The path meandered: the creatures who had made it had little regard for straight lines. As Smith had said: the track appeared to wrap concentrically around the peak, but never led up to it. Four mangy dogs followed us, snouts down and eyes furtive. Not the islanders’ dogs but wild ones, opportunists. We had turned now, so that the house and the various boats in the bay were gone and we were instead looking east towards the open sea and the treacherous shoals that lay further out in the dying light: a sandpaper of white on the soft mauve expanse.

Higher, and I was looking out towards the long spit of sand that nearly connected the island to Cape Barren. The wind moaned in the grasses. The mountains of Cape Barren loomed silvery into the sky; there were green grasslands and forests and a serration of hooks and swerves in the coast. If only he had gone there, I thought. No one would ever have found him, and this sorry business would be at an end.

The tussocks were giving way now to exposed boulders—smooth and rounded, forming a series of lines that ran almost north-south. We were crossing them, one after another, but the lines kept coming, and some were tall enough that a man could easily appear from between them.

I was dwelling on these thoughts, alert to small sounds, when the straitsmen announced they would go no further. One of them made a gesture with the rifle he was carrying, waving the stock in my direction. I declined. I could not see what difference it would make here, and besides, I had no skill with firearms. No one had said I was being sent to kill a man.

I watched them pick their way back down the hill for a while. The occasional shots had ceased now, and there was only the wind and scattered birds to break the silence, in the vast well of air around me. I picked a comb out of a pocket in my dress and hauled my hair out of the way. There were flies about, big heavy ones. I wondered if it mattered that the light was fading.

I picked a line, a furrow between two parallel faults of granite that led up gradually in a straight line to the north, deepening as it went. I was thinking as I ascended. Not about how much further the summit was, nor where I would encounter the man, nor what would happen when I did.

I thought of my father, stung again by the cold realisation that he was nearing his end. Why, I could not say. I guessed he would be sixty, a reasonable life for anyone, particularly a man who had had such travails.