The summer of Davey's first year's work with his father was the driest the early settlers had known in the South.
A breathless, insistent heat brooded over the hills, their narrow valleys and the long, bare Wirree plains. The grass stood stiff and straw-like by the roads and in the cleared paddocks, rustling when anything moved in it. Hordes of straw-coloured grasshoppers lay in it, whistling and whispering huskily, or rose with whirring wings when anything disturbed them. The skies, faded to grey, gave no promise of rain, and when the sun set it left a dull, angry flush—the colour of a black snake's belly—behind the hills.
The lesser mountain streams dried up. The creek that ran through Cameron's paddocks became a mere trickle. There was only one deep pool left of it. In that only enough water remained to keep the household going for a month, when Donald Cameron mustered, and he, Davey, and the stockmen drove the cattle to the Clearwater River, ten miles away to the south-west. It was still in good condition and Cameron held three hundred acres of the river frontage there. He was better off than most of the hill folk who, after driving their cattle a dozen miles or so for water, had to pay high prices for paddocks to run them in.
Every man of Cameron's was away at the Clearwater, and Mrs. Cameron and Jenny alone at the homestead, the afternoon that Deirdre came riding up out of the misty depths of the trees.
For days a heavy, yellowish-grey haze had covered the hills. Mrs. Cameron could not from her doorway see the slopes of the ranges behind the house. The mist hung like a pall over the trees, seeming to stifle the wild life of them. Not a twitter of birds was heard. Parroquets, breaking the dun-coloured mist with the scarlet and blue and green of their wings and breasts, dashed over the clearing, chattering hoarsely. Now and then they rose from the orchard with shrill screams, as Jenny drove them away from the few shrivelled plums left on the trees by flapping a dish-cloth at them. The air was full of the smell of burning.
"The fires have been bad on the other side of the ranges," Deirdre told Mrs. Cameron, as she came into the yard and slipped her bridle from Socks' neck. "Father is taking our poddies and cows, and Steve's, to the Clearwater."
"Yes," Mrs. Cameron said, "some men on the roads told us a few days ago that we'd better get our beasts out of the back paddocks in case the fires come this way."
Deirdre caught Socks by his forelock; but instead of turning him into the paddock behind the stables as she ordinarily did, she led him into one of the fern-spread, earthern-floored stalls and slammed the door on him.
"A man at Steve's this morning said some of the people on the other side 've been burnt out," she said, "The fires swept over the bush as if it were a grass paddock. Martin's, at Dale, is burnt down, and he said that some of the children going home from the Dale school were burnt to death."
Mrs. Cameron exclaimed distressfully.