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himself, it will approach me.
    So when news drifted up from the south of spirits, white-faced, covered from head to foot in bark and riding four-footed beasts that were taller than a man, he was disturbed, and the desire to see these creatures, to discover what they were, plucked at him till he could not rest. In the company of an old woman who knew the country because she had grown up there, he set out to find them, but when they came to a part of it that she did not know, the woman turned back. He went on alone. Long before Lachlan Beattie and the two girls found him he had been skirting the edge of the settlement, living off the strange yet familiar country down there, and keeping watch from the cover of the scrub.
    His first discovery was tracks of a kind that utterly puzzled him, then, in the middle of the path, a line of droppings, big, round, golden-dark with a sheen to them, about the size of a buzzard’s egg, unlike the pellets of local creatures. Touched with a fearful curiosity, he got down on all fours and sniffed. A kind of clattering filled his head, and he glanced up, expecting to find himself in the narrow and noisy confines of – of what? What had he almost seen? It was gone again. Was that what he would find on the other side of the scrub?
    He worried over the image, trying to catch again some detail that would make a picture, but it had been just a flash, mostly noise and a sense of panic in him. And all around, so clear that it filled all the spaces in him, was the familiar busyness of the scrub, a low, continuous rub and fret brokenby bird calls, each of which brought a clear little body to his mind, flutterings, scurryings, the skirl of insects.
    The next sign he came to was a red blanket thrown over a line. His heart leapt. But when he crept forward and whipped it aside there was only a blaze of grass heads, the bulk of a wooden hut, and standing in front of it, a little round-bellied naked child, rather unsteady on her white legs, and staring. She stood like that for a moment, puzzled, absorbed, then raised her fists to her eyes and howled.
    Later, from another part of the scrub, he looked into a clearing, all raw timber and scattered leaves, and saw a bearded fellow in a blue shirt and braces who spat on his hands, took up a long-handled, bladed instrument, and stood preparing to swing it. He was amazed. A kind of meaning clung to the image in the same way that the clothes he was wearing clung to the man, and when the blade flashed and jarred against wood, it struck home in him. Axe .
    The word flew into his head as fast and clear as the flash and whistle of its breath. Axe. Axe . Circles of meaning rippled away from the mark it blazed in the dark of his skull.
    Further on a woman emerged from a hut carrying a basket on her hip. She set it down and began pegging clothes on a line, shirts, then trousers, then children’s things and a frock. He fingered the rough material of the rag he had kept from the raft – which he wore knotted at his waist, as a sign should he be caught – and had to sit in the tall grass hugging himself, such a rush of bewilderment and soft affection came over him.
    He watched the woman hoist the line high by setting a forked pole under it, then pick up her basket and go. The soft things shifted in the breeze. Dripping sunlight, they made gestures this way and that, but awkwardly, weighed down by the shadows in their folds. The hem of a skirt lifted as if lively feet were in movement under it in a shuffling walk.
    Later, the same woman came out of her hut and stood making clucking sounds. Is this their language? he thought. He tried it very softly, putting his tongue to the roof of his mouth. Cluck cluck cluck .
    Suddenly, in a spurt of dust, a mob of big birds shot intosight. All closely bunched and flapping their wings over one another’s backs and squawking, they squabbled round the woman’s skirt. She laughed, scooped a handful of something from the bowl she carried,