Nothing, and still nothing. Every day, the reed had to be pushed deeper. Dig again, dig harder. Finally, after ten minutes of hard effort, a few mouthfuls of warm, brackish liquid.

He straightened and stared again to the south. The Rival had lifted above the horizon. Now it was a dazzling blue-white point too bright to look at. There was no circle of light, like the Sun’s disk, but when the Rival was high in the sky it threw down its own intense spears of heat.

This torment could not last. Or if it did, Wondjina’s family would not be here to see it. They would leave, heading away to seek help from lowland strangers.

Wondjina would not leave. He was old, and he would live or die in the homeland. But he could not survive like this. Hunger and thirst gnawed within him. Midsummer was long past, and the Sun was on its annual journey north. Heat should be lessening, rain should carry in on the west wind. But not this year.

Twelve days ago the Rival had appeared in the night sky. Darkness became a memory. The heat steadily increased, a dry wind blew from the south. No animal moved across the red sands. Even the tough, leathery grass had wilted.

Wanderers through the homeland brought word of other changes. Lake Argyle, the great water far to the north, had dried completely for the first time in many years. Far south, the Ord River ran low in its course. The Rival’s presence was felt, north or south, as it was here. You could not run from it, any more than you could escape by flight from the Sun itself.

Wondjina, the family’s living memory of older times, knew what must be done. The answer was not to flee. It was to ask the spirits of cloud and rain to bring relief.

Ask now, ask tonight. The family was determined to leave tomorrow.

He squatted onto his haunches and rubbed the wrinkled skin of his knees. Everywhere was reddish, powdery dust, worse than at any time in his long memory. He opened the woven bag, took out the necklace of dried bones and the bright-stained sections of emu shell. Let the youngsters speak of new ideas, of their belief that the Rival was nothing more than a star suddenly grown great. What did they know? Not one of them could recite a history of the family, not one had learned the modes of address to the spirits of autumn rains.