She made gestures at us.

The horses put on a final spurt, Jo took off his wideawake, shouted, threw out his chest, and began singing. The sun pushed through the pale clouds and shed a vivid light over the scene. It gleamed on the woman’s yellow hair, over her flapping pinafore and the rifle she was clutching. The child hid behind her, and the yellow dog, a mangy beast, scuttled back into the whare with a whimper, his tail between his legs. We drew rein and dismounted.

“Hallo,” screamed the woman. “I thought you was ’awks. Oh, the ’awks about ’ere, yer wouldn’t believe.”

The ‘kid’ gave us the benefit of one eye from behind the shadows of the woman’s pinafore—then retired again.

“Where’s your old man?” asked Jim.

The woman blinked rapidly, screwing up her face.

“Away shearin’. Bin away a month. I suppose yer goin’ to stop, are yer? There’s a storm comin’ up and it’s not safe on the hills round here after dark.”

“You bet we are,” said Jo. “So you’re on your lonely, missus?”

She stood, pleating the frills of her pinafore with one hand, and glancing from one to the other of us like a hungry bird. I smiled at the thought of how Jim had pulled Jo’s leg about her. Certainly her eyes were blue, and what hair she had was yellow, but ugly. Looking at her, you felt there was nothing but sticks and wires under that pinafore. Her front teeth were knocked out, she had red pulpy hands, and a pallid face. She could have been any age from thirty to sixty.

“I’ll go and turn out the horses,” said Jim.

“Got any embrocation? Poi’s rubbed herself to hell!”

“ ’Arf a mo!” The woman stood silent a moment, her nostrils flaring as she thought. Then she shouted violently. “I can’t let you stop… You’re not safe here, and there’s the end of it. I don’t let out that paddock any more. You’ll have to go on; I ain’t got nothing!”

“Well, I’m blest!” said Jo, heavily. He pulled me aside. “Gone a bit off ’er dot,” he whispered. “Too much alone, you know.”

“Turn the sympathetic tap on ’er, she’ll come round all right.”

But there was no need—she had come round by herself.

“Stop if yer like!” she muttered, shrugging her shoulders. She pointed at me. “I’ll give yer the embrocation if yer come along.”

“Right-o, I’ll take it down to them.”

We walked together up the garden path. It was planted on both sides with cabbages. They smelt like stale dish-water. Of flowers there were sweet-williams and double poppies, their crimson petals weather-torn and bruised. One bare patch of loose dirt was divided off by paua shells—presumably it belonged to the child—for she ran from her mother and began to grub in it with a broken clothes-peg. Then she produced a dead bird from the pocket in her pinafore, a small lark with one leg no more than a bloody stump and the left side of its head a mangled mess of blood and feathers where its skull had been caved in. She dropped the dead bird into a little hollow and started to hum as she pushed dirt over it with her clothes-peg.

“Elsie! Stop messing round with that bird,” the woman shouted.