Adelaide drew the boy’s head onto her lap and propped herself up against a rock. Danny had begun to shiver, despite the heat. Probably a mingling of shock and poison, Caleb thought. He took off his waistcoat and laid it over the boy.

‘How did you know what to do?’ Adelaide asked, her voice rasping with the smoke. ‘Are there snakes in Virginia?’

‘Some, but not real poisonous like these ones. Worst ones I came across were rattlers.’ Caleb ran a hand through his hair. ‘Truth is, before I came here I knew nothing about snake bites, but Bowen left books with detailed notes on treatments he tried.’ He shrugged. ‘If it’s any consolation, it’s only a single strike and it’s not deep, more like a scratch. Some poison got in but, God willing, it won’t kill him. Now I’m going to try something else. Something the Aborigines used to do. You’re going to have to help me, Adelaide.

‘Whatever you need,’ she said.

The rough dam constructed by the miners as a water race had long since been reduced to rubble in the winter floods, but it created a spot where the water ran at a faster pace than the sluggish late summer flow. Caleb gathered Danny in his arms and carried him over to the gentle fall of water, laying him on the sandy river bed to allow the water to flow over him.

Adelaide stood on the bank. ‘What are you doing?’

‘The natives used water immersion to deal with snake bite. I need you to support him, Adelaide. Danny?’

The boy’s eyes fluttered open, unfocused and pain filled. ‘My head hurts,’ he mumbled.’

‘You just lie there. The water will keep you nice and cool.’

Adelaide pulled off her boots and stockings and rolled up her trousers, exposing an expanse of calf and well-turned ankle. She picked her way across the rocks and sat down on a relatively dry rock with Danny’s head in her lap.

The boy’s teeth chattered but Caleb took that as a good sign. If the boy’s body temperature could be kept cool, it would slow the poison racing through his system.

Caleb straightened and looked around at the devastated bush. Here and there the scrub still burned and the blackened, smoking gums were stark against a lowering sky. Ash and burning leaves and embers drifted to the ground and the acrid smell of death and destruction hung in the air. For a moment he wondered how many of the wild creatures had escaped such an inferno. He could hardly blame the snake for striking out at Danny. Fire, more than any of the elements, was feared by all creatures great and small.

He splashed across to the far side of the river and started to climb the bank.

‘Where are you going?’ Adelaide called.