Death is Forever

chance to see the station from the air,” he continued, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. “Sometimes you can pick up things you’d miss on the ground. While we fly, try to match features down there with the map.”
    She nodded to show that she’d heard. Deliberately she unfolded the map and forced herself to focus on it rather than on her foolish feeling of betrayal.
    As the chopper bored through the sky, she looked from the map to the landscape below. The variation in the ground surface surprised her after the unrelieved flatness of the area around Derby. On Abe’s station there were low ridges and blunt pinnacles of black rock. In between the ridges there were narrow grasslands and sparse trees. At very rare intervals there were startling bits of vivid green. Cattle trails braided around the fragments of green.
    “Seeps and small springs,” Cole said finally, seeing her interest. “The black rocks are Triassic limestone outcroppings.”
    She nodded absently, absorbed in the landscape below.
    When she didn’t answer him, he turned and looked impatiently at her. The line of her shoulders wasn’t as stiff as it had been when she’d gotten into the helicopter. Her mouth was more relaxed, too. She was wrapped up in the land rather than locked in anger at him.
    He told himself that it was an improvement.

28
Over Abe’s station
    To Erin it seemed like a long time before the helicopter reached the edge of the station and turned north to fly the east leg of the boundary. As she watched, more ridges and shallow troughs appeared. There were red rock hills in broken array, like a rumpled blanket thrown over the land. There weren’t any roads. She couldn’t even see any rutted tracks. The vague, random-looking lines she saw from time to time could have been cattle trails or simply runoff channels for the few months of the year when free water existed in the land. There were no buildings, no canals, no windmills, nothing to suggest that civilized man had ever existed out here or ever would.
    Occasionally Erin spotted Kimberley shorthorns or kangaroos below. Cow and kangaroo alike fled from the thunderous dark shadow of the chopper skimming over the rugged land. Once she saw a small blackened circle surrounded by a ring of something that reflected sunlight in countless small silver-white flashes.
    “What’s that?” she asked, forgetting that she wasn’t going to talk to Cole any more than absolute survival required.
    He looked away from an intriguing geologic anomaly on the landscape and glanced where her finger was pointing. “Aborigine camp. The black is where the bonfire was.”
    “What’s the shiny halo?”
    “Broken beer bottles and smashed beer cans.”
    She frowned and looked more closely. If people had been there last night or a week or a year ago, there wasn’t any sign of them now. There wasn’t anything but the chaotic, untamed land.
    “Where are the natives?” she asked.
    “They could have been gone since last night or since the last wet. I can’t tell from up here.”
    “Where are their shelters?”
    “In the dry, they don’t need any. In the wet, they use natural stone overhangs, unless they’re on reservation land. Then they’ll use houses the government built for them.”
    The helicopter bore along its northern heading, not having completed even one leg of the Windsor station’s huge rectangle. As the minutes went by, the sheer scale of the station seeped into Erin. With it came a sense of the relentless demands the land would make on anyone who dared to walk its seamed face.
    The depression inside Erin slowly grew, fed by more than her own certainty that she’d once again misjudged a man’s intentions. This time it was the land she had misjudged. Despite all she had been told, she hadn’t believed that Australia could be as harsh, as empty, as protective of its secrets as Alaska had been. She hadn’t believed that the tiny spot called the Windsor station would be physically taxing to explore. There was no ice, no untamed rivers, no jungle, no mountains, not even a real forest—nothing to hide the nature of the country itself. Surely Abe’s diamond mine could not be all that well concealed.
    Erin hadn’t understood how sere the land was, how inhospitable to life. Alaska had the ocean and rivers full of salmon to provide a wealth of food for its natives. The Kimberley Plateau had neither ocean nor reliable rivers. It had no herds of migratory animals, no