no one. He was never seen. There was a picture of police divers searching the creek.

  He was gone, with everything he was carrying in the sports day photo. There was simply no trace.

  One article talked about his ‘health kick’ of the past couple of years, and his interest in survival skills. Pictures of him were posted at national parks, but there were no sightings.

  A friend mentioned that he’d had quite a few unexplained injuries over the years, but she had put them all down to the new activities in his life.

  ‘Hastings,’ Lexi said, ‘or whatever battles he ended up at.’

  ‘And he kept the dictionary at school, behind the loose panel in the library wall.’ It made sense to Al now. ‘He checked it on his way to sports day, and it had gone off. A word in it had activated, so he touched it, opened the portal and went after it. He went into the past and got lost, and the dictionary stayed there for 30 years, until they renovated the library.’

  In the kitchen, the kettle boiled. They could hear Grandma Noela opening the Tupperware box she kept tea bags in.

  ‘Well, now we get to find him,’ Lexi said. ‘One day, when the right word comes along.’ She leant forward to look into the box. There were pens in there, and paper clips. And an old ship with a pencil sharpener in its stern. She felt sick. ‘What if he’s the guy we saw in Nantucket? What if we did it? What if we left him there?’

  Al looked up fencing lessons online, but the pictures didn’t look much like the sword fighting he had seen – or done – in battles in the past.

  ‘We’re going to have to learn somehow,’ Lexi said when he showed her. ‘But you’re right. I don’t think it’d help us to stand like that.’ The caption on the screen said ‘lunge’ but the move in the picture looked more like poking someone with a wire while sticking your back leg out.

  They took peg keys and made them into badges. Lexi had been given a machine that made badges on their tenth birthday, so no one would be surprised by that. Al had even made a few himself. He had one that said ‘May contain traces of peanut’ and another that said ‘If you cannot see my mirrors I cannot see you’.

  Their father noticed them first. Lexi told him they were doing it for Grandad Al, and that they’d got the idea during the family history project.

  ‘That’s a nice thing to do,’ he said as he turned the badge over in his hand. ‘It even looks like the same kind of key.’ He found his glasses and took a closer look at it. ‘What do you think it’s from? Did this one come with something, or was it just a key?’

  ‘Just a key.’ She and Al had planned the answer. ‘It’s from the craft shop at Indooroopilly. Next to the old buttons.’

  ‘I wonder how your grandfather got them. I can’t imagine him in a craft shop.’ He took his glasses off. ‘Do you think it means something? He wore badges like this quite a bit. I think I just got used to it. I should have asked him.’ He shook his head. ‘No good thinking that way. We had months of treating practically everything as a clue and it all turned out not to be. You can drive yourself mad doing that. All that survival skills stuff, for instance. I once said to the police that it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d been building a nuclear fallout shelter in the backyard and stocking it with baked beans. It was a joke. The next day your grandma opened the door to a forensics team who’d been sent to check out the shelter.’

  Lexi and Al kept their badges on when they could and carried them in pockets when they couldn’t. From the photos they had seen, that was what Grandad Al had done. It had meant he was always ready to find a lost hunter, in his own time or any time he landed in the past.

  ‘How many words do you think go through Nantucket in the 1830s?’ Lexi was pinning her badge back on as they walked out of school.

  ‘Practically none.’ Al hadn’t wanted to admit that. �
�But some’ll go through America, and we can get to Nantucket, if we have time. And he’s been gone from here for 30 years, so maybe that means he’s been wherever he is for 30 years. If it was him in Nantucket, that puts him in America until the 1860s. Americans come up with lots of words. We’ll get there.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, because she didn’t want to point out that he was guessing, and they didn’t have a clue. ‘Okay.’

  ‘You and i have to go somewhere,’ Al said when he found Lexi in the kitchen.

  She was standing with the fridge door open. It started to beep at her. ‘It’s gone off?’

  ‘Just now. It’s a good word. It’s the kind of word that might help us. I bet it’s an American word.’

  He could see their parents out on the back deck. Their father was turning sausages on the barbecue and their mother was holding a glass of wine and talking. She was indicating something she wanted to do with the garden, but their father was only half-listening. Al wondered if he had time to eat a couple of sausages. But only briefly.

  ‘It’s “okay”,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Lexi shut the fridge door.

  ‘It’s “okay”. The word.’

  ‘Yeah, but how do you know it’s okay? We practically got massacred every time when the word was “water” and water should have been okay.’

  ‘No, it’s—’ Al felt like he was on the brink of a comedy routine from one of those old black-and-white TV shows that sometimes ran on the extra digital channels. Their father insisted they’d been funny once. ‘Just come.’

  Lexi followed him down the hall to his room. The dictionary was open on his desk. Even with the light on, she could see the blinking gold button from the doorway.

  ‘Oh, “okay”,’ she said when she looked at it more closely. ‘Now I get it.’

  ‘Are we doing this?’

  ‘We’re doing it. We agreed.’ She stared at the book. It might send them anywhere. It was full of invasion and war and trade and chance, and ‘okay’ could contain any combination of those. ‘Grandad Al’s got to be somewhere. I’ll shut the door, you call Mursili.’