a rich lode, or

Sandy One and his family were a little way inland, living on Mustle’s property. It was winter and the storms lashing the coast had swept into their little grove. Sandy One was not as young or healthy as he once was. The Mustles let him erect a humpy on their land. After all, he was still useful enough around the sheds, and they felt a certain obligation to him and his family.

A Sunday. Sandy One wandered away, going nowhere really, although he hoped the rifle he carried signalled some firm intention, such as hunting. Unknown to the old man, Chatalong followed him and—even secreting himself along like this—continued to whisper some sort of commentary.

They moved off into a fine, drizzling rain; the old man, and the whispering boy following a little after him, as if they were part of a series, or a variation upon a constant pattern. By the time they had, as it were, merged, and a tiring Chatalong was beside the dreaming old man, they had already walked a long way, had moved through the series of hills and gullies that ran between the coast, several miles away, and a chain of salt lakes to the north. The narrow-leafed poison bush (so called because it is poisonous to stock, although indigenous creatures eat it with no ill-effect) was rampant in a thin strip of land here, and had provided the apparent reason for the Dones to erect a fence around it some time before they relinquished the lease.

When it rained heavily, the water rushed through this land via a gully and into a soak near where the Dones’ first homestead had been, and from where they had moved a little over a decade ago, stripping the place of what they could and leaving behind them only dry and already crumbling stone walls.

Sandy One and Chatalong came across a mob of kangaroos in a small plain of waving grass and Sandy, for some reason, shot at a big buck which would have been too tough for eating. Perhaps he targeted it because of the way it glanced over its shoulder at them, or because it would provide more sport for the dogs, or ... Jack Chatalong could see no apparent reason. But Sandy One only wounded the animal. They followed its blood-spattered trail, and heard the dogs at it, then one of them yelping in pain. The sound sent a thrill through the boy.

They found the dog whimpering and with its guts hanging out. The roo had sliced it open. The other dogs were tearing at the writhing kangaroo and blood spattered their eyes, ears, snarling snouts.

Old Sandy shot the injured dog and, as he turned, he saw Chatalong with something in his hands. The boy’s hair was damp from the drizzle; the water in drops and web-like strands, and through the fog of years, of the rum and disease eating him, Sandy One once again saw a piddling little creek, the small sheet of granite and its boulders. Almost all the trees had gone.

Chatalong stood on a piece of granite which stuck out from the slope in the way bone, broken from its skeleton, emerges from split flesh.

‘Look.’

Floodwaters had torn at the last tree, an old one bent by winter gales, and toppled it. Small gullies had been cut into the soil, and now there were collections of bones, mixed with sticks and small boulders where they had been caught and dumped by the rushing water. Brittle lines of white, of yellow, stabbed from the flat spaces of clay and sucked at what light there was on this day.

‘There’s more,’ called Chatalong, faltering. It was a skull he held in his hands.

Sandy One called him away. ‘Leave it be. Don’t muck about with them, Chat.’

Hard hooves galloped in his chest as Sandy One called the little boy to him, noticing (in a strange parenthesis as he did so) how pale he seemed. The day cleared momentarily, and Sandy saw a single expanse of grey-black sky and sea over the boy’s shoulder, and a white line appear in it, way out there, about where the horizon would be.

Then saw gold at his feet. Perhaps a reef of it...