After a long, whispering silence, the low vibration began again, a note that climbed steadily into a high keening. As the sound rose, the wind swept down from the hills. A cold, arid gale stripped tears from Linda’s eyes and whipped her hair across her face. It tore at her coat and snatched her letter away, spinning it tumbling and catching across the paddock.

She stopped herself on the point of leaping after it and looked back to see the animal at her heels, unblinking. “Two not out,” said Linda against the icy wind. “All I have to do is stay on the path.”

She made it to the trees. Later, they would find a thread of her coat caught on the bark of a dead silky oak, although they would not know whether she had left it coming or going. The animal, breathing at her heels, began a tuneless moaning, varying notes and sobbing howls, coarser than birdsong, more deliberate than the rush of water.

She tried to ignore it, not to find a pattern, but there were—feelings. Impressions of violet shadows and chill golden sunlight, the twisting nets of liquid day through brown water, the scudding lights of high clouds at dawn, the blazing of stars in blue nights and beneath all that, echoes of darkness like centuries in rocks, and the promise of the unknown behind bleak hills.

The late afternoon sky, the sharp air and the track shifted, dissolved together. Linda put her hands over her ears. “I can’t hear you!” she lied loudly, and hurried through the susurration of she-oaks. The animal bounded lightly beside her, the brindles of its coat flickering. Linda stumbled through the trees until the ground gave way.

She lay at the bottom of a dry creek bed, bruised and dusty. At the top of the bank from which she had fallen was a fence: a tottering row of pickets knotted together by clawed bushes, broken where she had fallen through. The animal looked down at her, the whitening hairs around its muzzle clear, twitched one ear, then sauntered—almost hopped—out of sight.

Linda dusted herself off, limped up the other side and between the trees. There was no beast waiting. Only brown and black chooks hunting insects in the grass, a vegetable garden and a tired grey house, bowed with age.

She had expected a woman as dark as her own mother. But the old lady who pulled the door in, scraping it over the curl of mustard-yellow linoleum, was tall and green-eyed.

“Sylvie Spicer?” hazarded Linda.

“Good lord,” said the older woman—too old, surely—opening the screen door. “You’re the image of your mother.”

“She wasn’t my daughter,” said Sylvie Spicer.