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roos, and the spinifex roots dug up by a wombat whose clodhoppery stumbles banged against the walls at night.
    The parrots were still happy, crunching blackbutt and stringybark gumnuts in the forest at our back.
    Angie seemed happy, too. She was now a very tame lithe eel, decidedly fatter than when we had first discovered each other. We fed her once a day, and after the first week, she was always waiting for us at noon.
    At first, dinner was an egg that we broke into the water. Then, one day I dropped the egg before breaking it, and the whole thing slid to the bottom of the creek with only the smallest bump. Angie opened her jaws around the egg and encompassed it, shell and all.
    We read about the way eels often travel overland on their migrations, and how they need wet conditions for this, so as not to damage their thick slime covering.
    And we heard farmers only half laugh over their "escape artists", the eels raised in dams only to gallop off in their snake-slither way to running water at the first wet-spell opportunity.
    That winter, with the daily visits, I felt ever closer to Angie, with that special love one feels from the thrill of earning the trust of a wild animal. By now, she ate out of my hand. She played around my ankles, sluicing around them so that it was hard to feel which was her, which water. She tickled my ankle in a gentle nibble game, and tunnelled her body through the "O" of my hands. The only thing she hadn't done was travel on land, and I wanted to see her do this. To capture this special ability in action became my pet project.
    First, I'd put the egg closer and closer to the edge of the water. She seemed shy to go too shallow, and sometimes she was inextricably anxious altogether. I soon discovered she was frightened by flitting shadows. And also, that she didn't like travelling on dry stones. I built a ramp of sod and grass, and sluiced it with a bucket, and when she felt comfortable, that worked. But try as I would, she still wouldn't come up onto the bank.
    "It's too dry," Griff said. "Wait till it rains."
    ~
    On September first, it finally did—most of the night, in a steady drizzle. We woke late to a darkened room. The sky, an unbroken blue for so many days that cerulean had become ugly and the otherwise beautiful early and late shadows only accentuated the sharpness of hunger—that sky was gone—replaced by a soft and lovely cover of woolly grey.
    The whole morning it drizzled. Birds sat dripping in the trees. Currawongs and finches sang.
    "Today's your day," Griff said.
    "Let's record it," I twittered.
    We set up the tripod and telephoto on the balcony, and zoomed it in to the perfect spot, the top of a rise just 20 metres from the creek.
    I ran down with two eggs and a strip of meat for good measure. She loved meat. The smell of her meal would be irresistible, especially since we'd figured for a while now that all her meals these days were on us. It was 11:45 but she was waiting.
    She was unusually lively with this rain, and there were no shadows to frighten her.
    I showed her the eggs and waived the strip of meat in the water. Up the hill I backed.
    She watched, keeping her head still but making all kinds of fancy turns of the rest of her body.
    The first egg I put on the top of the ramp.
    She came into the shallows, and then started up the ramp.
    Moving backwards, I placed the second egg and the meat on the designated high spot, then turned and ran back to the house, bursting onto the balcony in time to see her lift her head, smell and sight the second part of her meal.
    Griff moved away from the camera so I could look through the lens myself.
    And I could see everything in detail. She made it all the way to the second egg and was perfectly in the centre of the shot when the eagle swooped.
    The photo shows Angie in the claws of the eagle—a long, limp, streaming ribbon.
    That day, the drought broke, to be replaced the next day and the week after, by the flood.

The Curse of