Shoe On a Limb

I felt I’d been to hell and back before we reached the reedy flat, where the cattle mobbed before we crossed the stream. Old Harry called me over, taking off his battered hat “This is where she died so it does seem”. He pointed to a river gum that was old and gnarled with age, where a shoe hung on the limb for thirty years. His arm swept across the tussocks trying hard to gauge, where his brother found her clothes and too his fears. “She was just a lass ‘round five or so who wandered off” he said. “Walking two miles to a mill to meet her dad. From here is when the mystery, so quickly raised its head! A search was organized but signs were bad”. “Some believed she wasn't lost, that when she left her home, she wandered where the river claimed her life, but others close to family said the lass was apt to roam, announcing in a whisper the little girl may be in strife”. “Through the day the scrub was searched on foot and riding hacks. It seemed the fruitless quest had turned to vain. A call came in that brought new hope; they’d found some little tracks, but very soon they found them lost again”. “A woman claimed she heard some crying when she went for water, as dusk was falling heavy on the day. The story fell upon deaf ears with her man whose theory fought her, ‘No five year old could wander all this way!’ “If only he had listened, maybe the lass would have been found, and the district would have had a happy end, yet it was six miles further on that held the searchers in astound; her clothes were lying near a river bend”. “The little girl was never found;, she had perished in the wild. Her monument’s that shoe tied to the limb”. Harry said she carried it, now a memory to the child. Others tell a different tale to him. They say it is more simple bought on by her grieving folk, who made the pilgrimage to where she may have died, and bought with them the shoe after prayers were quietly spoke. In her remembrance to the limb the shoe was tied. And the drovers passing through tell you every tale is grim. Why that little shoe was tied for all to see. Some claim to hear her crying when ‘ere they pass the limb. No stockman camps beside the haunted tree. Yet I wander back there thinking. Habits do die hard I guess, when the mysteries and the theories never dim. Why that shrine of thirty years has kept me wondering no less, where that little shoe is tied upon the limb.