Death is Forever

arms.
    “Come sit by the fire while you eat,” he said, stepping back from it. “In an hour you won’t believe you ever wanted to.”
    “Eat?”
    “No. Sit by a fire. It will be as hot today as it was yesterday, but it will feel even hotter. The humidity will be higher after the rain.”
    She shook her head. “God, what a climate. It’s a wonder the Aborigines survived.”
    “A lot of them didn’t,” he said, handing her a chunk of fire-blackened meat.
    “Do you think he did?”
    “The one who followed us?”
    She nodded, too busy chewing snake to talk.
    He shrugged and bit off a chunk of mulga. “I didn’t find any new tracks after the rain. If he came down off the hill, he didn’t come down this side.”
    Before they were finished eating, the ground began to steam as the sun got hot enough to draw moisture from the earth. Cole got up and began studying Bridget’s Hill with the aid of the strengthening light.
    “Cole?”
    He made an inquiring sound.
    “What are you looking for?” she asked. “The Aborigine?”
    He shook his head slowly, his whole attention on the base of the hill.
    She came to her feet and went to stand by him. She stared in the same direction as him, but she saw nothing except a small, short-lived cascade coursing down rugged rock.
    “I’ll be damned,” he said finally.
    “What?”
    “See that little stream?”
    “Yes.”
    “See where it leaps down between those clumps of hard spinifex and then between those stunted bloodwood trees and then into that rubble pile at the base of the hill?”
    She leaned forward. “Bloodwood, huh? Yes, I see it.”
    “See where the water comes out?”
    She narrowed her eyes, frowned, and looked more closely. “No.”
    “Neither do I.”
    He bent, snagged the rucksack and shotgun, and walked toward the cascade. She went alongside, stretching her legs to keep up.
    The answer to the mystery of the vanishing stream was no more obvious when they stood at the edge of the rubble pile. The cascade clearly washed down amid the tangle of boulders and scrubby trees. Just as clearly, the water didn’t come back out.
    “What—” she began, only to be cut off by an abrupt gesture from Cole.
    “Hear anything?” he asked.
    She listened. “All I hear is the cascade,” she said after a minute.
    He shrugged off the rucksack and handed her the shot- gun. “I’m going to take a closer look. See if you can find any other nearby places where water runs off the hill but doesn’t show up on the flats.”
    The longer Erin looked at Bridget’s Hill, the more puzzled she became. Despite the fierce downpour, very little water was running off the huge, long rise of limestone. Even if she assumed that the pygmy trees, hard spinifex, and broken surface of the limestone concealed most rills and rivulets, she was left with the fact that only a few narrow tongues of water extended from the base of the hill to the depression beyond the big circle of charcoal left by the Aborigines. The depression itself held only a thin puddle after the heavy storm.
    Cole scrambled down off the rubble pile and walked quickly to Erin.
    “There’s something odd about this place,” she said.
    “Damn little runoff,” he said succinctly.
    “Is that what you meant by limestone being a sponge?”
    He laughed, but there was excitement burning in his eyes. “Not quite, honey. It takes time and pressure to force water into the tiny spaces between particles of limestone.”
    “Then where did all that water go? That’s not a small hill, Cole. There must be at least four square miles of surface up top.”
    “Closer to ten. And we had at least an inch of rain, probably more like two.”
    “Did it all run off during the night?”
    “If it had, we’d have been ass deep in a flash flood. I’ll bet that only a fraction of the water that falls on Bridget’s Hill ever sees sunlight again.”
    “Then where does it go?” she asked, hands on hips.
    “Most of it runs down into joints and seams in the limestone and vanishes, working its way down through solution channels in the rock until it reaches the water table.”
    “Is that what happened to the cascade?”
    He nodded. “Every drop of water that fell on top is trying to work its way to the bottom. I’ll bet that limestone is rotten with solution channels.”
    “Caves?” she asked, her voice rising with excitement.
    “‘God’s own jewel box/Kept beneath stone locks.’” Cole’s teeth flashed startlingly white against