‘Mossman!’ the man boomed as he planted his feet, looking across the river. The buffeting wind pushed him around as he took in the wide fertile valley discernible through the driving rain. A roar of laughter could be heard above the storm, followed by words spoken in the thickest of Highland brogues: ‘Isn’t it grand, Friday.’ The dog lay at his feet on her stomach, glad to be out of the weather. Time passed til the man recollected himself, yelling once more up the valley: ‘Mossman!’ Turning his face into the wind and, keeping the river on his right, the first white man to set eyes on this inland plain, forced his way upstream.

The dog caught a scent and pressed on ahead. He could just make her out as she threw herself into the water and was instantly forced downstream. She lit out for the other shore angling against the current. The man loped towards the bank where she had leapt in. At this spot, the river broadened out into a thin blue/green lake. Waves crashed onto the rocky shore indicating the lake was much bigger than he could see. Something brown like torn tussock, was caught in the branches of a submerged tree on the other bank. Leaving his coat, boots and shepherd’s crook under a patch of matagouri high above the level of the water, the shepherd lumbered into the water.

The torrent took him as swiftly as it had the dog. He gasped as the cold bit through his already wet jersey and workingman’s pants, but he continued swimming towards the submerged tree. Exhausted and cold by the time he reached it, he nevertheless saw that the dog had found her way to a rocky bank downstream from the tree. He was beyond exhausted after he had dragged the unresponsive body of Mossman to the same spot.

A sharp stick poking up from a flimsy canoe of flax pierced his side as he threw himself on the bank, but he hardly noticed. He reached out and patted the dog’s head. His companion was surely dead and so was he, he thought, when he saw an old woman bending over him: ‘Poor man.’ she said. Her tears warmed the parts of his face where they fell.

The rain eased. She was younger as she spoke again: ‘Come with me to a place of healing.’ She lifted the body of the dog and walked towards a track leading uphill. This is the road to heaven, he thought, as he struggled to his feet.

As the man lifted his friend once more, he did not see blood from his wound drop on the face of the corpse in the canoe.

In stockinged feet, with his friend over his shoulder, the man followed the body of his dog in a strange woman’s arms to what was surely the end of the earth. The rain and wind ceased to bother him. There was only the next step, and the next, up the slight slope til the track ended at a sheer rock face. She took his free hand, brought it to her face, then touched the same fingers to his sodden jersey where the blood flowed from his wounded side. Turning away from the river, she pressed both his palm and hers against the rock face beside them. They all four disappeared.