The tribesman retrieves a small bundle from where he has hidden it. He hums the song, beginning with the note after where he’d left off. The sound wrings out the sea’s stinging residue. It brings back what had been drowned. He holds the bundle close to his chest, still frightened that it has come to him. He should not be holding it. He is not even a carrier, does not possess even that much knowledge, and now, against his will and too far away from the home place, he is a keeper, a guardian. He pulls back the stained canvas to touch the hollow mulga root, running his fingers along the grooves and beveled ridges of the designs burned into the wooden surface.

Whenever the men would gather, the keeper came to them with the mulga root and its contents, placing it in the center of the circle. The keeper advised the men when to move camp to the stone country and how to prepare for the coming floods. When the old women gathered, they drew these same shapes in the dirt and spoke with the keeper. He advised them in the safekeeping of water, where to gather goose eggs, and where to light the cleansing fires when the season called for it. The keeper’s knowledge guided the group, always, and now the keeper, who had been the tribesman’s only brother, was gone.

The tribesman continued the song and eventually found the floodplain dry and cracked near the home place. Crocodiles swam tight circles, water caking to mud around them, water holes evaporating away. Gurrung it was, then, at the home place now: the season when the land lies dormant. He tried to stay there, using the song, and his heart nearly burst when he encountered the scent of paperbark blossoms, which melted into twilight and the shapes of feeding bats gliding like spirits above his head. His face grew damp from the heat or tears, but he did not move to wipe the moisture away. In the distance the people carried their things into the darkness at the base of the escarpment, making their way up into the stones, to the high place, to hunt goanna and wait out the floods. He tried to stay there, feeling the cool rock caves over his head and hearing the gentle sounds of the people making camp. But the keeper appeared, turning to him suddenly from a particular tone in the song. The keeper beckoned to him and pointed north.

He opens his eyes to the empty room at the top of the museum. He hears the multitude of museum visitors below him and feels the vibrations of their footsteps above. It is terribly cold. He has not been warm since they thrust him into the hull. He observes his surroundings as if from the innermost chamber of a woodworm’s mindless tunnel. As the vision of the home place evaporates from his mind, he is left alone, no longer connected to a relevant world. There is no way forward for him, and since the keeper is dead, and the mulga root is here with him in this terrible place, there is no way forward for the people.