Showering, Tilly reflected that her cousin had been true to her word. She owed Sophie everything from her sanity to the roof over her head, for she had lost more than her husband and baby daughter in the tragedy. Her home had gone, along with Esmerelda, the fishing boat Gerry had operated from their base on the McArthur River, whose waters emptied into the Gulf of Carpentaria. She had never returned to their humble building of concrete and tin or the wide reaches of the treacherous river. Sophie had packed for her and organised the move to Binboona, the conservation park run by the Wildlife Protection Association, which lay well to the east of her former home, on the Territory side of the border in the rocky escarpment country of the western Gulf. The property of Binboona, eight hundred and fifty square kilometres in area, ran from the ranges to the coastline. The wildlife reserve had once been a cattle station but was now managed by Sophie and overseen from head office in Adelaide. Dedicated to the preservation of wildlife and the natural habitat, the WPA sanctuaries were dotted across the continent from the deserts of Central Australia to Western Australia’s wild Kimberley coast, precious oases in the struggle against the growing wholesale extinction of species.

Living at Binboona was not as easy as at their comfortable home in Cairns, but she had grown accustomed to the differences: partial power, a weekly mail service, a hot water system that relied on one stoking a fire . . . The isolation didn’t worry Tilly, while the injured and orphaned animals she helped care for had been a blessing in disguise in those early weeks, her empty hands and heart touched by their suffering and helplessness. And as time had passed she had come to know and like her three companions. At the beginning, Sophie had been little more than an acquaintance. A generation separated them: Tilly was twenty-eight and Sophie in her early forties. Matt Mercer, the older of the two men, was quiet and diffident, giving away little about himself though she guessed him to be somewhere in his late thirties. Luke Aldyce, with his wild head of hair and university education was a mere boy of twenty-two, in love with his vocation, endlessly enthusiastic about the country and its native creatures, both feathered and furred.