The country between Thalassa and Fairly is flat and treeless, except for the usual rows of river gums that grow along the many creek beds of the plain. The road runs beside the railway tracks, which have been built above ground level on banks of earth and rock. Foster knows that, with heavy rain, this part of the Willochra is subject to sudden floods, and approves of the railway’s raised construction. It was a flood that killed Henry Axam; Foster snorts in his saddle at the thought of such a fop pitting himself against the elemental waters. The morning has that brilliant, mineral quality he loves in early spring out bush: clear sky, the rising sun burning off the night’s chill, each tuft of grass distinct, the ranges rising green and red on every side and, to his left, six or seven mallee ringnecks skimming the saltbush. He thinks, as usual, about how he might describe all this in prose: ‘vast, rolling plains’ occurs to him, but he dismisses it at once as far too obvious; he prefers ‘the radiant sheen of the ringneck parrot’ and ‘the indolent spiralling of the omnipresent eagles’. Foster observes Thalassa fences strung along the road, Thalassa troughs and windmills; looking ahead, he sees the chimney smoke of the distant town. Everywhere he looks, he sees evidence of order. The ride into Fairly and beyond it, to the Wallace farm, gives him considerable satisfaction, and he and Wooding reach Undelcarra by nine o’clock.

  The sergeant is happy to meet the constable who has, until now, taken charge of the search operations. Foster has heard good things of this Manning, with one exception: as a young policeman, it appears, he turned a blind eye to some card sharps at a race meet; seemed, in fact, to accept money from these sharps in return for his blind eye. Upon questioning, Manning mounted some credible defence involving the intention to stop payment of a cheque, and the matter was allowed to rest. Foster’s informant did discover that, soon after this incident, Manning distinguished himself in the capture of two inveterate cattle thieves, one of whom he shot and killed—a man held in such low esteem by his own people that no reprisals came from the natives. Foster remembers this episode because he alluded to it in his most recent book, Customs of the Central Australian Aborigines. Foster judges a man by his deeds, as he hopes to be judged himself: some are good, some are ill-advised. The key lies in the balance, and he considers Constable Manning’s ledger squared.

  Certainly Foster is pleased by the set-up as he rides into the Wallace farm and sees horses saddled and men assembled. Manning’s waiting at the gate. He looks younger than expected, broad-set and ginger.

  ‘We had word late last night,’ Manning says, once Foster has introduced himself. ‘There’s signs of the boy north-east.’

  ‘What signs?’

  ‘A trail. Footprints.’

  Foster nods. ‘Is this common knowledge?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Manning says. ‘I thought it best to wait for you.’

  Foster approves of this. In these situations, he prefers to keep general hopes high and specific expectations low. Manning says he’ll take Foster to speak to the mother, who he mentions is hard of hearing, and leads the sergeant up the path towards the house. This building, like the others scattered around it, is dwarfed by the expanse in which it’s settled. A black dog watches them from the verandah.

  ‘Where’s Wallace, then?’ Foster asks.

  ‘He’s out already, sir, with his black boy. Been out since yesterday morning.’

  ‘We’re not looking for him as well, then, are we?’

  Manning seems to find this neither funny nor tasteless; it’s hard to know if this neutrality indicates obedience. Either way, he may turn out to lack initiative. And yet the card sharps, and the capture of the cattle thieves—it’s possible that this is just a bigger operation than he’s used to, and he’s out of his depth. Foster comes to a sudden stop. This is an old tactic of his; he likes the agitation it produces in the man he’s walking with.

  Foster says, ‘Any reason to suspect ill-treatment?’

  ‘You mean, was the boy ever thrashed? Not beyond the usual, I’d say.’

  ‘What kind of man is Wallace? Any talk about him?’

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary,’ Manning says.

  ‘Nothing out of the ordinary,’ Foster repeats, as if confirming a long-held conviction of his own. Then he begins to walk again, and reaches the house ahead of Manning.

  The interior of the house is exactly what Foster expects to find on one of these failing northern wheat farms. There’s always one good piece of furniture that looks out of place, an emissary from a better life—in this instance, a fine chiffonier. The harvests fail, the mortgage looms, but no one ever forgets to polish the mahogany. The mother, Mrs Wallace, appears to be sensible and tidy. Unusually tall, perhaps, but Foster approves of tallness in women; it suggests ambition of the right kind. In cases like this it’s the mother you look out for—if she should get overexcited, you’ll have problems. (It goes without saying that fathers can be tricky too: defensive of their turf or, like this Wallace, determined to play the hero.) But Mrs Wallace seems to be in control of herself. She looks at Foster’s lips and not his eyes, and holds her head in such a way that he concludes her left ear’s best. There’s food ready, and a big girl, presumably the eldest Wallace daughter, hands him a pannikin of tea. He likes the look of her. Nice wide hips. There are other girls—younger sisters—wandering about. One child yawns against the mother’s leg. Another girl pokes with some vehemence at the fire in the stove; the black dog yaps at her feet.

  ‘Please sit,’ says Mrs Wallace.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Mrs Wallace.

  ‘The smoke,’ says Mrs Wallace. She seems inclined to start sentences with no intention of finishing them.

  The girl at the stove says, ‘The smokestack’s coming loose again.’

  Foster hadn’t noticed any smoke but now that she’s mentioned it, there is a whiff in the air. If anything, the girl at the stove is encouraging it into the room. He sits in the armchair he’s offered—it’ll be the father’s chair, you can see where his boots have smoothed a groove in the hard-packed floor. Foster has learned to accept the hospitality of these good, simple farming types without fuss; they offend easily. He remains conscious all the while of the oldest girl, the one with the hips, who stands quite still but gives the impression, nevertheless, that she’s revolving to give him a look at every part of her. The mother sits in a less comfortable chair and draws the yawning child onto her knee. Manning, the young constable, remains standing.

  Foster sits straight in the paternal chair. ‘I have a good deal of experience with lost children,’ he says, ‘and there are certain predictable behaviours.’ He once heard adults described, in a joking tone, as ‘lapsed children’; he disapproves of this. It suggests the puerile possibility of return, and to what? He was never more stupid than when he was a child. ‘Now, an adult, if he’s lost, or she, will walk himself in circles looking for a way out. That’s if he doesn’t have the sense to know his way by the position of the sun or stars. But children when they’re lost have a tendency to walk in a long, straight line’—here he thrusts his arm out and squints along its length—‘and nothing will induce them to turn back. Nine times out of ten, children fix on one way and they follow it to the death.’ A slight stir in the room suggests that ‘to the death’ might have been too blunt. He adds, ‘And that’s how we find them. It’s quite routine, quite ordinary.’

  The girl at the stove lays the poker down as if it’s a loaded weapon she can’t quite trust and says, ‘Denny isn’t ordinary.’

  So the child is either ill or mental, which could complicate things considerably. This is the kind of information he should have had before leaving Port Augusta.

  Another girl, from out of the blur of sisters, says, ‘He’s delicate.’

  ‘He’s not sick or anything,’ says the girl at the stove. ‘Miss McNeil says he’s sensitive.’

  ‘What I need to know,’ says Foster, ‘is his height and weight, the colour of his hair, what he’s wearing, and the kind of shoe if any.’ The girl by the stove looks as if she plans to object to something, so Foster raises one finger and his voice: ‘In addition,’ he says, ‘any identifying marks, any difference in foot size, any turning in of the feet, any limp or favouring of one side—anything out of the ordinary of this kind, I certainly need to know.’

  The girl by the stove raises her voice to say, ‘Oh? Is there another lost boy out there, and you’re afraid you’ll mix them up?’

  ‘Cissy,’ admonishes the mother.

  ‘He drags his left foot,’ someone says—it’s the older girl with the hips. ‘But only when he’s tired.’

  ‘He doesn’t!’ says the girl by the stove.

  The girl with the hips ignores this; instead she takes a few steps towards Foster, dragging her left foot almost imperceptibly. By God, she’s a lovely lot of flesh.

  ‘He doesn’t,’ repeats the girl by the fire, but she looks unsure.

  ‘He comes to here,’ says the big girl, indicating a spot just above her right hip. ‘Fair complexion, fair hair—this colour.’ She points to the hair of the child sitting on the mother’s lap. ‘He has a red mark, strawberry-shaped, behind his left knee.’

  One of the smaller sisters pipes up to say, ‘It’s because Mam wanted strawberries when—’

  The big girl hushes her. ‘He’s wearing short grey trousers. Boots with laces and a light shirt. No coat.’

  ‘No hat,’ adds Manning. The girl by the fire looks at him as if surprised, and Manning notices and turns a smidge defensive. ‘Mrs Wallace told me yesterday no hat.’

  Foster looks back at the spot above the big girl’s hip. ‘And nothing else with him?’

  The girls all look to their mother. ‘Mam,’ says the big one loudly, towards her mother’s left ear, ‘what did Denny have with him?’

  ‘A sack,’ the mother says. ‘He had a sack.’

  ‘Thank you,’ says Foster gravely, rising from his chair. Manning and even the girl by the stove take a step backwards. The big girl, though, stays where she stands. He turns to the mother and leans in. ‘I’ll speak to the men now. We’ll head out as soon as my trackers arrive. I’ll do my best for you, Mrs Wallace, and your son. There’s every reason to believe we’ll find him safe and well.’

  He thinks of the boy he found in a river, neck snapped; the other in the well at Blinman; the girl in a sand dune whose skull was uncovered by dogs; the Daylesford three in the hollow tree; and the boy with the cricket bat who tried to eat the leather of his braces before he died. Foster knows that unless this Denny Wallace is found within the next day, he’ll almost certainly die of thirst, exposure, exhaustion, or all three—if he isn’t dead already.

  ‘What’s more,’ Foster says, taking Mrs Wallace’s hands in his own, ‘it’s the season for native peaches. He does know, doesn’t he, about the peaches?’

  ‘Of course he knows,’ says the girl by the fire, and the dog yaps as if in agreement.

  Mrs Wallace bows her head over Foster’s hands. He allows this, then extracts them with deliberate care. He makes sure to look at the girl with the hips, who doesn’t blush or squirm. Before leaving the cottage to speak to the men assembled outside, he consults his watch, smiles, and gestures at the clock on the mantel shelf. ‘Your clock,’ he says, ‘is slow by seven minutes.’

  Joanna Axam decides to visit Mary Wallace. She calls Bolingbroke and he comes, mournful, on his reedy legs—the strangest, calmest whippet she has ever owned, who lives for heat and sleep and silence, and rarely stretches into a run. But when he does run, he flies more beautifully than any of his predecessors, and so she has a soft spot for him, for her brindle Bolingbroke, so long and loyal. His cough worries her, but he seems resigned to it.

  Joanna’s husband presented her with her first whippet not long after they married. She called that dog Golden for his tawny coat. He was magnificent at first, supple, shining, but Henry overfed him until Golden would only eat from Henry’s hand—treats all day, that Golden came to beg for. Then, when the dog grew fat—who ever heard of a fat whippet?—Henry complained of Golden’s gluttony until Joanna said, finally, ‘Have you never thought that he overeats to please you?’ After that, Henry left her to manage her own dogs. Joanna likes to take a dog when she travels about alone.

  In reality, she no longer travels alone. Less than two years ago, she would have driven herself to Fairly and on to the Wallace farm; now, unable to control a horse or vehicle, she must wait for someone else to take her. She requests the services of a polite boy she thinks of as a nephew of Nancy’s, although she has no idea if they’re actually related, but George informs her that this boy has been put to work constructing sheep pens. George tells her this with his mouth drawn down as if he regrets the inconvenience on her behalf, and goes into the complicated possibilities of who they can spare (nobody) and for how long (no time at all). He’s already deflected her questions about sending Tal to look for the Wallace boy. Then Bear says, ‘I’ll take you—I need to go to town to speak with Beller,’ and George mulls this over, too: is this the best time for Bear to be away, all things considered, with the first sheep coming in this afternoon, washing starting tomorrow, and so much left to do before the arrival of the shearers? Bear lets his brother talk, says, ‘All the same, I’ll take her,’ and goes out to the stable to hitch horses to the gig.

  Now they rattle up the road to Fairly, Joanna with Bolingbroke sleeping in her lap. The dog opens his eyes occasionally, and it’s as if his eyebrows have risen of their own accord and carried his eyelids with them—his eyes always look startled, as if he didn’t expect them to open, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Bear speaks at length of Beller, whoever that is (at one time Joanna would have known and spoken to Beller herself), and then of wool prices and what they can expect this year, and then of the poor Wallace boy. That subject gets Bear pondering his impending fatherhood. Oh, Bear, who’s convinced that horses report to each other on all that’s happened while they were apart, who will travel an hour out of his way so as not to hear the cries of sheep caught in a drought-boggy waterhole, who saw an opera once—Handel’s Serse—and thoroughly enjoyed it (the women in disguise! the king singing to a plane tree!) and now considers himself relieved of the burden of all music. What he talks about now, as they near Fairly, is his excellence in a stock drive—he knows all the routes, never loses an animal when he takes sheep to the railway, to the back country or the outstations, or over creeks, and he confesses to his mother that he thinks these skills will translate into fatherhood, especially if he were to have a child who, God forbid, got himself lost. Then Bear returns to the subject of Beller, who is, apparently, a decent man, and some kind of stock agent.

  ‘Why don’t you stop in at Willie Baumann’s while I see him?’ Bear says and, having suggested this idea, considers it decided.

  Joanna submits, but insists that Bear take Bolingbroke; she has heard Wilhelmina comment more than once on the whimsy of keeping a whippet that has never so much as run after a rabbit.

  Pausing at the Baumanns’ front door, Joanna prepares herself for Wilhelmina. She wonders how it would feel to walk into Willie’s parlour wearing Jimmy Possum’s cloak: like carrying a shield, she thinks, in the manner of a warrior queen. Having burned her blue shawl last night, Joanna is wearing a much less gorgeous green one. It’s too flimsy to provide any kind of barrier between her arm and the world.

  The Baumann house has recovered from the wedding. Here’s the maid opening the door with a cheerful face; the hallway is filled with the smell of recent baking, and the parlour with bowls and vases full of Minna’s wedding roses. Wilhelmina, lustrous in black, is as gracious as ever from her chair, which leaves Joanna clumsy and contrite.

  ‘I must apologise for bursting in on you like this,’ she says. ‘I’m on my way to visit Mary Wallace.’

  ‘Poor soul,’ says Wilhelmina, smoothing her skirts.

  Joanna says, ‘Ralph needed to stop in town, so I thought: I shall look in on Wilhelmina.’

  ‘Naturally I’m grateful for callers, Mrs Axam, whatever their reasons.’

  Joanna allows a stiff silence. Then she says, ‘Well, the weather is holding. We can be thankful for that.’

  Wilhelmina nods knowingly. ‘That is a mercy, with the shearing just beginning.’

  Joanna considers insisting that she’s thankful for the weather on the Wallaces’ behalf, not Thalassa’s (the weather does worry her, though, at shearing time); she decides not to bother. ‘We had Sergeant Foster of Port Augusta stopping with us last night,’ she says. ‘He’s to lead the search.’

  ‘So I heard from my daughter. We are not, as you know, unconnected to the police force.’

  They could spend the whole morning this way, with Wilhelmina glinting in her chair like a rigid star. But something makes Willie bend, because she leans forwards and says, ‘My maid saw him pass with his men. One white man and, following after, two blacks.’

  ‘Native trackers,’ Joanna says. ‘So now we can be sure the boy will be found.’ Joanna has absolute faith in native tracking; she’s seen it succeed so often. She’s been told by one of the Thalassa shepherds that her tracks have changed since her accident. ‘You been walking round different way,’ he said, imitating her new gait with one arm held tightly to his side.

  Wilhelmina shakes her head. ‘Uncanny, isn’t it, the way they find things? My old nursemaid used to say that whenever a long-lost thing was found, a demon had showed you the way.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Joanna says. Is this a Lutheran notion? She often suspects Wilhelmina of parading the most lurid bits of Lutheranism as punishment for Joanna’s neglected German quarter.

  Wilhelmina continues. ‘Naturally, I don’t say that it’s demons. We can only pray.’ And then, perhaps thinking prayers too insubstantial, she adds, ‘My daughter has gone to Mrs Wallace with food this morning, the last of her wedding breakfast. She has taken my buggy and my two bay mares. Mr Manning has no buggy at present. Hermina is looking, also, for a maid, but there are no girls who want to work.’