When they come for him they are of tribes he does not know, and he sings the song of good neighbours and the song of may I come in? They surround him as trees and stiltspear in flickering and they display their teeth and their weapon-hands, and when he still does not run they hit him and when still he does not run they take him to their hidden village. Their clans and kith-groups have broken down: these are the last of their people.

Children come to stare at him. He looks at them and sees a final generation.

His goodness moves, but Judah knows they are a dead people and nothing will change that. They take him hunting-dams and sires together, no time for traditional divisions-and he hears their uh uh uh, their counterpointed breaths and patted rhythms. The water eddies then ceases to eddy.

He thrusts out the listening trumpet and captures their sound on wax. He listens to it; he winds his handle and hears their rhythm. Judah can see it. He can see its shape. He looks through a lens and is a geographer on the wax continent of the song, tracking chasms, the coiled valley, its peaks and arêtes. He winds slowly, hears the song in sluggish time.

To his shame Judah feels drab among the doomed people. He works as best he can in the horrible wet cold, noting all the layers of the stiltspear songs, every faint and ill-performed bark, but the environs oppress him. No bower in the woods, no green den, but a frosted huddle of mulch and constant war parties, stiltspear out to fight, haunted by the ghosts they will certainly become.

Judah will not watch them. His interior thing jackknifes. He has their soul in his wax. He leaves them, for the second time.

Back to the train. It has moved. He sees a thousand faces he has never seen before. The rails have forked. A town is growing. What a wonderful thing.

Tracks slick and train-polished. They coil into half-built sheds and empty sidings, into yards, past the warping wood of this half-built town they bifurcate. One line juts into the darkest part of the wetland and stops abruptly, hemmed by trees.

Another disappears westward. Men come out of their clearing and they carry dripping hammers, and they carry nails, and they are as stained and sweating as if they have been at war. With each breath they wear and shed momentary scarves of vapour.

As he enters the clearing where Junctiontown grows, Judah’s good thing kicks happy like a baby and he knows he will stay here, that he is back and will be part of what he sees, not a parasite in its trail. He came for the interventions, of which the song is one. And this, this buckling down of rails, is another.

He is a veteran of the railroads, but he has never worked them before. The thing in him cajoles him. It wants him to join this great effort.