Chapter Four

Dennis Hugh McIntyre was three years older and built along different lines.

Where Jamie was quick and loud and never still, Dennis was slow and watchful and disinclined to be looked at. Where Jamie lied compulsively, often for no reason at all — about how far he'd ridden, about what he'd seen in the creek, about a fox he'd shot that nobody ever found — Dennis told the truth in a flat voice and resented being asked.

They were not close the way brothers in books are close. They were close the way two men chained together are close. Dennis did what Jamie told him from the time Jamie was six, and neither of them ever examined why, and it lasted fifty years and finished in two separate catastrophes on two continents.

The pattern was set in a lane.

They were sent to shift a mob of ewes and Jamie, who was eleven, decided the process could be improved. He told Dennis to run ahead to the far gate and open it and hold it, and he would push the mob down.

Dennis ran a kilometre and a half. He opened the gate.

He held it.

Jamie sat on the fence and did nothing at all for forty minutes, then shoved the mob a hundred metres and let them drift.

When Neville found out, Jamie explained — reasonably, calmly, at length, with his hands moving — that he had delegated the critical path to Dennis because Dennis was the better runner; that the mob's slow progress was attributable to conditions on the ground; and that in fact the operation had been a success, because all the sheep were now in the lane.

Neville, who had come out to the yards prepared to give someone a belting, found himself twenty minutes later nodding along.

Gail, watching from the kitchen window, did not nod along. She had heard the whole thing through the flywire and she thought:

There is something in that boy that came from nowhere in this family, and it is going to take him a very long way, and I do not know that I want to see where.