‘Can’t tell till daylight,’ said Ezekiel shortly. He turned and yelled into the darkness, ‘Back inside, the lot of you! Be out at first light.’

The stench of flood filled the still dry air as Ezekiel limped back towards the house.

Dawn was a grey shiver across the horizon, the sky above still painted black, as Ezekiel surveyed the ruins of his kingdom. Clancy stood beside him, Maria watching from the back door.

The flood had surged above the channels. It had taken the shearing sheds, the hay shed, the grain silo, the farm shop, all, or nearly all, of their sheep, as well as five shepherds’ huts, and probably the men who’d lived in them, whom no one had seen since the day before.

The world smelled of mud, of decades of wombat droppings and decay but not yet of death. The drowned bodies of animals and men had not had time to bloat, nor would they begin to stink until the next morning, or the day after. But years of accumulated debris, wildlife that had died naturally and lain, partially eaten by goannas and crows until it turned too leathery to tempt, the compost of leavings turning to soil: all had been upturned, swept up and left behind as the flood declined.

The slumped body of a dead cow lay wrapped around a red gum. Clancy blinked at what seemed like a statue that had floated down from some grand house, till he realised it was a camel. Clancy wondered if its Afghan trader owner had escaped.

All that day Clancy, Ezekiel and the four remaining stockmen searched among the wreckage, hunting for living sheep, swiftly cutting the throats of those who struggled weakly on broken legs or lay on their sides with cracked spines, and counted what was left.

The remnants of the vast flocks were placed in a hastily created pen. Two hundred and forty-one sheep, most of them wethers, castrated males, were left from what had been about seventy thousand: no new stock would be bred from them. Would the sheep have been able to escape if the channel paddock had not been fenced? Clancy didn’t think so. The flood had been too fast. Some might have made it away . . . It was an image that would haunt him all his life, the crush of terrified beasts, all in full and heavy wool, bleating, tumbling, crashing, becoming one with the debris of the water.

They had gained logs too, long dead trees stripped of branches by the force of water that now might be used to make pens for any animals they might save. No dead roos or emus, he noticed, nor bodies of any natives, though the natives camped along the river upstream. Had animals and natives, perhaps, known to seek higher ground yesterday? Clancy had heard from boys at school how some natives could tell if a flood was coming weeks before, just by the pattern of the winds, the rise or fall of springs up in the hills, or the sight of snake-necked turtles climbing hills ten days before the rain. Animals might feel vibrations coming from a day’s ride away, or more.