Some of the people he called on were lonely, others vulnerable. Some got into trouble through a lack of foresight; a handful were actively dodgy. It was the variety, the different people and experiences, that Hirsch enjoyed about his Thursday and Monday patrols. He liked to start early, about 7 a.m., but today it was almost nine and he was still only a few kilometres south of Tiverton. He’d have to take a few shortcuts to make up the lost time. Phone some of the people on his rounds rather than dropping in.

‘You off?’ Muir said.

‘Yep.’

His face a picture of innocence—so that Hirsch was instantly on guard—Muir said, ‘All set for tomorrow night?’

In a moment of weakness that he’d been trying to spin as building good community relations, Hirsh had agreed to be Tiverton’s Santa this year. He’d be distributing presents to the town and farm kids on the side street near Ed Tennant’s shop, then announcing the winner of the town’s best Christmas lights, while looking ridiculous in a smelly red suit.

‘Fuck off, Bob.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Muir said, clapping him on the back.

Hirsch set out south along the Barrier Highway. Window down, Emmylou Harris in the CD slot, a hard country lament that suited his mood—the isolation, the bushwhackery he sometimes encountered. Down the shallow valley, low dry hills on either side, greyish brown with the darker speckles of shadows or trees clinging to the stony soil. Stone ruins close to the road, distant farmhouse rooftops, a line of windfarm turbines along a nearby ridge—the settler years, the struggling present and the future, all in one. Halfway up a sloping hillside a motionless dust cloud. A vehicle on a dirt road? A wind eddy? It all seemed unknowable, a world poised for action, but unable to proceed. Hirsch had been the Tiverton cop for one year now and was waiting for a mutual embrace, but the place kept him at arm’s length. If life was the search for a true home—a welcoming place, a constant lover or a mind at peace—then he was still looking.

Kind of. There was Wendy in his life. In the eyes of the district they were ‘going out’, and that was just fine with Hirsch. And he was close to her clever, amusing daughter Katie, who’d saved his life last year. He had plenty to be thankful for.