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a single world of muscle and nerve, mind both present and dreamlike afloat, communicated itself to me, entered my fists, where they held fast to the twined leashes and took the strain of the dogs’ forelegs and rump, ran back down my forearms to my chest and belly, set my heart steadily beating.
    Matt had his hand now on Braden's shoulder and was singing to him—that's how I heard it. Slowing him down. Creating in him a steady state of being inside himself. In the eye that would sight along the barrel of the rifle. In the index finger that would gently squeeze the trigger. In the softness of his shoulder that would take the impact of the shot down through his spine, his buttocks, the muscles at the back of hiscalves to the balls of his feet where they were spread just wide enough to balance the six feet two of him squarely on the earth.
    I wished that Matt was singing, in that low voice whose words I missed but whose tune I was straining to catch, to me, or to something
in
me. That he was discovering for me that state of detachment but deep immersion, beyond mere attention or nerve, that, once I had hit upon it, I might go back and back to—the sureness of something centred that I lacked.
    I watched Braden and thought I saw it entering him. When Matt nodded and released his shoulder at last he would be fully equipped. They would go forward and the others would get up and follow, even Henry Denkler, waking abruptly from his doze as if even in sleep he too had been quietly listening. Twenty minutes from now, Braden would have it for ever. Even if he never returned to any of this, it would be his.
    It was this, rather than the business of simply putting a shot into the brain of a maddened beast, that he had come out here to get hold of so that these witnesses to it—his father, his brothers, the professional, Matt Riley, Henry Denkler—would know he had it, that they had passed it on.
    On some signal from Matt Riley that I failed, for all my tenseness, to register, Wes McGowan got to his feet, came to where I was sitting, and leaned down. His big hand covered Tilly's skull, tickling her with his finger behind the ears. “Angus,” he told me, "I want you to stay back here with the dogs.”
    I swallowed hard, nodded glumly. I'd known this was coming, and Mr. McGowan, not to embarrass me by witnessing my youthful disappointment, turned away. I knew what he was doing. He was keeping me out of harm's way. But there was something else as well. If anything went wrong out there my inexperience might be dangerous, and not only to myself.
    “Come on, boys,” I told the dogs, and I put my arms around Tilly, who turned and licked my face.
    Glen and the others were on their feet now. Braden cast me a quick look and I nodded. I too got to my feet. The little party formed in three lines, Matt Riley and Jem in front to do the tracking, Braden, Glen and Stuart behind. They set off through the waist-high grass. Once again I would be on the sidelines watching, as I had been so often before when it was a matter only of the telling. I urged the dogs up into the tray ofthe Bedford and, scrambling up behind them, stood straining my eyes for a better view.
    The shoulders and hats, which were all I could see above the sunlit grasstops, moved slowly forward. Twenty, thirty yards further and Matt Riley sheered off to the left. The rest of the party came to a stop. Waited. I could hear the silence like a hotter space at the centre of the late-morning heat. Big grasshoppers were blundering about. Flies simmered and swarmed. The dogs, on tensed hind legs, leaned into the still air, tautening the leash. “Easy, Jigger,” I whispered to the younger dog, though he paid no attention. His mind was away up ahead, low down in the grass roots, close to the earth. “Tilly,” I told the other, "quiet, eh? Be quiet now.” My own mind too was out there somewhere. Beside Braden. Who would be sweating hard now, every muscle tense, preparing for the moment