The rest of the day, I walk through the dry autumn grass. My feet healed from my last run through the stubbly grass but now they’re soft from being trapped in the stupid hard shoes. I climb fences and search out creeks to drink from, and to cool my burning bare feet.

I walk through the hot late afternoon sun and into the evening, until it gets dark and then I find a log to sleep next to. I push my back against it and pull my knees up to my chest. I wake when the bats go over, circling the trees over me, calling to each other. The noise isn’t so scary as gun bangs down the street in the dark. I call out like a bat, lonely in the night, but no one will be answering me.

My stomach is sucked in against my backbone when I wake with the sun in my eyes. I walk to a creek and try to fill my emptiness up with water. ‘This is juicy pig on bread,’ I tell my stomach. ‘You still eating higher than a king, little stomach,’ I tell it. It gurgles back like it knows I’m lying. Trucks roar in the distance so I leave the creek and head out across a wide dusty paddock. I’m thinking maybe they’re fruit trucks heading up to farms and maybe one is going to my farm.

I pass through a field full of vines, and stop to suck at the irrigation pipes dripping water onto the vine roots. It’s not enough water, but it’s something. I walk on down a hill and back up, following that roar on the road.

The problem with heading the way the fruit trucks are heading is I’m getting further and further from the creek that wound in and out of my path yesterday.

The sun beats down on my back, and burns my arms and face and the top of my head right through my hair. I take off my good black trousers and wrap them around my head for a while, and keep my eyes mostly closed against the glare, and the trucks keep roaring on past down on the highway. In the late afternoon, the trucks are roaring the other way and I’m so hot I think I’m gonna melt. My tongue is fat and dry in my mouth and my legs are so wobbly I keep falling down. I get to a fence and rest against it for ages before I find the strength to squeeze through the wires. There’s some shade on the other side hard up against the fence in the long grass that grows all matted there, so I lie down and sleep.

The next morning my lips are glued together and my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. Still, the trucks start up their rumbling down on the road, and it makes me push myself up so my bare feet can plod on. My feet are sore, scraped and cut, and each step stabs up through my legs. Every bit of me is sore, but as long as I keep moving I have a chance. A chance to get home. The sun gets higher and hotter and my legs get wobbly again. My head aches and I think I’m gonna die out here if I don’t find a creek soon, but I can’t think which way to look for one so I keep walking the way the trucks are going.

A man yells and I can’t see him but I run for a while, coz even half dead, I reckon I can outrun the Ape. I fall down in the grass and just stay there until the yelling stops. I wait for the whirring sound of grass heads on the car, but it never comes. Of course, the Ape’s not coming for me. Ma left me. I cry, coz I figure out I’m still waiting, deep in my heart, for her to come looking for me, but I’m too tired and too dry for tears. I get up and keep walking, hoping I’m not walking in circles, hoping the wide yellow sea hasn’t tricked me again.

The next fence, I just kind of fall over it. I’m in an orchard all overgrown with grass and trees dry and shaggy with dead leaves. I think something has happened to my farm while I been gone. That it’s this now. All dried up and all the people moved on. I run on staggering, wobbling legs, and soon I’m in an open yellow field again.

Then a new kind of roar. The roar of a tractor, just like Foreman rides. I lift my hand against the sun and try to see, but my knees give out and I flop sideways onto the ground. I sit and look into the sun and Applejoy yells, ‘P! Peony!’ and then Foreman is there, scooping me up, making AJ pour water into my mouth. Then I’m on the tractor safe in Foreman’s lap with AJ pouring water on my face as we bounce across the paddocks.

‘How did you find me?’ I ask and my voice croaks out like an old goat.

AJ laughs. ‘The truck drivers saw you,’ he says. ‘They said a girl with fluffy dark hair was walking the fields for days. I been searching and watching from the hill. I saw you coming. You’s only on the next farm over!’

I try to smile but my lips crack.

Foreman delivers me down into Gramps’s arms. I press my face into his smoky shirt chest, and he whispers, ‘Peony, my sweet honey girl.’ And I know I am home.