Clancy and Tiger remounted their horses. ‘How did you get the name Tiger? Good man with your fists?’

He’d meant it light-heartedly. Tiger unbuttoned his shirt, then slid it off his back. Clancy stared at the mass of scars, new scars laid upon older ones, in at least four directions.

‘Got the lash five times,’ said Tiger shortly. ‘Squatter I was assigned to didn’t like a man who answered back.’

‘You’re not much of a talker.’

Tiger looked at him squarely. ‘I ain’t now. Got a hundred lashes the first time, five hundred the last.’

Few men survived five hundred lashes, or even two hundred. A man could die from blood poisoning after fifty.

‘How long have you been free?’

‘Served my sentence five years after I got here, that was in ’56, but the old fox I worked with claimed me papers had been lost.’ His shoulders moved in what might have been a shrug, if his back had not been so torn. ‘Managed to get away from him ten year ago now, about. Come on, need to get the next lot cut.’

Day followed day, following a routine but never quite the same: cutting fodder in the mornings for the slow-footed, slow-munching cattle, gradually fattening till their skins grew taut again, and they looked like their hides were rubbed with brown boot polish; a lazy stop for lunch, the billy boiling — no stewed tea leaves for McKenzie, but fresh for each pot — with sinkers, a bit of the morning’s dough wrapped around a green branch and held over the fire, eaten with more butter and treacle, or cockie’s joy.

Damper turned stale within an hour of cooking, and Mrs McKenzie scorned having stale damper at her campfire. Sometimes she made drop scones instead, or Welsh cakes if they had enough butter and berries to put in them, or fritters of some strange root vegetable cut thin, dropped in batter then in hot mutton fat so they puffed up, crisp and oily, all cooked in the giant skillet that hung with her camp oven and billy from her swag. Clancy reckoned Mrs McKenzie could cook anything, given a camp oven, skillet and billy. He was looking forward to that soufflé.

After lunch, McKenzie, Tiger and Clancy rounded up the cattle that had strayed during the break and herded them to the next water hole, either marked on McKenzie’s map, or on the map Mrs McKenzie held in her head, for there were times when McKenzie would ask her which of the gullies ahead would be more likely to still have water.