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long way around to make a little holiday of it. A shame it’s rained every day—but look, there’s a bit of blue ahead.”
    Tess shows me photos from their last job. “And here’s Carl cutting up a camel we shot for meat.”
    Is that a chainsaw he’s using?
    â€œCamel’s a big animal, but a chainsaw makes quick work of it.”
    Carl and Tess are into natural foods. “Whenever we’re on the road, whatever we hit, we eat.”
    Happiness is the discovery that I’m sitting next to a dead kangaroo. My benefactors peeled the roo off the road just yesterday, and what a waste it would be to let it rot. “Tea time!” announces Carl as we swerve into a roadside picnic area. Australians call lunch “tea time,” and I know what’s cooking. I collect the firewood while Carl hacks away at the kangaroo.
    Roo tail is elegantly simple to prepare. Cut off the tail and toss it on the fire to burn off the hair. Remove it and with a large dangerous knife scrape
off the charred bits. Throw it back on the coals for ten or fifteen minutes. Voilà! Carl gags with his first bite, but he claims it’s only because he swallowed one of the bush flies that orbit our heads in plasmatic swarms. I have trouble eating around the tendons, but Carl points out that they’re useful for sewing up leather goods.
    They’re generous folk, not only sharing their roadkill but taking me to Tennant Creek. Three hundred miles of Jeep and bus have had the desired effect: the lip of the storm is directly overhead, with muddled gray behind me and unfettered blue ahead. Wonderful. Balanced between the wet and the dry, I choose the dry and ride off into the desert.
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    TWO WEEKS AGO in Darwin a man recommended that I carry at least forty liters of water when traveling in the desert. “But that’s forty kilos!” I said. Eighty-eight pounds. “I’ll die not of thirst, but exhaustion.” He leaned close and said, “Look, mate—there’s nothing in the center—nothing at all.”
    The wetlander’s throat-clutching dread of deserts isn’t so different from my claustrophobia when hemmed in by trees. It’s a matter of what feels like home, and for me home is where the bulb of the sun pops up and the fine yellow dawn slides over the world and, without even getting out of my sleeping bag, I can see the true horizon, land’s end.
    That’s what it’s like my first morning in the desert, a cool and dry morning camped near a heap of granite boulders called the Devil’s Marbles. Between the rocks are sandy watercourses with an occasional ghost gum—a eucalyptus that appears to have not bark but skin as white as a Nordic princess’s. Out on the flats beyond the rocks are the narrow-leaf mulgas, each as forlorn as Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree.
    They suit me and the birds fine. This isn’t a he-man death desert, like the truly waterless Atacama of Chile, but a relatively sissy desert getting some ten inches of rain yearly, similar to my Tucson home. One difference from home, however, is Musca vetustissima , the bush fly. It’s just a wee thing that doesn’t bite, which is more than you can say for some human toddlers. On the other hand, a child doesn’t walk across your eyeballs.
    The female bush fly is merely in search of protein, says Jim Heath in his delightful little book The Fly in Your Eye . She needs proper nutrition from
your mucus, tears, sweat, or saliva. Only then can she muster the energy to lay a clutch of eggs in her favored nursery, a fresh piece of dung. The bigger the dung, the better. Sadly for the bush fly, Australia’s largest animals vanished during the last ice age, perhaps on the menu of the Aborigines. Without gold-medal dung producers like the one-ton Diprotodon optatum , which looked like the offspring of a rhino and a grizzly bear, the bush flies of arid Australia eked out a