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steered him back outside. Joe threw sticks on the fire, making a blaze they could see by, brighter than a lamp, and keeping Stanton waiting no longer, withdrew from his pocket a staple of fleece.
    â€˜Wool,’ breathed Stanton, his eyes following every movement of the mellow, waxy material.
    He experienced a kick in the chest. An unappeasable appetite for possession. He watched Joe twirling the swatch of fibres, and thought, what a marvel Joe was with that element dangling from his fingers. To the inexpert eye the material was no more than a dusty rag, while Stanton saw otherwise. It was a magical worm, a necklace, a cloudy icicle, a misty knife. It was fine sheep’s wool, the essence of distinction over the tawdriness of daily shapes. And surely it led back to Desmond Kale more certainly than search parties of mounted troopers and knavish blacktrackers.
    â€˜Aren’t it pretty,’ said Joe.
    Stanton saw white sparks deflected down a tumble of greasy crimps as Joe layered it across his cupped hands, a gift.
    â€˜My deepest thanks.’
    â€˜You owe me nuffink, saving something I would like to ask of you, which is a few pointers, or lessons in wool, for me and my sons in telling good stuffs from bad. We have been badly misled in several consignments.’
    â€˜The first principle is the greatest.’
    â€˜Which is?’
    â€˜The hook.’
    â€˜I never heard of such a thing with sheep,’ said Joe. ‘Except at the butcher’s.’

‘THE HOOK — IT IS THE means of taking hold,’ said Stanton, ‘say between grasses, seeds, in the way they cling; among insects with their feelers, birds with their claws, fish with scales, man with his fingers, teeth, and his generative organs; God has decreed it among all with their scents and colours, down into in our cravings for attraction; and further in the affinity of thoughts as philosophies, in the mechanisms and mysteries of love, in the possibilities of accidents or otherwise deciding our fates. See this tiny filament or threadlet of wool?’
    Stanton separated one out in the firelight.
    â€˜Stop there,’ said Joe. ‘It is more like a cobweb than an hook.’
    â€˜It is all in the catch and the tangle. A thread of wool is made up of scales, the scales hook threads together making wools and worsteds. The hook is the great binder of wool’s existence; the catch is its means; the tangle is a natural state.’
    â€˜Tangles explains my life, at least,’ said Joe. ‘But I still don’t understand wools.’
    â€˜It needs English mills to unravel it all. They are marvels atstraightening threads to make them usable, and they need the best raw wools, and we can find them for them, Joe.’
    â€˜I’m not much helped.’
    â€˜You will be if you come to my place directly, but without your outrageous percentages stacked on. I will show you more what I mean. I shall unpick your tangle and make you rich.’
    Stanton smoothed the sample along the length of his forearm.
    â€˜Where was it found?’
    Joe could not say. His informants were out of their wits, he said, at the western limit of signs, at the tumbled sandstone ramparts on the far side of the biggest river. They found dead men’s bones. They would have died themselves, except their tracker found a way. After a three-day return ride they came back where waggon tracks converged, and there they found Joe. A trooper, and his blacktracker, the two men bargained for gin and lapped it up like dogs did water. For which they paid in this handful of floss gathered from thorn bushes.
    All they’d said was, that from where it was found, either all were perished — or they had maps to go on, to take them as far as China.
    â€˜Maps?’ said Stanton.
    â€˜Except there ain’t no maps, from what I have heard.’
    â€˜Correct. None that anyone has ever laid eyes on, Joe. Remember that. You are wise to say so. It