She handed it to him and he pulled it on. It held an incredible fuzzy warmth, but the conical point dipped over his left eye. ‘You’re kidding me.’

From where he stood, he could see that words had deserted his nurse. Her cheeks were sucked in and her eyes were almost shut as she tried to keep her face straight. He could see the enormous effort she put into not laughing out loud.

With a sudden comical wipe of expression, her face regained composure and she lifted her eyes to his. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Hang on a minute.’ He held up his hand. ‘Where’s your Granny Mim hat?’

She grinned at him and produced a blue beanie shaped like a homestead, complete with a sad little gum tree. The verandahs drooped over her ears. ‘Spirit of The Land – my home among the gum trees. Tada!’

‘To think I would have missed this if I’d slept in.’

She grinned at him. ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t.’

They slipped out of Zac’s door, straight onto the verandah and around the side of the house to the paddock. Zac was pleased she reached for his hand at the same time as he reached for hers. Then Reggie appeared beside them wagging his tail and Ava scratched his neck with her free fingers. ‘You can come too.’

Zac’s hand tightened on hers as they moved towards a slight rise, with another hill he hadn’t noticed behind it. They hurried up the incline, crunching dirt and scattering rocks as the sky lightened.

She said, ‘I try to watch the sunrise in the first couple of days when I come home. It reminds me how it must have looked to Mim when Pop brought her here and it connects me again to the land.’

They crested the slight rise before them to the left of the higher mountains and the view opened, multifaceted, shrouded in the last of the night. Shadowy features of rocks and small trees appeared slowly out of the gloom with the approaching dawn like waiting soldiers in the camouflage of night.

They climbed on top of the red outcrop of boulders, one of half a dozen different-sized rocks, bumping each other like a group of giant marbles waiting for a new game.

He eased down to sit on the scratchy rock, next to the most restful woman in the world, and took her hand again, watching the sun inch fingers of orange paint across the dark vista in front of them. They peered over the roof of an old stone shed below them, which Ava told him had been the original settlers’ dwelling.