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pulled his journal of the Beagle from the shelf and turned to a page headed ‘Ornithology’. He saw that Covington was correct and that ‘obtained’ was the very word used.

Another six months passed and Covington returned from his home in the south. It was October and changeable weather to the point of madness, hot as the equator in the morning, misty and chill with low rushing cloud in the afternoon. MacCracken looked up one day and there Covington was on the horizon, unmoving, watchful. He sat on a hired pony. Much had transpired between them during their separation. They had corresponded on money matters and through the facility of Covington’s Sydney agent MacCracken already owned cuts in a number of Covington’s cargoes: whale oil, timber, hides. They were beginning to show him a handy profit. So there was no more welcome visitor on MacCracken’s rocky patch than the man he saw.
    â€˜Mr Covington!’ MacCracken waved his hat.
    Overlarge on horseback, Covington was a stone pillar awaiting a lightning bolt. His movements were a story of shoulder bones, rib bones, ankle bones and skull all broken in his youth, mended, and thereafter very sore. Those ‘boans’ ground against each other and were stiff, lending Covington his monumental manner when he attempted turning his neck.
    MacCracken strode up the white track. ‘Old fellow, how good to see you!’
    â€˜That woman who helped me,’ Covington looked down from his hired nag, ‘what was her name?’
    Covington’s gaze had all the power of a lament. MacCracken helped him down. They descended the landscape of rocky headland and sheltered bay.
    That day MacCracken wrote in his diary:
    I love the old fossil, he warms my liking, it is a good feeling to know we are friends.
    Two years later MacCracken went back to the date and circled the entry in red. It was because of a letter Covington carried in his satchel but was no more likely to take out and show around than he was to strip his clothes and walk naked. It was a letter from Charles Darwin and it read:
    Dear Covington, I have for some years been preparing a work for publication which I commenced twenty years ago, and for which I sometimes find extracts in your handwriting! The work will be my biggest; it treats on the origin of varieties of our domestic animals and plants, and on the origin of species in a state of nature. I have to discuss every branch of natural history, and the work is beyond my strength and tries me sorely.
    Two years. That would be the length of time Covington nurtured his pain before MacCracken understood the story he carried in his bones, and how it ate away at him. Two years before Covington showed MacCracken the letter. By then MacCracken would, in a kind of by-product of shame, know what his own role was to be in the tale of Covington’s life, and how to go about correcting his ignorance and bringing his friend through to his end.

    Covington stayed a week subjecting himself to the pounding of Nurse. MacCracken had leisure to examine him for his present state of health, which was excellent save for his rheumatism and deafness. Like a farrier re-shoeing an old horse he gave Covington’s ears another syringing. Covington declared himself well satisfied, though he heard no better.
    â€˜What made you deaf?’ MacCracken shouted a question he had asked before.
    As before he got a deflected reply.
    â€˜Why is a worm blind?’ responded Covington, then answered his own question: ‘Because it lives in the dark, that is why.’
    MacCracken rolled his eyes. They were back to their first way of dealing with each other, with Covington excluding MacCracken somewhat, yet demanding his attention—and always on the edge of a withheld confession.
    â€˜MacCracken, can I trust you?’
    â€˜As your physician and your friend? As your business partner? Aye on all counts!’
    â€˜How wise are you?’
    â€˜Wise