And he had a growing affection for pumpkin now. Mrs McKenzie cut off the top, like a lid, scooped out the seeds, to be fried crisp in whatever fat she had on hand, then used the pumpkin like an oven to bake possum, and once big chunks of what Clancy hoped was eel but suspected was snake or goanna.

He trusted her cooking, and so ate it. And all of them were still alive next morning.

Happiness. It seeped in, somehow, from the moment he woke in his swag, his beard wet with dew, the scent of cattle dung and campfire and gum trees; washing, when it was possible, upstream from the animals. He noticed Rose washed too, though well away from him. The McKenzies rarely bothered washing more than hands and faces, nor did Tiger, though Mrs McKenzie and Rose often returned from their hunting with wet hair, as well as yabbies, a few fish, or a duck.

Happiness was sitting around the campfire eating buttermilk damper and, once, an emu-egg omelette that left him burping sulphur all morning as McKenzie, who liked to talk, found a new audience for his Highland ghost stories, the selkies who enchanted fishermen and dragged them down into the waves, the gytrash who took the form of a horse, but when you climbed upon his back, galloped into the mist and neither horse nor man was ever seen again . . .

Sometimes Mrs McKenzie told stories too, of the star who fell in love with his own reflection and came down so close he tumbled into the water and became the father of all starfish, and even Tiger told a tale or two of flash coves whose pockets he had picked and the surprises sometimes found within them, like the grass snake coiled up and fast asleep or the half-eaten crumpet and a lady’s garter in the pocket of a lord. His best story was the gold-miner whose dog had grabbed some dynamite with the fuse already lit and followed the men as they ran screaming, dropping it only in the nick of time to run after a wallaby.

‘And next day that dog was back at camp,’ Tiger finished. ‘Wanting his breakfast.’

And Rose listened and smiled and nibbled her damper, and as the sun rose behind her, the tips of her dark hair turned gold and her laugh was brighter than that of the whistling bird with a flash of yellow at its throat.

Happiness was green ridges, lyrebirds snapping indignant alarm calls, work that was hard enough to make a man sleep almost dreamlessly but not too hard and with good companionship with it. At times he wondered if he had ever truly been happy before.