NANCY

Nancy Thompson sat on the giant rock below Rock Farm and watched the mist trickle down the gullies. Good to breathe mountain air again. The winter snow gave a spring flush of grass each year and the cooler climate delayed the browning off in summer.

Rock Farm itself had not run stock for decades, beyond a couple of horses and a tribe of animals brought to the veterinary surgery to be disposed of and who Felicity and Nicholas had not had the heart to put down, including Fancy the three-legged goat, a one-legged goose called Goering who still attempted to peck any male who turned his back and all the others . . .

She’d left Michael and the boys at home and driven up for a day by herself with Flinty. The distance that had once taken days to ride could now be travelled in a couple of hours with the new highway and bridges. And she needed to talk to Flinty, one of the conversations they’d begun in the drought years when they’d brought the sheep as far up as Rock Farm each time before heading back down the long paddock to Overflow.

It had been a strangely good time, those last years of the drought. They’d kept the stock on the road, or in stock route paddocks, for over a year after the drought officially broke too. City people, even farming people, might think a drought broke when the land was wet, and the dams filled. Nancy of the Overflow knew better. A drought was over when the water had sunk deep into the ground below, to be called up by the tree roots in the summer days, to sit there, cool and waiting, the bounty of the soil.

The soil itself had to recover too, learn how to handle ‘wet’ again. Paddocks might flush green, but the grasses and the small sub-shrubs needed time to establish deep roots again and the native grasses had to put out their first lot of seed undisturbed by too many eager sheep mouths.

When the red gums put out new branches (not just leaves), Nancy knew it was time to return.

And yet things that should have happened now the rains had come again were still not happening. Which was why she was there today. She needed . . . not advice, but the viewpoint of someone who had watched the land and loved it, even longer than she had. Someone who had known her grandparents too . . .

She turned at the sound of Flinty’s crutches. Flinty needed crutches on rough ground these days, though she still walked around the house unaided. Nancy waited while Flinty lowered herself onto the rock beside her, dangling her moleskinned legs, gazing out at the eagle-streaked cliffs of her valley below. ‘So,’ Flinty said at last. ‘What did you want to talk about?’

‘How did you know I wanted to talk?’

Flinty just smiled.

‘Do you think the land is changing?’ asked Nancy bluntly.