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them. Your own body heat would naturally and gently warm up the person who was freezing.
    â€˜Bill, if we’re going to get through this night, we have to keep each other warm. Now get everything off except your singlet and jocks.’
    Mat peeled off Bill’s sopping top clothes – his hoodie and T-shirt. Bill did nothing to help. He couldn’t. Mat sat him down and pulled off his sodden jeans. Then she took her own outer clothes off. She searched through the backpack and pulled out two small packages – the foil blankets.
    â€˜Lie down,’ she ordered Bill.
    Bill wearily obeyed. Mat lay on her side next to him and arranged the two foil blankets as tightly around them both as she could. Bill had his back to her. Mat put her arms around Bill’s waist and held him tight. His body kept shaking for about fifteen minutes. The cold in his body seemed to seep through her own. Then Mat detected a quietening. Her own body heat was gently winning. She never could have said thatthey began to feel comfortably warm all over, but where her chest met Bill’s back there was a flickering of warmth. The desperate, killing kind of cold had been defeated. When Bill fell to sleep, Matty was able to let herself sleep, too.
    For the first part of that night, the two children’s sleep was light. Even so, Mat was to miss a most strange occurrence that only Bill would witness. Some time during the night, Bill woke to see an old lady crouching near them. She was humming softly and busily working the firesticks back and forth in her hands. Bill closed his eyes for what seemed a moment, but when he opened them again, the old lady had gone. Instead, there was a fire about a metre away, safely ringed with small rocks. The heat from the fire radiated across the children. The children uncurled their tightly wound bodies and sank into a deep, healing sleep.

Why didn’t you wake me when you saw her using the Djelwuck?’
    â€˜I didn’t know if I was dreaming.’
    â€˜Well that fire isn’t a dream,’ said Mat motioning with her head.
    Mat had made Bill describe what he saw, over and over again. He couldn’t remember what the old lady was wearing. He didn’t even properly see her face, but he somehow just knew she was Aboriginal. But maybe he believed this because the old lady was using the firesticks. And how did he know the lady was old? He didn’t know that either. He had seen her and he hadheard her humming. Matty wanted to know what sort of humming. Bill said it wasn’t a real tune, not something he knew, but it was sort of calm and slow.
    â€˜Well one thing is for sure,’ said Mat taking charge as she usually did, ‘we’re going to keep this fire going all day.’
    The two friends had woken to a clear blue day; the storm had worked out its bad temper and moved on. Nevertheless, the children realised how important a reliable fire was for heating, comfort and food. They gathered twigs and small lengths of branches to stoke it up. Mat and Bill were still in their singlets and underpants, their only dry clothes, so they carted a couple of logs to near the fire and draped their wet clothes, their sodden shoes and the hootchie to dry. Next, Mat produced a plastic bag of flour from the backpack, mixed it in the saucepan with dried milk and water, added a sprinkle of salt from a small lidded container, and rolled it into a firm ball that she covered in some foil. She scraped glowing coals away from the main part of the fire, then laid her creation among them and covered it with more coals. Half an hour later, the children were eating hot bread with ascraping of strawberry jam from little peel-back containers that Mat had brought along as a surprise.
    â€˜Where’d you learn to make this stuff?’ asked Bill.
    â€˜Damper,’ corrected Mat. ‘We sometimes make it in the fire at home during winter. Just for fun.’
    Two days of a cold and basic diet