John Menton didn't like the heat. That's why he wore a long-sleeved shirt, his wide-brimmed hat and drover's gloves all day. John didn't mind a sweat, didn't mind the humidity that seemed to build the further you got north of the Tweed, but he couldn't abide the way the sun made his skin feel like it was on fire. He pulled his neckerchief up across the nape of his neck at the thought, though the sun was too high in the sky to be hitting it.

John kept his head down as he tracked his prey, dismissing a number of false trails as he locked in on his quarry: at least one person in the group they were following was a hunter themselves. But there were just too many little things you'd miss. You could sweep away the obvious signs, like footprints and broken twigs, but the earth below would still tell a story you couldn't mute. If a group matched footsteps, the ground compacted more than it should. If they didn't, there were more traces to cover up as you left.

The blackbirds had left under the cover of dark, and they'd done an admirable job of hiding their tracks. But any group of five or more was impossible to disguise, and the party had their bearing. John looked over at Jimmy Cochrane, who was hunched down inspecting the ground the same as him. Jimmy was probably a better tracker than John, probably the best in the whole world, but he didn't have any patience for the gubbas. Every night they set out their swags, and every morning John woke expecting to find Jimmy's knife buried in one of the white fella’s eyeballs. As if he could feel John's gaze, Jimmy looked back and nodded. Was he acknowledging the trail, or that he'd one day kill the whites?

John turned and found David Belt's eyeline. David was new, just a kid really, not yet hardened to the way of life he'd found himself in. He thought he'd joined the Native Police: some grand tradition of gubs and blaks getting along to maintain public order. But that wasn't what this group did. There was a sort of order in the silence after a hunt, John supposed, but that wasn't the ideal David thought they were out achieving.

David hated being on point. Jimmy and Johno could track a grain of sand across the Dreaming itself, and he felt like they only ever sent him out in front to give him shit when he missed something. But they'd already found this trail, found it easy enough, so he wasn't worried too much about missing anything. As long as he kept them pointed in the right direction, they wouldn't get on his arse about it.

They'd been walking for about an hour now, passing clearing after clearing, all man-made efforts, no doubt the work of the escapees they were following. The land was dry and dusty, the red-brown dirt flicking up with the wind as the spinifex lashed out at passers-by like whips, and it was obvious the land here was dying. But the drovers didn't care: this was better than bushland for grazing cattle, even if only a little.

It was the obvious direction to head in for the blackbirds, David could tell. It's where he'd have gone, if he was on the run around here, because if he'd spent months clearing it, he'd know how to move through it. David grinned to himself as he remembered the white boss's boy saying they should head into the dunes: the old man in the stocks nearly got away with one there.

David kept his eyes down, but there just wasn't that much to see. John would talk about how you could see the dirt compacted from too many feet, but David still didn't know how, so he kept his eyes low and pretended to look. Really, he was just following where the bush told him to go. Following his gut, Captain Gifford called it.

Out of nowhere, David's breath caught. An almighty stench stung his eyes and burned his nostrils, and his gut heaved, and his head snapped up to find the source. It wasn't exactly close to the trail, but David tracked it down anyway: he couldn't have ignored it if he tried.

David walked into the clearing. His eyes, wet with the sting of the smell, leapt wide open at the sight before him. It was a horror like he'd never seen before: a red and pink and white mess, a flesh beast become real, its eyes wide open and staring at him, its mouth huge and terrible like a serpent, with giant fangs on both the top and bottom of its jaw. And as David approached, it twitched and moved in his direction.

He stumbled back from the sight, losing his footing, his eyes still locked with the beast's as he fell over a rock. Before David could land, two arms caught him and he finally broke eye contact with the monster. Blak hands gripped him under the arms and held him up from falling. David craned his neck back and looked up to see Jimmy standing over him, a big toothy grin foreshadowing the shit talk coming David's way later.

“Thanks,” mumbled David.

Jimmy only lifted his eyebrows in reply, that grin of his still plastered wide across the older man's face as he turned back to investigate the thing. He walked into the clearing suppressing a grimace. Jimmy'd been around enough corpses to not mind the smell all that much, but this one was still pretty ripe. He bent over next to it and snatched his hand out, grabbing a little goanna from under the corpse’s neck, its mouth still filled with flesh from the thing. Jimmy tossed the lizard back at Dave and smiled as the younger man flinched away. He liked the kid, but Dave’s mind was always on walkabout.

The animal was expertly skinned, and from a quick glance it was done using a technique Jimmy hadn't ever seen before: there was no telltale slash down the gut, no slits at the legs. It looked more like that time little Cassie had gotten her arm caught in the two big rolls of the washing machine ringer at the boarding school, and the pressure and friction had literally ripped the skin straight from her arm.

Jimmy stood tall and let out a quick whistle to get Johno's attention. Dave was in the clearing with him now, no longer afraid, and before a minute had passed the rest of the group had caught up.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

The white cunts all visibly recoiled when the wind pushed the odour their way. Soft, Jimmy thought. The Sydney gub clapped his hand over his mouth, took two steps forward, saw the corpse and staggered away retching. Terry pretended he was thinking so he could cover his mouth with his hand, and Fred recovered from the initial shock of the odour to stare at the corpse with the same dead eyes he used to appraise everything. Johno stood in Fred's shadow, trying to hide from the sun as always.

"Did you send the dogs after them?" Fred said back to the white cunt station owner, who was a clear 10 metres away. Jimmy didn't bother talking yet. He knew they'd need to pitch their theories before he told them what had actually happened.

The drover's son replied without moving any closer. "No, we only have the one dog and he doesn't leave the porch these days."

Jimmy waited to see if there was any follow-up from the whites, and when there wasn't, he spoke. "Not a dog." He lifted the animal's mouth up and showed it to the group. The giant fangs on the upper and lower jaw were a dead giveaway to him, but he could see not even Johno recognised what he was getting at. Could have been a dingo, he supposed, but this mouth had four extra teeth.

To illustrate his point, Jimmy grabbed the lower jaw and separated it from the upper as far as it would allow. The muscles around the mouth were still intact, even if the skin wasn't, so the mouth opened as far as it might naturally, which was farther than any dog's jaw could.

"Like a snake," Dave said in awe, no doubt still imagining the thing alive.

Jimmy rolled his eyes. "Yeah kid, it's a magical dog-snake," he said with a smirk.

Terry spoke without moving his gag-preventing hand, his voice muffled as a result. "What does that tell us, Jimmy?" asked the old captain in his usual patronising tone.

Jimmy ignored the tone. "It's a lagunta. Don't usually see 'em up here. Fetched a pretty bounty back down south though."

"Never heard of it," Fred said gruffly, unconvinced.

Jimmy locked eyes with the man and briefly imagined skinning him the way this thing had been: the way Cassie's arm had been. I'd grab Fred by the face with one hand, he thought, and by the back of the head with his other, and then with one rip the skin would shed like a flayed rabbit. Jimmy looked down, and he could see puncture marks in the top of the thing's skull, where whomever had skinned it had grabbed it tight.

"He's talking about the Thylacine," Terry said matter-of-factly, his voice still muffled. "The Tasmanian Wolf. But we're a bit far out of its habitat, aren't we, Jimmy?"

"A bit far out of all our habitats aren't we?" Jimmy replied, his heart thumping in his chest at the word Tasmania. He blinked, and Terry stood there flayed. Jimmy blinked again and the captain was back to normal.

"Why'd they skin it?" Fred asked.

Jimmy calmed himself. "The pelt was where the money was. Thick stripes down the back of it, like a Thurung or the goanna Dave was scared of. Not that hard a job either, provided you didn't mess up the pelt when you killed the thing. Whoever did this was an expert."

John could feel the tension in the air. He didn't like always being the one to defuse it, but he did it anyway. "Could they use it to buy passage home?" he said. Frederick and Terrence nodded thoughtfully.

The group walked away from the corpse, leaving it where it lay. Something bothered John though. The carcass was a fair way off the trail, and signs of a fight around it were minimal: the blackbirds had ambushed this beast, killed it with minimal fight and then skinned it on the spot without leaving any tracks back to their main group. He kept it to himself for the moment.

David was back out ahead of the group again, moving through the bush with his head down low, and Jimmy was following up behind him. The whites stood in a group, waiting for John to get going again, and he hotfooted his way back to the trail.

John hadn't made it 15 metres when something caught his eye above the blue gums: a wisp of black smoke. He stood dead still and whipped his hat off to focus on it, before immediately holding the wide-brimmed hat over his head to beg off the glare of the sun. It was just a single plume of black smoke, a campfire, nothing more.

It might as well have been a dinner bell.

John looked around and found Jimmy, who had already clocked it and was practically salivating at the sight. David was still dutifully heading forward, following the tracks, so John pinched his lips together and whistled a burst of three short tweets. David whirled on the spot and started running back without even looking.

John turned to the whites as they finally caught up to him.

"See, this one's just standing around, not even doing anything," said Jocko as he strode up. "And I thought they were moving slow before."

John ignored the gubba and looked at Terrence. "Smoke, boss. See that big gum down on the right of the kid? Look up over the top of him, and just to the right a bit."

John followed Terrence's eyes up and saw the flash of recognition when he made it out. Frederick had already done the same. John stifled another grin when he saw the station owner's son looking in the wrong place.

"You see, Jocko, that's why we move at their pace," Terrence said. "If we'd been deep in the bush already, we might have missed this."

Jocko looked around sheepishly, still not able to find the smoke, and he rolled his eyes at the comment, looking straight at John as he did. John kept eye contact as he slowly raised his arm to direct the gub's attention to the smoke. He watched the dullard's sightline raise with his hand, find the smoke and then hastily look in any other direction but John's.

There was no hiding John’s smile this time.