Texas by Sarah Hay

reassuring. And then behind him she noticed, above the roof of the homestead, some sort of aerial, obviously no longer in use, with a creeper entwined around a horizontal bar and the vertical bar above it. From this angle, it looked like a crucifix made of bush.
    â€˜How do you contact anyone here?’ she asked.
    â€˜There’s a phone at the roadhouse,’ he said.
    John pulled up at the fence and Sven got out of the vehicle.
    â€˜I think we’re leaving now.’
    His eyes left hers.
    â€˜Enjoy the rest of your travelling,’ she added.
    She glanced back quickly before the homestead was obscured from sight. There was no sign of anyone. John looked in the rear-vision mirror and then at her.
    â€˜So what did you think?’
    About what? she wondered. And then: ‘They seemed very nice.’
    Texas ‘Not bad blokes. A bit useless. Went without power for a week or so. Couldn’t work out how to get it going again after they ran it out of fuel. They put more fuel in but didn’t bleed the injectors so they had air in the fuel pump.’
    â€˜I spoke to Hans. He seemed a bit . . .’ She searched for the right word as the landscape slipped beneath the vehicle. ‘Nervous.’
    â€˜There’s always something to spook you in this country. If you go looking for it.’
    â€˜They’ll be all right?’
    â€˜Bloody hell.’ John braked and the vehicle slowed. ‘Did you see that?’
    â€˜What?’ Startled, looking to where John was looking, suddenly aware that her sense of well-being was easily disturbed. ‘What is it?’
    The vehicle stopped. John opened the car door. But he stayed where he was. His eyes searched the scrub, which in that section of the track had closed in, with the range rising steeply behind it and the gullies shaded like folds in fabric.
    â€˜It was a bloody big cat. I’m sure of it. Biggest cat I ever saw. The size of a dog.’
    She was thinking lions, tigers.
    â€˜Not much point in getting the gun out. It’d be long gone.’
    â€˜What sort of cat?’ she asked as his attention returned to the middle of the road and he pushed the gear into first, the vehicle slowly gaining speed.
    â€˜Cat gone wild. You know, like a domestic cat. The thing is, it’s a few generations on, and god knows in this country, with plenty of tucker, what we might end up with.’
    The vehicle retraced their tracks, occasionally deviating slightly when John avoided a rock or a dip in the road. The constant bumping, changing down a gear, slowing for rough patches, changing up, the sun slipping lower so that at times it shone directly into her window, brought on a pleasurable somnolence that seemed to suspend time. They reached the river which, other than the line of ranges they were leaving behind, was the most defining aspect of her landscape. The light had yellowed and with it, green became green-gold and the blemish-free limbs of the river gums glowed. As they descended the bank, she thought of being stuck there, sunk in sand that was striped now by shade. But John took the vehicle through a slightly different route where the ground was firmer and they got to the other side without any trouble. The top of the bank was covered in grass. When they reached it he stopped the vehicle and turned off the engine. Birds rose nervously from the treetops like fluttering triangles of paper, shifting across the sky in formation, noisy and indignant as they settled again in the trees on the far side.
    â€˜Corellas,’ he said.
    He offered her a can of beer from the esky. They sat side by side on the tailgate of the vehicle. She was feeling comradely while he began to talk. He became more expansive, revealing his passion for the country, how his grandfather had taught him to ride and describing the place that would have been his. Then he moved on to how Susannah made him feel, saying that his wife didn’t understand. That she