Death is Forever

with the hot breeze. Somewhere in the distance an animal gave an odd, resonant cry.
    “What’s that?” she asked.
    “Cow talking to the moon.”
    Another urgent cry came on the wind.
    “Moon talking back to the cow?” she asked dryly.
    He grinned. “You learn fast.”
    The two doors to the Rover closed as one, sounding loud in the stillness. He started up and eased the Rover back onto the rough, rutted track, using only moonlight until they were down on flat land again. As the Rover bumped forward, Cole could see signs where a larger vehicle had taken the track, leaving behind crushed spinifex and broken brush. There were other signs of recent traffic as well, tire tracks not yet blurred by the wind.
    “Lots of traffic,” Erin said.
    “You have good eyes.”
    “Nervous eyes, after yesterday.”
    “So far I haven’t seen anything unexpected,” Cole said. “Just the sort of tracks you’d see on Abe’s driveway.”
    “Some driveway. Must be sixty kilometers long.”
    “As the crow flies—or the cockatoo, since we’re in the Kimberley. The narrower tread marks belong to something with a wheel base smaller than the Rover’s. Probably one of the old jeeps that Abe kept around. He had three of the damn things the last time I was here. He just kept cannibalizing to keep one of them going.”
    “Then you don’t think anyone’s at the station right now?”
    “Some people from BlackWing will be there. At least they damn well better be, or our prospecting won’t get off the ground before the wet. Sarah might be there. Maybe some of her kids and grandkids. The men probably went walkabout after Abe died.”
    “Who’s Sarah?”
    Cole smiled strangely. “Nobody knows. She was a child when Abe and his brother first pegged out their pastoral lease. Her tribe had either been wiped out by disease and war, or they’d just gone walkabout and left her. She stayed with Abe.”
    The Rover lurched and wallowed. Erin braced herself on the dashboard while Cole downshifted into low gear and crawled over the deeply rutted, concrete-hard remains of a dried-out bog.
    “Do you think Sarah knows about the mine?” Erin asked.
    “I doubt it. If she did, she wouldn’t care. Diamonds are a modern passion. The Aborigines have no use for modern things.”
    “Surely life changed after the English came?”
    “The English haven’t been here very long. The first Australians drove cattle to the Kimberley from Queensland a little more than a hundred years ago. The trek took two years. They started out with ten thousand head and lost more than half, so nobody was in a bloody great hurry to do it twice. There’s been more settlement out here in the last twenty years than there was in the first hundred.”
    The Rover staggered and slithered over what could only have been a muddy patch of ground.
    “A seep,” he said when Erin made a startled sound.
    “Water?”
    “It happens, you know.”
    “You could have fooled me. That’s the first free fresh water I’ve seen since I got to Australia.”
    He swerved the Rover as an animal the size of a small dog flashed across the track.
    “What was that?” she asked.
    “A wallaby.”
    She stared into the night. She couldn’t see anything. She sighed and settled back again. “Did Abe ever talk about his brother?”
    “Not to me. Not directly. According to local legend, after your grandfather left with Bridget McQueen, Abe went native for a time. He learned the language, lived the life, and became a kind of god or devil to the Aborigines who migrated through the station. He sat at their fires, they pledged young women to him, and saved him the choice parts of lizard and croc.”
    The Rover groaned and bumped along the track, taking Cole’s full attention.
    “Did you like Abe?” she asked when the road was less rough.
    “I respected his toughness. I admired his knowledge of the land. But like him?” Cole shrugged. “No one liked Abe, least of all the people who knew him best—the Aborigines. You don’t like your gods or devils. You just live with them the best way you can. He was obsessed with sex, but he hated women more than any man I’ve ever known.”
    “Then why did he leave me the station? He could have willed it to Dad or Phil.”
    Cole’s sideways glance was a pale glitter against the dark planes of his face. “Maybe Abe didn’t hate them enough.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Softly Cole began to quote from “Chunder.” “‘I’m going down alone/Where the