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the times Will and Jack was away, and the times they was back. Another kind of day and night, only months long. I turned twelve and Jack gave me twelve shells in a box, the whole thing small enough to fit in my palm. Want to marry me, Sarah Thornhill ?
    I turned thirteen while they was away again. Wondered if he’d bring back another box, thirteen shells this time, but he never brought the same thing twice. That year it was an eggshell, creamy with green specks, that he’d blown out and kept in a box full of feathers. Then they went off again.
    It got to be so every trip was longer. The seals running out, Pa said. Had to go further to find them and when they did, not so many as before. Where it might of taken two months to fill the hold, now they might be gone the best part of a year.
    By and by I started to get a womanly shape, and my monthlies come. Ma was too genteel to talk about anything that went on in your insides, but Mary was fifteen going on sixteen, had her monthlies for a few years. She was making eyes at Billy Cobb from up the river. He was a lump of a boy and I couldn’t see that Mary liked him much, she was just practising on him. He’d row down from Cobb’s now and then and the two of them would go off by themselves. When I got my monthlies she was kind about it. Not children anymore, we got on better.
    You can have babies now, Dolly, she said. That’s what it means.
    I must of looked blank.
    With a man, you know, she said. You seen how the horses let down that tube thing they’ve got. Get up on the mare if you let them, put it inside. Same with people, only a bit nicer about it.
    I’d seen the poor old mares, and the cows too, and I wasn’t going to have anything like that done to me. But I was ready to stop being a child. Had a feeling Mary might not know everything about what men and women did together.
    With Will and Jack gone so long it was a dull old time. I’d wake up early but wish I hadn’t, the day stretching out too long. So many people in the house, but empty too. I’d go up to the cave, the way I always had, and sit in the honey-coloured light listening to the What Bird. The bird was the same and the light was the same, but somehow they’d lost their flavour. I wondered at the child I’d been not so long before, who thought a morning answering the What Bird was a morning well spent.
    My body was becoming someone else’s, and my self too, but body and self neither settled yet into their shapes. I was out of sorts, waiting to catch up with myself.
    Have you got worms, Dolly, Ma said. You’re restless as a cat.
    Came at me with the opening medicine. I made myself sit still after that. Commend thy soul to patience , I said to myself, like I’d heard the parson say. Commend thy soul to patience .
    Every day and every week much like the last. We’d have the visits from the Langlands and the rest of them, Sophia always on at Pa, when would Will be back? Me and Mary went riding, as far as the rocks where Thornhill’s finished, or down the other way towards Payne’s Mill. Might go with Johnny up out of the valley along the Sydney road as far as Martin’s Corner, he was sweet on Judith Martin, her father had the place there. Once or twice we took the horses across on the punt and up the new road on the other side of the river. Stop at the top and look at the view down over the valley, turn round again.
    Never far enough to get anywhere, and back home a few hours later.
    A trip to Sydney one time, that was a big thing. I’d just turned fourteen. Down the river on Trevarrow’s Emily , then out to sea for the run down the coast to Port Jackson, lucky to have a fair wind and a calm sea. A public house in Bridge Street wanted a man to train up, and Johnny was nineteen, wanted to do it. Couldn’t wait, he was that keen to get away from old Dead-and-Alive, by which he meant our valley.
    I didn’t fancy Sydney, loud