The drama unfolded with an extraordinarily protracted clarity. We had time to catch the calm cruelty in the eye of the leading dingo; we had time to see the flanks of the dog trembling; we even had time to stop the van and fling the doors open, and for Ros – running towards him – to shout. ‘Here, boy! Come on, come on, make a dash for it.’

In one bound he was free is now a much discredited device for getting a hero out of a tight corner, but no other description will do for what the dog did. He saw his chance and leapt. Maybe he flew. One minute he was a captive, without a hope in Hell of making an escape, the next he was lying panting on the cushions in the back of the Shiralee, a look of undying gratitude on his face, his eyes molten, the thump of his heart audible even above our diesel engine. He was scratched and bitten. His nose had been bloodied. But I wouldn’t have wanted to investigate the psychological scars.

The dingoes did not immediately concede defeat. For a moment or two they seemed to be considering a raid upon the van. Then they appeared to decide that for the kind of domestic he was likely to make anyway the dog wasn’t really worth the sweat. They threw us a look of the iciest contempt and padded off into the desert.

We drove the dog round to the police station where a policewoman, or perhaps a policeman’s wife, refused to believe our story. She had never heard of such a thing. Dingoes didn’t do that. We must have been mistaken. I sat soothing the dog and watching Ros remonstrating with the woman in the dark. I saw the head shaking and the closed expression. It was like being in a scene in John Bryson’s book. If a dingo had crept up on her from behind a bush and started to rip her arm out she would still have denied it was happening. The dingo had become a symbol of Territorian defensiveness. Any attack upon it was an attack upon them.