When Darryl left the bar, the kids sitting on their school ports eating ice creams in the warm winter sunshine jumped up and ran after him, shouting. They threw pebbles at the pipes, but he laughed, and the crows flew along shouting just as loud.

I didn’t think much in those days, or I might have yelled those kids to heel. Sent them home. Not that it would have helped in the end.

He kept walking after his followers tired, and where he walked, he played. You could hear him from anywhere in town. From the Stockman’s Arms, from the school itself, even in Hale Motors over the rumble of engines and drills. My Jim said if he were a plant, that sound’d make him curl up and die.

For a whole week, Darryl walked around Woodwild, going out a mile or so at dawn when dew silvered the grass, working through bush and paddocks, coming in dirt-reddened at evening, his fine skin sun-singed. The grocer said the drone of the pipes set his teeth on edge. The mayor’s cockatoo lost its feathers and had to be moved into the pub’s kitchen to keep warm.

Hilda Damson never said a word—she was all for letting nature take its course, as I remember, yet I don’t recall any lantern-bush ever troubling that house.

Darryl made slow progress: it’s hard going in lantern-bush scrub, even with all your breath about you. People jeered, but he’d laugh back, showing his teeth. He didn’t act crazy—apart from the bagpipes.

He’d bring things back he’d found. A bit of iron, a glass bottle-stop, a wallaby skull white in his hand. I made him keep them in his car, not the room—Peg Hale wouldn’t have approved, and they gave me the horrors.

The next fortnight, he drove further. He played his pipes in paddocks and gullies, on rocky outcroppings and the verge of the Runagate-Woodwild Road. Cats cleared out and weren’t seen for a month. Pelicans flew off course and landed in the Pinnickes’ dam, and all the magpies began attacking, though it wasn’t nesting season.

In the end, there can’t have been a patch of lantern-bush near Woodwild that hadn’t heard those pipes. He even paid my Jim to show him the chalk-caves, and played there, with that animal of his—clambering over the boulders as if born to it, for all his canvas shoes and city skin. I asked what the animal was, for I swear I never got a look at it. Jim shrugged and said it had been dark.

I’d wake at midnight, thinking I heard the echoes of the piping chasing around down there, under the rocks and roots. Sometimes I still do.

Then he left. He said he’d be back at the end of summer.