Death is Forever

later,” he said. “What happens to the film then?”
    “Nothing, if I’m careful. The emulsion is stable even in this heat. It’s just direct sun that can be a problem. The bag I carry film in when I’m shooting is insulated.”
    “How many rolls have you gone through since we left?”
    “Not many.”
    He smiled slightly. “How many is not many?”
    “Less than I wanted to. When I’m working, I can go through a roll of film every five minutes.”
    “No wonder you packed that cooler to the gills,” he said. “Must be twenty pounds of film.”
    “Must be twenty pounds of shotgun shells, too.”
    “If I run out, I’ll use your film.”
    “Wish I could say the same about your shells,” she muttered. “How long are we going to be out here?”
    “Until the wet.”
    “How long is that?”
    “Until it rains.”
    “Gee, thanks for enlightening me.”
    He smiled.
    “I tell myself to conserve film,” she said, “but when I’m shooting I forget. Every image I see is so new. I’m afraid if I don’t capture it now I’ll never see it again.”
    Cole touched Erin lightly on the cheek. “I’m the same way when I’m prospecting. Every place is a treasure waiting to be found.”
    Before she could react to the brief caress, he took hold of the steering wheel again and focused on the increasingly difficult terrain.
    Biting her lip, trying to ignore the leap in her pulse at such a simple thing as the brush of his fingertips over her cheek, Erin concentrated on the countryside.
    “Look—kangaroos!” she said suddenly.
    He glanced over to the right. “No such thing.”
    “What? Of course they are. Nothing else hops like that.”
    “Nope,” he said. “Ask any Aussie. They’re kangas or they’re roos. Personally, I think they’re roos. Kangas tend to hang out farther east.”
    She snickered and felt herself drifting more deeply beneath the spell of companionship that grew between them whenever she let down her guard and responded to Cole without calculation. He seemed to respond to her in the same way, without calculation.
    You’re a fool, Erin Shane Windsor, she told herself.
    There was no argument.

37
Kimberley Plateau Early afternoon
    The Rover slowed to a stop in a patch of shade beneath an outcropping of rock. Cole got out, checked the brake fluid reservoir, and recapped it.
    “Problems?” Erin asked.
    “We’re losing a little fluid, but not enough to worry about. There’s a gallon of the stuff in the tool cabinet.”
    He wiped his forehead on the back of his arm, resettled his hat, and looked at the sky. Heat and moisture made it a shade of burning silver-gray peculiar to the tropics. Nothing new there.
    He looked to the dry watercourse that had bitten through the earth near the road, eroding a channel for the runoff of the wet’s pouring rains. There was no hint of water now. He hadn’t expected any.
    “I’m going to take a look at the gully walls,” he said. “If you promise not to start taking pictures, you can stay in the Rover’s shade. Otherwise you’re coming with me.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t want to spend half an hour tracking you down,” he said dryly. “This would be easy country to get lost in.”
    “I’m coming with you. So is my camera.”
    While Cole studied the steeply cut banks of the gully, Erin absorbed the angles, shadows, and densities of the landscape. She simply looked without expectation, opening herself to the land.
    Gradually a subtle excitement tingled through her, a feeling she’d known only once before in her life, when she had accepted the arctic for what it was rather than what it wasn’t.
    As soon as she stopped looking for familiar lines and colors, the stark, mysterious, completely inhuman beauty of the Kimberley began to seep into her. The savage heat of the day was balanced by the seamless night, stretching from horizon to horizon without artificial light of any kind. The scarcity of vegetation was balanced by the vivid elegance of ghost gums and the fluid whisper of spinifex. The scarcity of animals was balanced by their startling shapes and unlikely means of locomotion.
    And the stillness was complete, a silence more beautiful than music, a seduction greater than any easy beauty of water or grass or forest. The profound silence called to her soul.
    Slowly she became aware of Cole standing next to her, watching her.
    “It’s getting to you, isn’t it?” he asked.
    “What?”
    “The land.”
    “It’s extraordinary,” she