Years later, a cutter clambered up from the fern gully and came to a pile of sleepers and a billy can by an old fire. He walked further into the clearing and a black dog rushed at him from behind a log and stood snarl­ing, his yellow teeth bared beneath quivering lips. The cutter then saw a pile of bones beside the dog and the forearm stuck portentously from the split log. With one eye on the dog, the man saw the wedge on the ground where it had sprung from the log and he guessed that the hand which be­longed to this bleached bone probably gripped a second wedge. The tree had closed on the man who would have split it, and the dog who would have saved him had watched him die and now desperately tried to pro tect an ever decreasing pile of bones from the ravages of fire, goannas and eventually another man.