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idea of kicking a dying animal anywhere.
    â€˜Well, I haven’t got a rifle anyway, so it wouldn’t have mattered much.’
    â€˜You might want to get yerself one,’ Rob Starr said mildly, looking to Cheery Dan for agreement. ‘There’s a fair few wild dogs in them hills up the back of your place.’
    â€˜Oh.’
    This was news to Jo. Wild dogs. Did he mean dingoes? And how did he already know where she lived?
    â€˜They’re getting real bloody cheeky, too. Darren Ferrier lost a good bull calf last month–’ Cheery Dan was on the same assassinating wavelength as Starr, it seemed.
    â€˜Well, don’t go shooting any dingoes with collars on, will you?’ Jo interrupted these dugai histrionics. ‘If it’s got a collar on it’s our yellow dog.’
    â€˜Any yella dog comes onto my place it takes its chances.’ Starr replied, deadpan. He shook a cigarette out of its packet, and felt in his jeans pocket for a light.
    They weren’t long on diplomacy in Tin Wagon Road, then.
    Jo nodded slowly and pursed her lips, jutting them out as though for the life of her she was trying, and failing, to see eye to eye with him. If anyone shot Warrigal, she didn’t know what she’d do. Poison their waterholes, probably. Steal their children. It was at moments like this that she understood the old Goories refusing to walk behind the dugais when they travelled together in the forests. Just in case the temptation to sink an axe into their ignorant European skulls became altogether too overwhelming.
    Rob Starr angled out a cloud of smoke. It faded into nothingness as the first of the mourners’ cars began to drive away to the Middle B to get on the hops.
    â€˜So which is your place then?’ Jo asked him. A neutral response.Don’t start anything at a funeral, she told herself. She heard Therese: Remember to breathe, Josephine.
    â€˜Right at the end of the valley, where the ridge loops back on itself.’ He gestured north-east. ‘I back onto the World Heritage. Our places meet up near the old abandoned banana winch – the corners meet, or near enough. Old Jim Mooney’s kids used to walk through my place to get to the Pocket school, years ago.’
    â€˜Run cattle, do you?’
    â€˜Brahmins.’
    â€˜Rightio, well, I better get cracking.’
    Cradling a bowl of Weetbix the next morning, Jo looked out to where a shiny Land Cruiser troopie had pulled up in her driveway. Daisy and Warrigal were sniffing around the wheels, lifting their legs and issuing a few tentative barks, still unsure of the rules on the new place. A fiftyish blond bloke sporting an akubra and permanent sunburn had his elbow sticking out of the Cruiser window. He was looking down at the dogs.
    â€˜You’re right, mate, they won’t bite,’ Jo called from the yard. The man didn’t get out. He cast his gaze around at the ongoing work in the paddocks, the ute full of junk and the smoking rubbish pile, then came back to Jo.
    â€˜G’day. You got a teenage girl here that rides horses?’ he asked, pushing his hat up to show more of a face that had drinker written all over it.
    â€˜Yeah, my daughter.’ Jo took a sustaining sip of good sweet coffee, and kicked a dry dog turd off the lawn and into the dust under the house. ‘Why?’
    â€˜The name’s Darren Ferrier. I live up on the last bend before Nudgel there, place with the stockyards. Anyway, me neighbour reckons he seen a girl riding my horses there, round about dawn the last couple of mornings. You know anything about that?’
    â€˜Riding your horses?’ Jo said, astonished.
    â€˜Yep. Bareback, he reckoned.’ Darren Ferrier looked a lot less than pleased.
    â€˜I dunno ... she can ride, but–’ Jo stopped. Wouldn’t put it past the little bugger. ‘–we’ve got our own horses. I dunno why she’d go and do that.’
    â€˜Well, it