In Gerald Murnane’s previous collection of stories, Velvet Waters, there is a character, a schoolboy, called simply A. He is fascinated by the explorer Mitchell’s mappings of the interior of Victoria, but the story ends with a quite different version of the familiar Murnane theme of cartography. Each year, after the school concert marking the end of the final term, an odd event takes place. A. calls it ‘the howling’; some of the schoolboys run out at the end of the concert into the dark, and, having hidden around the schoolyard, make a chorus of animal noises. A. thinks of the howling as a mysterious ritual, whose movements can be mapped, but knows better than to ask the rules, because he would have been told there were none. The story ends with A. joining the howling too late, seeing the girl who is supposed to help him map the event walking away and, even at this moment of failure, sensing, in the noises, ‘occasionally, something more’.