From Chapter 71


It was getting too dark to see along the ridge, now. The old man was back in the ute. He had been lost in a place without time and wasn't sure exactly what he had been doing. He looked down at the temperature gauge, which he noticed had moved above the normal mark. That was a fair indication that he'd been there a long time; the ute tended to overheat whenever it was just idling. An understanding of exactly what he had seen earlier suddenly released into recognition. "Thaaat's what it was," he said. "There had been others running to the side of the track."  The old man hurriedly circled the ute off the track to turn around. He intended to find the intruders.


From Chapter 100


Within the old man's mind, there was a fragile perception of his reality. He understood perfectly the tides of completeness that seemed to ebb and flow in his life. With his wife, he would be
whole. Without her he would be an empty vessel, one that would easily buckle under the strain of loneliness and depression. He sensed that to be the case. He felt himself to be capable of
total loss of purpose should he have to face the rest of his life alone. He also sensed a vague world beyond his understanding, a world that surely must exist outside the walls of his
single-minded fixation on his own life, here, this moment, his wife. Yet, he could not crack the shell that excluded him from acknowledging that world. It was as though the flow of time had
somehow become solid around him and all that was his. The only movement within that tundra of frozen time were unplaced apparitions that could as easily be deeply etched memories as
prophecies for the future. Conceptions of both tenderness and brutality. These apparitions as if beyond the constraints of time, floated through his head.