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corporals?’
    â€˜They say Hitler’s one. We could go for weeks on end,’ said Slim, ‘just think of it.’
    Buckler stared through the window at the half-dark boy sitting guard.
    He went out to him. ‘Everyone else is at the shearing, why aren’t you lending an elbow, Hammond?’
    It was said with a good smile. The boy scrambled to his feet.
    â€˜Wouldn’t know what to make of a sheep,’ he mumbled, looking down at the dirt.
    â€˜Say if it was buffalo hide?’
    He looked up.
    â€˜That would be different, sure. No-one’d go up me for leaving cuts.’
    â€˜Seems just yesterday you were skinning them at ten.’
    â€˜I was, and younger. Pop had me working for it.’
    Buckler peered inquiringly, sympathetically at the kid.
    â€˜Why didn’t you say it was you, Hammond?’
    â€˜I’ve let ya down.’ He lowered his head.
    â€˜Don’t know anything about that,’ said Buckler, who’d been sending school fees to the Marist Brothers, Townsville, on the quiet, and when it came to priorities, putting Hammond’s share ahead of Colts’s for the simple reason that Buckler thought Presbyterians, because he was baptised one, would stretch understanding further than would the Micks. A recent final demand showed he was wrong.
    Buckler summoned Abe to bring them a smoko box. Hammond picked among the cupcakes and drank tea.
    â€˜You’re a second-chance boy, Hammond. Give it another try, that’s your luck. Us – me, your father, Corporal de Grey, all the good men who came through the first war show – we got it sorted out for you and Colts.’
    The kid nodded. ‘I know that bull. There was the time you crawled down a trench and tied a rope round his waist.’
    Buckler said, ‘Call it a trench, it was more like a river of mud. Then there was the time he lifted the spar off me, when my legs were jammed. Only they weren’t crushed. Not quite. He got me back walking and I was right as rain. That was Messines.’
    â€˜I grew up on them bits. Like the time he felt the spent shell stroking his face. He talked about that. It landed like a ghost, he said. It would have been curtains in the mud, he would have been pushed in. The mud would have filled his face, but you had the jack and the length of four be two.’
    â€˜Can you imagine it?’
    â€˜Can’t.’
    â€˜We knew worse, Hammond.’
    â€˜I know. He never shuts up about it.’
    It made Buckler smile.
    In the stillness came a pizzicato of crickets and men snoring with cello richness. Over several nights Buckler waited for the visit from Hoppy Harris. Percussion would come with the crunch of boots on gravel. At meals the atmosphere between them, their nodding politeness, started working on him through gaps of hefty silence. Someone wasn’t eating. A fellow insomniac stood out in the dark smoking. Shape of that contractor under the stars.
    Buckler didn’t think Harris a man to negotiate or yarn. He was one who waited to strike a blow against the most satisfying material to hand, a wrongdoer in the flesh. Judgement circling closer tightened the fist and waited till work was done.
    A principle of courage determined Buckler’s mood as he considered the situation: don’t get out from under it. Fall to the lowest plane of hope. There live or die as you did in her arms.
    Around noon the following day Adrian de Grey left the shearing and Buckler failed to realise the meaning of the man’s lorry heading a couple of miles out onto the flat. Later the sound of a plane taking off droned from the newly extended strip. Buckler felt wronged that de Grey was out there so smartly. First ever RAAF milk run down from the north, landed and then hurled into a hot sky and lost to Buckler’s pride in greeting it as the most senior officer in a region the size of Great Britain, France, Germany and Scandinavia combined.
    â€˜Pilot